'E.T., call back later,' says the down-and-out SETI project in California

SAN JOSE, CALIF. - If E.T. phones Earth, he'll get a "disconnect" signal.

Lacking the money to pay its operating expenses, the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., has pulled the plug on the renowned Allen Telescope Array, a field of radio dishes that scan the skies for signals from extraterrestrial civilizations.

In a letter last Friday to donors, SETI Institute CEO Tom Pierson said that the array was put into "hibernation" last week, safe but nonfunctioning, because of inadequate financial support.

The timing couldn't be worse, SETI scientists say. After millenniums of musings, this spring astronomers announced that 1,235 new possible planets had been observed by Kepler, a telescope on a satellite. They predict that dozens of these planets will be Earth-sized -- and some will be in the "habitable zone," where temperatures are just right for liquid water, a prerequisite of life as we know it.

"There is a huge irony," said SETI director Jill Tarter, "that a time when we discover so many planets to look at, we don't have the operating funds to listen."

SETI senior astronomer Seth Shostak compared the project's suspension to "the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria being put into dry dock. ... This is about exploration, and we want to keep the thing operational. It's no good to have it sit idle.

"We have the radio antennae up, but we can't run them without operating funds," he added.

But funding for SETI has long been a headache for E.T. seekers. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration bankrolled some early projects, but in 1994, Sen. Richard Bryan of Nevada convinced Congress that it wasn't worth the cost, calling it the "Great Martian Chase" and complaining that not a single flying saucer had applied for FAA approval.

However, successful private funding came from donors such as Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, allowing SETI to raise $50 million to build the 42 dishes.

Plans called for construction of 350 individual radio antennas, all working in concert. But what's lacking now is funding to support the day-to-day costs of running the dishes.

This is the responsibility of the University of California, Berkeley's Radio Astronomy Laboratory, but one of the university's major funders, the National Science Foundation, supplied only one-tenth its previous support.

Meanwhile, the state of California has also cut funding.