Researchers from the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project, together with scientists from the University of California at Davis and the Alaska Whaling Foundation in the US, have managed to communicate with a humpback whale using its native language for the first time. The results of the experiment were published in the scientific journal magazine PeerJ.
Experts recorded a special contact signal from a whale named Twain and played it several times through an underwater speaker for 20 minutes at different intervals. Twain responded to the call by approaching the boat with the scientists and walking in a circle around the ship.
The researchers concluded that the humpback whale was able to compare changes in the pauses between signals and recognize when humans gravitated toward it.
“We believe this is the first such communication exchange between humans and humpback whales in the ‘language’ of these animals,” said lead author Brenda McCowan of the University of California, San Francisco.
Although interaction with Twain is unlikely to be meaningful from a human perspective, the experiment will help SETI scientists develop methods for detecting and interpreting alien messages. Experts in the search for extraterrestrial civilizations use the experience of intelligent communication of non-human species and the principles of information theory to create filters for processing extraterrestrial signals.
Formerly an amateur ufologist in the name a failure in the bank’s information network in their attempt to find the aliens.