The Cosmic Report: The X Files - a weekly space round-up

From moon hotels and billionaire space tourism to SETI’s 21-year search for alien technosignatures, and a censored UFO incident in 1970s Seoul, this week’s Cosmic Report explores where space ambition, mystery, and skepticism collide.

When space and enterprise converge, it becomes exciting and skeptical at the same time. This week, news arrived that the stinking rich can reserve a room at the first moon hotel by laying down $1 million as a deposit.

Galactic Resource Utilization Space (GRU) is setting up "a proprietary habitation module system and automated process for transforming lunar soil into durable structures” to meet their keen deadline of 2032.

According to official sources, space tourism is key for the lunar economy, forging "the fastest path for humanity to become interplanetary."

Founder Skyler Chan is something of a visionary, saying in a statement, “We live during an inflection point where we can actually become interplanetary before we die.”

He continued: "If we succeed, billions of human lives will be born on the moon and Mars and be able to experience the beauty of lunar and martian life."

Only space-time will tell.

The world's digital campfire

This week, a fascinating project came to a head, as the SETI@home project at UC Berkeley published the results of a six-year analysis of a two-decade-long mission. During this time, private computers filtered 12 billion radio signals with characteristics of potential "technosignatures," which are traces of intelligent life in space.

To reach the final candidates, researchers used the Max Planck Institute's supercomputer in Hannover to filter out Earth-based electromagnetic interference. Following this intense filtering, only 100 high-priority candidates remain for further investigation.

Founder David Anderson notes the project taught them what not to do, creating a "long list of things we would have done differently" for future sky survey projects.

“Even if we don't find ET, we can at least say that we have reached a new level of sensitivity. If there had been a signal above a certain strength, we would have found it,” said Anderson.

For 21 years, it was a digital campfire for a global community that became Earth's most powerful supercomputer.

A satellite receiving a sequence of signals from Earth. — Image by Cybernews

One from the vaults

This week, we’re rewinding a little to the sinister goings-on of 1976, in Seoul, South Korea.

While browsing the sublime UFO community on Reddit, I came across an eerie cold case with almost no information in English.

On October 14th, 1976, in Seoul, South Korea, while flying over the Blue House (the presidential residence), multiple luminous objects moved slowly south over the city. Somewhere between 10 and 12 of them – witness accounts vary.

The Capital Defense Command treated this as an airspace breach over a restricted zone, as a captive early evening audience tuned into MBC’s (leading radio and TV broadcaster) Starry Night broadcast. During the broadcast, the host reportedly mentioned the lights on-air, lending an Orson Welles-esque aura to proceedings.

Forces in Seoul shooting down some bright lights at night. — Image by Cybernews

The next day, the Ministry of National Defense asserted that the warning shots were fired at a Northwest Airlines cargo plane that strayed into restricted airspace en route from Gimpo to Osaka.

When Seoul Broadcasting System (SBS) – largest private broadcaster in Korea – investigated the encounter in 2020 on the investigative show I Want to Know That, first-hand witness accounts shed an entirely different light on the matter, one of an unsettling nature.

On October 14, 1976, over Seoul, six million witnesses saw military firing anti-aircraft guns at 12 UFOs near the president’s residence for two hours. Many civilians were injured. a Korean doc reveals efforts to suppress the story.
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Ahn Hee-seok recalled:

Around October 14th, 1976, I was walking toward Gwanghwamun when I saw unidentified lights on the slopes of Geumhwasan Mountain. I spotted lights in the sky, but upon closer inspection, they weren't stars. I remember there being about 12 of them. They were positioned in the sky at regular intervals. Then, I heard a strange sound that shook the heavens and the earth. I intuitively knew it was the sound of anti-aircraft guns, and these guns were firing into the sky.

One victim, a high-schooler at the time, said: “Something flew at me… I felt a sharp pain… blood was gushing out. At that moment, I thought, ‘Oh, I’ve been shot.’” Reports say rounds fell back to earth, leaving casualties in their wake.

It’s not as if everyone was immediately thinking “aliens!” more so that the authorities did what authorities always do, slapped a neat label on a messy sky. The official story says “cargo plane.” Not everything has to be extraterrestrial to be an X-File, especially when the authorities censor a case, and it takes decades for other perspectives to be considered.