Bruce R. Fenton

A team of psychologists from the University of Cádiz have added their criticisms of S.E.T.I. methodology to those of a growing number of scientists

Some of you may know the psychological experiment in which viewers are asked to watch a video showing a group of people passing a ball around and attempt to count the passes, at one stage during the video a man wearing a gorilla suit walks through the scene. A great many people are so intensely focused on the details of what they have been expecting to see, a ball being passed around, that they fail to notice the man in the gorilla suit.

Now, a team of researchers from Spain have voiced concerns that humanity’s attempts to track down advanced alien life are being derailed by the same type of psychological blindness. The team suggest that astronomers are so focussed on detecting intelligent beings through non-earthly radio signals that they are likely to miss signs of life manifesting themselves in dimensions that typically escape our perception, perhaps through quantum phenomena, higher dimensional physics or even dark energy.