by FRED CHARUNDER-MACHARRUNDEIRA, Alternate Reality News Service Science Writer
Finding an extraterrestrial communication is like watching the shore for a message in a bottle. Only, the bottle is a regular digital pulse. And, it has taken hundreds, possibly thousands of years to reach us rather than a few months. And, it doesn't travel with the tides, it travels at the speed of light. And, it isn't necessarily in a language we could understand, assuming it contains speech at all, which is not a given (it could contain images, mathematical formulae or recipes for fried fuffnagles with a pink ournaisse sauce).
Okay, finding an extraterrestrial communication is like watching for a message in a bottle in the same way that whispering a prayer is like traveling on a jumbo jet. That could explain why, 32 years after receiving the first undeniable non-background noisy sounds from space, scientists have only managed to decipher three words.
The latest word, which members of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (which was acronymmed as SETI rather than SEI because Set-E sounds more scientific than Sigh) confirmed on Tuesday, was "Babaloooooooooooooo!"
"This is a very interesting discovery," stated MIT scholar and Nobel Prize Bronze Medalist for Ethnographic Skydiving Mellonesium Paunch. "It suggests that alien beings are familiar with the Lukumi tradition, known in the West as Santeria. As everybody knows, Babaloo Aiye, the Father of the World, controls disease. Perhaps the extraterrestrials are telling us they cannot come to us because they fear our germs, or, conversely, they could be warning us to stay away from them lest we catch a disease from their germs. Or, maybe, they are germs. At this point, it's impossible to say."
"Well, actually," started renegade anthrocosmologist Yuri Flemm, "there is a much simpler explanatio -"
"On the other hand," Paunch continued, "it could be a reference to the Babaloo Restaurant in Pointe-Claire, Quebec. Perhaps an alien reconnaissance mission had eaten there once and liked it so much that now the restaurant's reputation has gone viral across the galaxy. Or, maybe the message is actually a takeout order gone cosmic."
"Or, maybe" Flemm, winner of the 1412 Nobel Prize for Literary Looting, Raping and Pillaging, tried again, "it is actually a reference to -"
"Or," Paunch, completely ignoring the interruptions which hadn't actually happened during our interview with her, stated, "it could have been a reference to comedy writer Babaloo Mandel. True, he hasn't written anything worthwhile since Night Shift, but in any communication with extraterrestrials, we have to assume that there is going to be some cultural lag."
"Or, maybe it's just a scene from an episode of I Love Lucy!" Flemm hastily insisted.
"I Love Lucy?" Paunch wondered. "Why...would aliens be sending us scenes from our own television series?"
Flemm momentarily banged his head on his desk. When he had finished, he wiped the blood off his brow and explained that the signal may not have been coming from aliens, that it could have been an old episode of I Love Lucy that had somehow bounced back to Earth. Perhaps it had fallen into a black hole and been spit out another black hole in our direction. Perhaps it got reflected back at us by dark matter.
"We don't really know much about the dark matter in the universe," Flemm said. "Maybe its taste runs more to Seinfeld."
According to Flemm, the consensus in the scientific community that Copa, the word that had been translated three years ago, was a reference to Las Vegas (or, as a small minority of researcher believe, to the Canadian Owners and Pilots Association), was clearly wrong. "It is obviously a reference to the club where Desi performed. I mean, really! Lucy tried to weasel her way into it practically every episode - you don't have to have a PhD in astrocomedics to figure that one out!" (Which is a good thing, considering that he doesn't have a PhD in astrocomedics.)
Flemm added that the first translated word (was it really two decades ago? No, actually, it was only seven years) , which everybody assumed was "look - see" (which could either be an invitation to visit them and experience their culture, or a request for them to come and experience ours), is more likely to translate as "Luuuuuuucy!"
"It was an honest mistake," Flemm allowed, "but, as we learn more about the message, it becomes less and less tenable."
"Yuri is just engaging in reckless speculation," Paunch retorted. "I'm telling!"
The only scientist to agree with Flemm to date is Stephen Hawking, who warned against spending too much time contemplating sitcoms from the 1950s. "Watching too much I Love Lucy might make us nostalgic for a simpler time," Hawking stated, "which would weaken our resolve to resist alien invaders."
"But, the point is that there are no aliens!" Flemm loudly insisted, before banging his head on his desk one time too many and passing out. We hope his dreams were pleasant.