About The Transmission From Mars        In my story, the transmission from Mars is believed to be encoded. It is later discovered that it was not encoded, but rather, we (may have) lacked the technology to convert the signal back to a meaningful form. Whether the stories of reported alien encounters are fact or fiction, most of these described encounters depict alien beings using telepathy to communicate. This seems to be considered typical of supposed 'higher' life forms, in that they have advanced to a telepathic form of communication.  Perhaps a better explanation is, not all life forms naturally develop our very confusing vocalized form of  communication. If so, their technologies in respect to expanding their communication may have taken on radically different forms. If there were such beings, able to communicate by a form of telepathy, theoretically they might be able to describe an event or several events to another individual, or even a group, very rapidly and with great clarity. The information could include all emotions, sights, smells, tastes... all of the senses, much more than just spoken or written words as we ‘humans' generally use. It could eliminate misinterpretations or misunderstandings. To such a life form, our form of communication might seem to them as a dog's barking or a cat's meow seems to us. These animals do communicate, and while we see them as significant life forms, they don't really say very much as far as we are concerned, in respect to intellectual exchange. Our advanced ability as humans to broadcast our form of communication over the air and into outer space by using carrier waves may not represent us as interesting or highly intelligent life forms to these proposed telepathic alien beings. Our search for alien signals over these same type of carrier waves may also be equally inappropriate, as alien life forms may not use carrier waves at all to communicate. (THIS IS NOT TO SAY I THINK SETI IS INAPPROPRIATE IN ANY WAY!. THERE IS OTHER LIFE SOMEWHERE OUT THERE TO BE FOUND.) Of course, these are just subjects for speculation. In my Sci-fi story, an alien race that normally used a form of telepathy to communicate attempted to contact Earth using a form of carrier waves to send their telepathic message, so that we would be able to recognize their transmission. About real alien transmissions   http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/