If the SETI Institute wants to continue be relevant, maybe the first thing it should do is consider retiring its 75-year-old director, Seth Shostak. It’s been obvious from the Institute’s inception that the eloquent and amicable astronomer has never been serious about employing every available resource to conduct a thorough search for extraterrestrial intelligence. But given his bizarre response to a modest proposal from NASA robotics scientist Silvano Colombano, it’s pretty clear that one of astronomy’s most visible opinion-shapers has pulled a year-long Rumpelstiltskin. And with an issue of this magnitude, you actually kinda do want the guy at the wheel to be fully alert.

On Dec. 3, Fox News publicized a paper Colombano produced earlier this year called “New Assumptions To Guide SETI Research.” Noting the hundreds of new extrasolar planets discovered by the Kepler telescope, Colombano suggested that, given the theoretical limitations of interstellar travel, the sort of ETI we might discover – or the sort of ETI that might discover us – could well be artificial intelligence, dispatched by mortal carbon-based life forms like us.

This isn’t news. Sci-fi writers were positing the idea in the 19th century. In 2003, NASA historian Steven Dick wrote that SETI should expand its target list to include robotics, because “postbiologicals would not be confined to planetary surfaces, they might be more likely to roam the universe than to send signals.”

Faith in an idea can be a noble thing, but every now and then you might need a Plan B/CREDIT: plainbibleteaching.com

The new angle is how another NASA guy decided to mildly upbraid SETI for ignoring the UFO issue, which might well take the form of AI. “Consider the UFO phenomenon worthy of study in the context of a system with very low signal to noise ratio,” he wrote, “but nevertheless with the possibility of challenging some of our assumptions and pointing to new possibilities for communication and discovery.” He suggested SETI take a look at “several existing data bases such as the 130,000 pages of declassified U.S. Air Force documents, National UFO Reporting Center Database and several other international data bases.”

Shostak, of course, would have none of that nonsense, and he dusted off the usual canned quotes in a piece he wrote for SF Gate. “Professional researchers are not easily persuaded by eyewitness testimony, blobby photos, or” blahblahblah etc. He did concede that Colombano might be onto something with the AI ET theory. “But the more appealing thought for many people is that we’re being visited now. Of course, a scientist would consider such a suggestion of interest only if it could be corroborated by observation. Bright ideas are nice, but evidence rules.”

Evidence? Like the 2004 Nimitz/Tic Tac incident, or the Pentagon’s $22 million UFO research program in the New York Times that galvanized world attention last December? Or the accompanying jet fighter videos that amazed the pursuing Navy pilots? That kind of evidence? No, not interesting enough for Shotak, who didn’t see fit to even bring it into the conversation. However, it should also be noted here that Colombano hadn’t gotten the memo, either.

“I was unaware of the NY Times report,” he said in an email to De Void. “No, my position paper came solely out of my own understanding of the issues related to SETI research, and yes, my views have been evolving for several years, but purely on the basis of the science involved rather than my meager acquaintance with the UFO phenomena.”

Science — that thing Shostak always likes to talk about. Anyhow, during a 12/13/18 podcast interview with Black Vault founder John Greenewald, Shostak was quite emphatic about never seeing any compelling UFO images in declaring that all efforts to find suggestive cases “always come up blank.

“Ninety percent are prosaic and 10 percent of them are unexplained, but that doesn’t mean they’re UFOs.” (Umm, yes it does.) “The fact that 10 percent of them are unexplained doesn’t really mean much … Ten percent of the murders in this city are unexplained, too, but that doesn’t mean that aliens are murdering people, it just means that we haven’t solved those particular murders.” (Someone actually says space aliens are murdering the residents of Mountain View, Calif.? Who?)

Shostak added that UFO research “has been done over and over and over again, always with the same results.” (Just like SETI?) “So the question is, is it worth doing again?” (SETI thinks so.) “Well, if somebody wants to spend the money to do it, I don’t know that the SETI Institute will be doing it anytime soon – if ever – because there’s not the expertise. The kind of expertise you need for this sort of thing is not the sort of thing that an astronomer would have, for example.”

Holy cow! This may have been the most accurate thing Shostak said all night. After decades of dismissing UFOs as delusions, hoaxes, and fairy tales, now he tells us astronomers lack the expertise to study these things? Then why has the SETI Institute been allowed to get away with trying to convince the world that UFO reports are garbage?

Here’s the point. The Times story – which neither Shostak nor Colombano apparently know anything about – was a game-changer. There are discreet, behind-the-scenes congressional queries into The Great Taboo underway. And the face of SETI has finally admitted his professional discipline is unqualified to evaluate the data? A few options come immediately to mind: 1) the SETI Institute has no standing when it comes to investigating the big picture, 2) it needs to add “Limited” on the front end of its acronym, and/or 3) Shostak needs to get out of the way so that professional colleagues who beg to differ can be guided by the full spectrum of evidence, not by willfully uninformed dogma. As it stands now, the SETI Institute has nothing to contribute.