Extragalactic radio burst puzzles astronomers

The burst was discovered by David Narkevic, an undergraduate student at West Virginia University in Morgantown, US, while he was searching through archived data taken in 2001 by the Parkes radio dish in Australia. He was looking for periodic signals from pulsars - rotating neutron stars - within our galaxy.

But he came upon a short burst of radio emission that appeared to come from outside the Milky Way. Because electrons in space cause different frequencies of radio waves to arrive at Earth at different times, the researchers used the delay to estimate that the source probably lay about 1.6 billion light years away. "Our first reaction was, what in the world is this?!" says Narkevic's advisor, Duncan Lorimer. "I didn't expect to see anything out there at all."

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Whatever happened to...the ex-Marine who saw a UFO?

Terrell Copeland became "Case no. 58105" on The History Channel's new "UFO Hunters" series. There, on national TV, host Bill Birnes declared the Suffolk man to be a "hybrid" - a product of intergalactic breeding who is being prepped for direct contact with his alien relatives.

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Don’t talk to aliens, warns Stephen Hawking

He concludes that trying to make contact with alien races is “a little too risky”. He said: “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”

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