SETI Confirms First Alien Signal In 50 Years Is A Robocall About Extending The Warranty On Their Spacecraft

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA — The SETI Institute confirmed Monday that a radio signal picked up from the direction of Tau Ceti, the first credible extraterrestrial transmission since the famous "Wow!" signal of 1977, is a pre-recorded robocall offering to extend the warranty on the recipient's spacecraft.

It took the institute's decoding team eleven years to untangle the signal, which arrived wrapped in a cadence researchers initially mistook for a ceremonial chant. It was not a chant. "We aimed forty years of funding and half our careers at that star hoping to hear something about the nature of consciousness," said Dr. Priya Vashti, the institute's director of signal analysis. "What we got was: your extended coverage may have already expired. Press one to speak with a representative."

The message repeats every eleven minutes, each time arriving from a marginally different point in the sky, a pattern the team now believes indicates an automated redial system spanning several star systems rather than a single transmitter. A supplementary tone, buried beneath the main message, appears to be hold music. Analysts have not yet determined the genre, though two staffers independently described it as "smooth."

"This tracks with what we've been seeing for a decade," said Owen Kessling, a self-described interstellar telecommunications analyst who briefed reporters from a folding table outside the institute's parking lot. Kessling's own count, kept on a legal pad, puts the ratio of scam traffic to scientifically meaningful transmissions in the observable radio spectrum at roughly nine to one. "Every civilization gets to the stage where it can broadcast across light-years, and every single one immediately uses that ability to sell extended warranties. It's actually kind of beautiful, if you squint."

Complicating matters further, an amateur radio operator in Fresno picked up the same transmission on a rebuilt shortwave set in his garage and, believing it to be a persistent domestic telemarketer, spent four minutes shouting for the caller to remove his number from the list before realizing the message was arriving from 11.9 light-years away. He has since added Tau Ceti to a handwritten log he keeps of numbers he intends to block.

The institute says it cannot yet reply, since the round-trip delay means any "Press 1" selection would take nearly twenty-four years to register, and by then the introductory offer will almost certainly have lapsed. A second, fainter signal detected the following week appears to be an automated follow-up asking why the first offer went unanswered.

At press time, the institute confirmed that an overnight intern, left alone with the console and a headset, had accidentally pressed two, enrolling Earth in a recurring newsletter on extended-civilization insurance products that the species will now receive every eleven minutes for approximately the next four thousand years.