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Posted March 30, 2026 Reviewed by Monica Vilhauer Ph.D.
When I was an intelligence officer, we had a saying about looking for “bad guys” in terrorist networks: “Don’t look for your lost keys only under the lamppost.” This means don’t restrict your hunt for the truth to easy-to-search areas, especially places where you want and expect the evidence to be or where your cognitive biases blind you.[1]
Another important concept we were taught is “Beware of mirroring,” meaning, it’s dangerous to assume a foreign actor has the same perceptions and motivations that we do. For instance, foreign intelligence officers may engage in cyber hacking for personal financial gain as well as intelligence gathering, something that US officers—with extremely rare exceptions—never do. Thus, a particular hack by a particular foreign adversary may or may not signal official interest in the hacking target.
To avoid pitfalls such as “lamp-posting” and “mirroring”, we sometimes enjoyed success using the concept of negative space, where we explicitly enumerated our own expectations, desires, biases and beliefs, then posited that the answer to an intelligence question lay only in the negative space, where we didn’t expect, where we didn’t want, for reasons we would never dream of.[1]
In my recent work investigating UFOs with my wife, Psychology Today blogger Chris Gilbert MD PhD (cast member in the TV series Alien Files Reopened), I realized that humans’ search for ET signals from deep space might be missing evidence of distant ETs staring us in the face because of “lamp-posting” and “mirroring.”
Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) experts often attribute failing to detect ET to the needle in a haystack problem: When you consider all combinations of locations in the sky, time of day, signal bands (radio, optical, x-ray, etc.), and signal type (single tone, bursts, repeating, non-repeating, math based non-math based, etc.), the ET signal search space is so large that we have, optimistically, covered only 0.000000000000000000001 of the possibilities.
Thus, SETI experts argue, we should not expect quick success any more than we should expect to catch a fish by randomly scooping one cup of water out of the ocean. For these reasons, SETI explorations typically hunt for “low hanging fruit,” including artificially narrow-band radio signals (that differ from broadband astronomical background radiation), non-random, artificial signals, signals in convenient microwave bands, unnaturally repeating signals, and signals that are not of earthly origin. [2] We have barely scratched the surface with these “obvious” searches, so why waste scarce resources looking in the negative space of human expectation?
It’s a valid question, given that studying unexpected parts of the astronomical electromagnetic spectrum, such as X-rays, infrared, visible, gamma rays, and terahertz bands, would require constructing and operating very expensive sensor networks with no expectation of success.
But the negative space concept for discovering ETs could be very useful for analyzing the data we have already collected.
Indeed, NASA and others are increasingly making non-SETI astronomy and astrophysics data available to SETI researchers. But many of those datasets, collected to explain natural phenomena, have explicitly filtered out artificial-appearing signals (that may be the most promising) and have compressed certain other signals for efficient storage in ways that could remove important information.
Thus, pursuing the negative space concept in SETI should include giving SETI researchers full access to pre-filtered, pre-compressed non-SETI data.
Equally important would be looking at those richer data sets “upside down” in ways directly opposite to the way SETI researchers usually analyze data today, including examining:
Fortunately, SETI researchers have already begun looking for such signals in astronomical data [3]. Of course, hunts for new types of “needles” in the enormous “haystack” of non-SETI data offer no guarantee of success,
But the odds of success might improve if researchers switched from looking for needles in haystacks to hunting for a few straws of hay in mountains of needles.
References
1 The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis: cia.gov/resources/csi/static/Pyschology-of-Intelligence-Analysis.pdf
2 A radio technosignature search towards Proxima Centauri resulting in a signal of interest: nature.com/articles/s41550-021-01479-w
3 Rethinking Radio: A New Way to Hear the Universe? seti.org/news/rethinking-radio/
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Eric Haseltine, Ph.D., is a neuroscientist and the author of Long Fuse, Big Bang.
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The best way to begin something new—in love, work, and life.
Self Tests are all about you. Are you outgoing or introverted? Are you a narcissist? Does perfectionism hold you back? Find out the answers to these questions and more with Psychology Today.