Huge alien announcement 'could happen within weeks' as professor says 'we've found it'

In what could potentially be the biggest story in the history of science – two rival teams of astronomers are said to be racing to confirm the discovery of an alien civilsation

A British academic believes he has stumbled on the most world-changing piece of news in recorded history.

Professor Simon Holland, who has produced documentaries for NASA-funded projects including a project pinpointing Earth-threatening asteroids, says that two rival groups of astronomers are in a race to publish the first confirmed evidence of an extraterrestrial civilisation.

He told The Mirror: “We have found a non-human extraterrestrial intelligence in our galaxy, and people don't know about it.” Simon explains that he has been given information by a contact within Mark Zuckerbeg's Breakthrough Listen, a privately-funded initiative aimed at finding evidence of civilisations beyond Earth.

And the news may come within the next month to coincide with the US election, he believes. He claims that astronomers within the Oxford-based project have identified clear evidence of transmissions from another world.

“They found the evidence of a non-human technological signature a few years ago, using the Parkes telescope in Australia,” Simon says. Such extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and the team – funded by billionaires Mark Zuckerberg and Yuri Milner – are racing to gather more evidence to support their potentially game-changing discovery.

Meanwhile, Simon says, they risk being beaten to the finish line. He continued: “This is breaking news, as of yesterday, but the Chinese might be pipping them to the post, with their, FAST [Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope] program. It's the largest telescope in the world since Arecibo.”

The co-ordinates of the target object, which is known as BLC-1, are supposedly known to the Chinese and the two teams are competing to become the first to make the hugely prestigious announcement.

Five potential technosignature candidates were identified from re-examination of SETI’s “Seti at Home” screensaver programme, which utilised the combined resources of the world’s PCs to sift through the masses of data generated by radio telescopes. BLC-1, Simon says, is regarded as by far the most promising.

Whatever the source of BLC-1’s signals turns out to be, Simon stresses, it’s like no known natural phenomenon. “It’s a single point source,” he says, and it’s not just noise.

"The signal, instead of being the giant buzz of everything in the universe that we hear through all radio telescopes, was a narrow electromagnetic spectrum.”

Astronomers have been excited by potential “alien” transmissions before – when pulsars were first discovered they were catalogued as “LGM’ or “little green men” objects. And the 1977 “Wow!” Signal has never been definitively identified. But, Simon believes, this time it could be the real thing.

The scientists are, understandably, exercising extreme caution before making the epochal announcement, but Simon believes it could come – either from Breakthrough Listen in Oxford or from the Chinese team – at any time within the next month or so.

“It would it would be wonderful if it coincided with the first woman in the White House,” he jokes.