San Francisco, CA -- A bill currently working its way through the Congress includes $10 million a year for two years in funding for the  "search for technosignatures, such as radio transmissions" - SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence). This would be the first government funding for SETI research in a quarter century. Over that period SETI was working with private funding from sources such as Russian billionaire Yuri Milner.

In a May 9, 2018 The Atlantic article by Marina Koren former Center for SETI Research director, Dr. Jill Tarter, stated:  "Ten million at once for one year won't do much, but $10 million a year, as an ongoing funding stream, could do a great deal. It could allow people to build special-purpose instrumentation, and then use it on the sky for a long time."

In response to this new potential funding PRG executive director Stephen Bassett stated, "What American tax payers, Yuri Milner and any other private supporters of SETI research should know is:

Elements within the most highly classified military/intelligence "black" programs are well aware of an extraterrestrial presence engaging the planet since at least the 1940's.

Congressional oversight and formal awareness of this status by all appropriate committees was removed years ago.

SETI research was established simultaneous with the founding of NASA as a foil to take pressure off the White House, Congress, the military and NASA from a public increasingly aware the stated government position on the phenomenon was a lie.

Aside from building radio telescope infrastructure that does have other uses, SETI funding has been tax payer money tossed down the drain.

Extraordinary information coming from Pentagon and CIA sources in just the past 12 months as well as releases from other nations over the past 18 years makes new funding to look for ET signals in the sky is just more waste in service to the ET truth embargo now entering its eighth decade.

Perhaps these points will be given an airing in forthcoming hearings on the budget."

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