On Friday, it was announced that SETI’s Kepler project was already getting some exciting results. Exciting, no?

“We’ve started searching our Kepler SETI observations and our analyses have generated some of our first candidate signals,” scientists of the University of California, Berkeley announced.

However, by Saturday morning it was confirmed that the signals were not of extraterrestrial origin. It’s interference from another satellite.

“Even though these signals are interference, detecting events with similar characteristics to what we expect from [extraterrestrial technology] is a good indication that the first steps of our detection algorithms are working properly,” reads a blog post on SETI’s site.

The news is a bummer. But the search for extraterrestrial intelligence continues.

The Kepler project has been generating a lot of excitement among scientists and researchers from many different disciplines. Heck, science fiction writers and filmmaker have also been deeply interested in the news of newly-discovered worlds — and folks from Lucasfilm even took part in one of the Kepler announcements.

Now the next phase of researching these other worlds includes scanning for signs of “extraterrestrial intelligence.”

Using data from the Kepler space telescope, SETI astronomers are focused on “listening” for radio signals coming from stars known (or at least thought) to have planets orbiting them. It was hoped that the first “candidate” signals had been detected, according to an announcement from SETI last week.

The announcement was posted at http://seti.berkeley.edu/kepler-seti-candidate-signals, but that link now redirects to a page that states, in essence, “There is nothing to see here, sorry for the confusion.”

The original statement had said: “These signals look similar to what we think might be produced from an extraterrestrial technology. They are narrow in frequency, much narrower than would be produced by any known astrophysical phenomena, and they drift in frequency with time, as we would expect because of the Doppler effect imposed by the relative motion of the transmitter and the receiving radio telescope.”

It also stated that these first “candidate signals” are “undoubtedly examples of terrestrial radio frequency interference (RFI).”

But that didn’t stop some people from becoming understandably hopeful.

As Daily Galaxy pointed out over the weekend: Kepler has discovered more than 1,000 new planet candidates, nearly doubling its previously known count. Ten of these candidates are near-Earth-size and orbit in the habitable zone of their host star. Candidates require follow-up observations to verify they are actual planets.

“This is a major milestone on the road to finding Earth’s twin,” said Douglas Hudgins, Kepler program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

If last year was marked by the discovery of planets, could this year be remembered as the year we learn that we are “not alone in the universe”?

David Murphy, writing at PC Mag, explained the quick confirmation that the signals were not extraterrestrial in origin:

To test whether the radio signals were truly extraterrestrial, or just us, researchers moved the telescope they were using to scan the skies. After all, if a radio signal is being generated by a source up in space, then pointing the telescope elsewhere would eliminate its ability to detect the signal. In the case of SETI’s discovered signals, however, they persisted: A sign that a human-launched satellite was generating a strong enough of a signal to be picked up by the telescope regardless of where it was pointing.

In short, no aliens.

Along with explaining that the signal was just from our own technology, SETI went on to say that the signals were still interesting because it resembles what they think alien technology would produce.

Mathew Luschek at NBC Bay Area made an observation that reflects, I think, the criticism that some in ufology direct at SETI: “Apparently Earth noise resembles alien noise, sometimes.”

Ufologists like Stanton Friedman has complained in the past that SETI is doing their research based on a (sometimes stubborn) assumption that “intelligent life” would have technology that had evolved exactly the same way that our own has. [video]

On the other hand, you gotta’ start someplace. And the best place to start is usually to begin with what you know. And us humans know and understand radio waves pretty well.

The SETI project plans to continue to analyze the nearly 50 terabytes of data generated from its Kepler observations, and the group will update its blog with any additional results that pop up throughout the next many months.

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