KBRP-LP - Radio Free Bisbee 96.1 FM Bisbee, Online KBRP-LP - Radio Free Bisbee 96.1 FM Bisbee Radio internet, KBRP-LP - Radio Free Bisbee 96.1 FM Bisbee USA Radio at first I just chuckled. Because it seemed just so funny to have something actually named after Dunc, and it was even funnier when people didn't realise I was married to him, we have different last names, so I got lots of questions, like, "What do you think about the Lorimer Burst, is it real or not?" So I kind of got a good chuckle out of it for a little bit, but then that kind of stuck and so we started using the name in proposals and things, which was kind of fun. To have something named after me like this was really a great honour. Yeah, not something I was expecting, but yeah, really nice. But the Lorimer Burst was so distant and yet so bright it didn't appear to have been produced by any naturally occurring phenomenon. I did think that it could be a signal from an extraterrestrial civilisation we create signals like that on Earth, so it's not crazy to think that radio bursts could be created on another planet. Once we actually thought about it, and looked at the energetics, you'd need to harness almost a whole solar system's worth of energy to create something this bright. Then we realised this is just impossible unless the civilisation is way more advanced than we are. We couldn't think of how to make something this energetic. Scientists have been searching the cosmos for strange signals like the Lorimer Burst for more than years. Ever since a secretive meeting took place in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. There have been, over the years, a lot of claims, of sightings of extraterrestrials, colonies on the moon. The subject had gotten to be treated with contempt, really. It was considered almost taboo. But, in , Frank Drake held a conference behind closed doors in this room at the Green Bank Observatory. The National Academy of Sciences of the United States, a very eminent body, asked me to convene a meeting of all the people I knew in the world who were actually serious thinkers on the subject and I invited them all. All of them. The group called themselves the Order of the Dolphin. I could talk about all of them at length but let me just mention a few just to give you a feel for who they were. There was Otto Stuber, director of the observatory here at Green Bank, and considered perhaps the most important astronomer of the th century. Besides being a great astronomer he was a very strong proponent of the idea that intelligent life, and life in general, was very common in the universe. And there was Carl Sagan, a familiar name, who was a great proponent of extraterrestrial intelligent life. He had popularised it, gotten support for it, both with the general public and the scientific world. Then there was John Lilly, not an astronomer, a neurologist who had studied the human brain, and then the brains of dolphins, and was convinced that dolphins were close in intelligence to us, and, in studying the brain, he was trying to make the case that intelligence is inevitable in the course of evolution, and therefore it should be very common in the universe. Then there was Melvin Calvin, a chemist who had successfully.