In the Warner Brothers movie Contact, actor Jodie Foster plays an astronomer who searches for extraterrestrial life on a thousand nearby, sun-like stars.

In real life, Harvard Professor of Physics Paul Horowitz has been searching for aliens for nearly 20 years.

With the assistance of an 84-foot radiotelescope in Harvard, Mass., Horowitz and his assistants listen for frequencies near the neutral hydrogen line, which could indicate the existence of life in outer space.

According to the Harvard Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Web page (http://mc.harvard.edu/seti/), the search first began in 1978 with scientists listening to signals transmitted from a 1,000-foot dish in Arecibo, Puerto Rico.

But by 1995, the project had moved on-line. Darren L. Leigh, who wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on the equipment used in the Harvard SETI project and who has served as one of Horowitz's research assistants since 1992, helped build computers that screen the frequencies and then "send you e-mail if it has a possibly right signal," Leigh says. This project was called Billion Channel Extraterrestrial Assay, or BETA and is the system still in operation today.

"There's just way too much to listen to," Leigh says, explaining the need for the equipment. "Computers can sit there humming away 24 hours nonstop. Mostly what they do is throw stuff away."

The Harvard SETI project received funding from NASA in 1991 until appropriations were axed by Senator Richard H. Bryan (D-Nev.) in 1994. To fund BETA, Leigh says the group relied on support from private foundations such as the Planetary Society and on sample parts donated by companies like Hewlett Packard, Micron and Intel.

"We would go around to flea markets and junk yards and find electronic equipment," Leigh says.

Now, Leigh says that the bulk of SETI's budget goes toward "electricity and a phone line we installed." The projects costs approximately $20,000 a year.

Not Just Little Green Men

Leigh says there are no practical applications for the project "until we could actually start up a conversation and learn a lot."

"[But] we want to know what's out there," Leigh says. "Curiosity plays a big part."

Leigh says people often laugh at his search for "little green men," but he believes scientific proof actually exists for life beyond Earth.

As proof, Leigh refers to the Drake equation, a mathematical equation written by Dr. Frank Drake, President of the SETI Institute, which calculates the potential number of communicative intelligent civilizations in our galaxy.

"[To calculate], you start with how many stars are out there, what fraction of the stars are enough like ours that there would be life," Leigh says. "Even if the odds are reasonably low, there are enough stars out there that it puts the probability up there."