Do you know the story of the “message from Andromeda”? The Russian scientist Victor Kulakov is thought to have decoded a “cosmic SOS” since 1998.

According to an “authoritative source” of NASA in Houston, the “Russian scientist Victor Kulakov” was at the helm of a team of UN researchers working in a state observatory 50 km from Moscow. At the end of January 1998, this group is supposed to have received a message from Andromeda.

The curious “message from Andromeda”

Only after a few months, as the weekly Weekly World News (already known for its extravagant cover stories) explained at times, the specialists would have succeeded in decoding the alien language, based on a mathematical algorithm, and translating it.

There is already a problem here: the Andromeda galaxy is 2.537 million light-years from Earth, while the World Weekly News stated that the message was “80 thousand years old”.

If that of the World Weekly News (later taken over entirely from the web) was not a hoax, it looks like: radio waves are a form of electromagnetic radiation, and as such, they travel at the speed of light.

Starting from some planet in the Andromeda galaxy any message will not arrive before 2.53 million years, ten thousand years more, ten thousand years less. But let's move on.

Extraterrestrial civilization close to extinction

According to the alleged Russian scientist (who according to the World Weekly News would give interviews to two scientific journals, Universe and Radio Astronomy) who however didn't provide any transcription of the message, the signal was tought to have been sent by an advanced extraterrestrial civilization but on the verge of extinction.

If it was true, it would be a case of spatial archeology since it should refer to an extraterrestrial civilization likely dead over 2.5 million years ago.

What struck the imagination of many people is that the message from Andromeda would have described apocalyptic scenes: nuclear explosions, radiation deaths, terminal illnesses and so on. Many have thought about the impact with an asteroid or rather a nuclear war since it seemed that the message was pervaded by a sense of repentance.

The World Weekly News emphasized that “inexplicably” this alien civilization, which is thought to have had access to space flight, would have specified that it could not evacuate the planet via spaceships because for unknown reasons (perhaps a war in progress?) could they not take off.

The inconsistencies of the message from Andromeda

For this reason, this sort of “cosmic SOS” would have been launched hoping that some evolved civilization was around and could go and save them (from themselves). Which, however, seems absurd, for at least two reasons.

If the civilization we are talking about, like today's humanity, had already discovered space flight, how could it not be able to understand if there were inhabited or habitable planets in its galaxy?

In that case, the message would have been directed towards those planets, not towards the Earth. And anyway, what would be the point of launching a “cosmic SOS” hoping that advanced civilizations but unknown to these “desperate” aliens, could intercept it?

Wouldn't it have been better to launch a “cosmic testament” to warn future civilizations that had caught it not making the same mistakes?

Fake news more and more fashionable despite everything

In conclusion, the story is probably one of many “fake news” circulating on the net (taking up hoaxes published years ago by the press), despite all the efforts made to fight them. Stories that all have the same characteristic: they cannot be confirm or deny with certainty, lacking any objective element (sources, data, the message itself) on the basis of which to perform an analysis.

If you think about it, it is the same situation that occurs with many“fake news” much more subtle put around by today's politicians. Could it be that the spatial “fake news” was only the first experiments to understand if the public opinion could easily be manipulated through the web? The hypothesis could have more foundation than the same message from Andromeda.