Cosmic Optimists Seek to Reach Out and Touch E.T.

Will E.T. phone from home?

A Houston company hopes so. This weekend, officials with Team Encounter plan to beam into space what they claim is the most powerful greeting ever sent from Earth, trying to reach out and touch someone -- or something.

Team Encounter will place its “cosmic call” to possible extraterrestrial neighbors using a 230-foot-diameter radio astronomy dish in Evpatoriya, Ukraine, and a temporary mission control set up at the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, N.M.

The message will be a digital mixed bag: text, photos, and audio and video clips from paying customers and schoolchildren all over the world. The intended targets are five stars deemed reasonable candidates for harboring life-supporting planets.

The message doesn’t lack for its own star power, featuring an introduction by newsman Hugh Downs; a greeting from Sally Ride, America’s first woman in space; and a music clip from rocker David Bowie.

“We’ve gotten everything from jokes to great musical scores,” said Charles Chafer, president of Team Encounter. “We got one drawing of a kid’s Nintendo because he wanted E.T. to know how kids play.”

The company, which seeks to be the world leader in public space missions, made a scaled-down call to the cosmos in 1999.

Chafer said the transmissions are efforts to reach out and “join the galactic community.”

Choosing Roswell as the place for mission control this year was obvious. The southeastern New Mexico community has become a UFO Mecca since the purported 1947 crash-landing of a suspected alien spacecraft on a local farm.

Team Encounter officials will send a message from the Roswell museum to the Ukrainian site, telling scientists to begin the transmission, which will take about 15 hours to send.

The cosmic call will be a featured event at Roswell’s UFO festival this weekend -- an event that draws thousands of true believers and curious onlookers every year.

But sponsors don’t expect a response -- if there is one -- anytime soon. The message will take two years to reach the nearest star and 14 years to reach the farthest, Chafer said.

He expects the soonest an answer might arrive would be five years.

“We’ll sit here by the phones,” he said. “I think if a response comes in, we’ll know it.”