Voyager 2 has been sending signals to Earth periodically since it was
launched in 1977. The mission was designed to send a record of human
biology, history, culture, language, and encouragement to find alien
hands so they would then come to Earth and contact us. It is currently
the most distant object from Earth made by human hands. And then on
April 22nd, the spacecraft stopped sending transmissions entirely.
Since then there have been sporadic transmissions. And some
researchers say it's because aliens have discovered the probe and are
attempting to send transmissions back to Earth.
Hartwig
Hausdorf, an expert of Ufology hailing from Germany says the probe could
have been hijacked by an extraterrestrial entity who then reprogrammed
the probe to transmit the strange nonsensical signals it has been
transmitting back to Earth. Hausdorf is the author of Sattelites of
God: In China's Forbidden Zone, Not of This World, Things That Should
Not Exist and UFO's: They are Still Flying. In an interview with Bild,
Hausdorf said, "It seems almost as if someone had reprogrammed or
hijacked the probe, thus perhaps we do not yet know the whole truth."
If this were true, it would mean Voyager 2 had achieved its most
ambitious and unlikely goal: contact with an extraterrestrial and
intelligent race. And it would have come a few billion years earlier
than it was thought possible.
The Voyager 2 was
build as an unmanned craft and launched in order to observe the planets
and then be launched in a gravity assist out into space where it may be
intercepted some day long after the Earth is gone. Or any time before
then. Voyager 2 is also equipped with a golden record on its side,
which Carl Sagan selected images for along with a committee within NASA.
As the Voyager 2 was launched, president Jimmy Carter made a speech,
"We cast this message into the cosmos... Of the 200 billion stars in
the Milky way galaxy, some (perhaps many) may have inhabited planets and
space fairing civilizations. if one such civilization intercepts
Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message:
We are trying to survive our time so we may live into yours." The
Voyager 2 was considered one of the longest and most successful missions
ever conducted by NASA.
Could the Voyager's strange signals be
more than simply the craft having a repeated glitch? What if the
transmissions it had been sending made it act like a beacon and it had
actually attracted an alien craft which took it aboard and now was using
it in an attempt to make contact with Earth? Who knows? A lot can
happen 8.5 billion miles away from Earth. On the other hand, it could
be just a glitch. In 1995 in November the computer misinterpreted a
command to leave the heating system on and the craft operated at
temperatures far in excess to what many of the circuits on board were
intended to withstand. Either way, we'll keep you updated on this
strange story.
