“Have You Found the Aliens Yet?”: St Andrews’ Alien Hunters Talk Lizard People, Ronald Reagan, And God

Kyra White, President of the Order of the Crow, has big thoughts about little green men. If extraterrestrials invaded, she told me, “They would have to appear in America for anyone to take them seriously.” 

The Order is the “first-ever” student branch of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute. SETI was founded by NASA scientists in the ‘80s to search for signs of life beyond Earth. It now has branches around the world and its trustees have included two Nobel Prize-winners and celebrity astronomer Carl Sagan. The founder of SETI’s UK branch, Dr John Elliott, is a Fellow at St Andrews, where he also coordinates the SETI Post-Detection Hub. The idea for the Order came when White, Olivia Poole (now the Order’s Treasurer), and some other friends saw Dr Elliott speak in a public debate last year. “We all met and had an interview with him being like, ‘We’re really excited. We would like to form this club,’” White remembered. 

The Order’s name is a riff on a group Carl Sagan set up, called the Order of the Dolphin. “The idea of ‘crow’ was that crows are simply intelligent creatures, and we still don’t understand them,” White said. The club officially started this semester — they’ve already written emails to hundreds of MPs in an attempt to get the British government to fund SETI-related projects. Plans include hosting guest speakers, getting research opportunities with academics, and starting a club journal. “We were joking that we'd do a photography event where you just take photos of aliens downtown,” White said. 

As you might have guessed, SETI hasn’t had any luck so far. One of its main methods of detection is to look for radio signals from other planets. “[Sometimes] they think they find something, and it turns out to be like a microwave in the laboratory,” White said. It doesn’t help that the nearest major galaxy is over two million light-years away. That means the light that reaches us was emitted so long ago that, in the intervening time, whole species and civilisations could have developed and collapsed. 

But there’s still hope. “Statistically, there’s life out there,” Poole told me. Perhaps Earth’s radio waves will get picked up by extraterrestrials. “You never know,” White said, “one day we might have an alien come round and say, ‘I was a big fan of The Archers.’” 

However, the prospect of finding them (the aliens, not the Radio 4 voice actors) presents its own challenges. White remembered a film where the alien “only spoke in beeps.” While questions concerning communication are better suited for linguists than astronomers, the Order tries to take an “interdisciplinary” approach to alien detection. White studies Maths while Poole studies International Relations. Other Order members study everything from Philosophy to Chinese.

Does the academic inclusivity of SETI ever overlap with the more tinfoil hat-inclined of the alien researchers? Those who, for example, hold certain views on the connection between the British royal family and the existence of lizard people wearing skin suits? “You have to engage with [conspiracy theories],” White said. “They speak a lot to how we would approach the unknown.” She compared it to the ITV sitcom My Parents Are Aliens — any kind of speculation about aliens can reveal interesting things about the “human psyche in response to post-detection.” 

For Poole, pop culture depictions of aliens belie a lot of “fear.” That’s true of both the Lovecraftian tentacle-fests we see on the big screen and our high school history classes. Poole thought that European contact with the Americas was a comparison a lot of people might make to first contact with aliens. “Whenever people come up against the unknown [...] it has not ended well, and so people just assume that whatever life will be there is going to be dangerous.” 

“We just don’t know,” White said. The hypotheticals are endless: “[maybe] we give the common flu to an alien and they die, or they accidentally give [us] their version of the common flu and it’s the worst pandemic since [Covid-19].” 

Poole is pessimistic about actually finding signs of life beyond Earth. “It’s probably not going to happen for a long time.” What’s more important is planning how humanity would react if and when it happens — that when E.T. beams down it’s a “free for all.” 

White agreed. “I’m optimistic that there is something out there, but I’m very pessimistic of how we as humans will handle it […] We can barely handle our own Earth.”

For humanity to be ready, there needs to be “unity in the world,” White said. “Even if it’s just a UN treaty.” There are currently no formal international agreements on alien first contact. At a summit in the ‘80s, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev agreed that the US and USSR would have each other’s backs if Earth was invaded by extraterrestrial life. Poole doesn’t see that kind of international solidarity happening today, though. At least, not until aliens “turn up at our doorstep.” 

Beyond the political questions, there remains the inconvenient questions that any alien invasion raises for the religious among us. “If we were to find an alien,” White said, “what does the Church do? What do the Imams in Saudi Arabia do?”

Why look for aliens if we’re not ready for them, then? “That’s kind of the purpose of SETI,” Poole said. “Getting the country ready and having policies in place.”

It’d be “foolish” to imagine that in the next few decades, humanity will be united enough to “welcome [E.T.] with a bicycle,” White said. But she pointed out that humanity has a track record of adapting to sudden unknowns: “The world did deal with the Coronavirus with very little preparation beforehand.” 

There are also a lot of “hopeful” depictions of aliens floating round the cultural consciousness. E.T. is not the chest-bursting type. “A lot of it will fall down to how we interact with them,” White told me. 

The key to adapting to anything is keeping an open mind. “There will be people that claim that whatever we detect is the next Messiah,” White said. “Maybe they are. Who knows?”

Illustration: Grace Robinson