Oh I agree. We screw up daily in our scientific discoveries.... Then again some probably are real signals. It is the height of ignorance and arrogance to think that we are all alone here.

As Shakespeare said in Hamlet ..:"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Meaning we don't know 1/1 Billionth of what there is to know.. (Seen and unseen).

That is A-OK. I love discoveries.. :-)

Sus

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http://www.wired.com/2015/10/guys-lots-of-signals-from-space-seem-like-aliens/

Last week, astronomers—amateur and pro—got excited about some strange results from the Kepler Space Telescope, the NASA observatory tasked with searching for Earth-like planets. As those planets orbit their own distant suns, periodically blocking light from Kepler’s view, the telescope documents the flickers. But over the last several years, it has picked up a strange pattern of blips from one star in particular, KIC 8462852.

Light from that star dramatically plunges in irregular intervals—not the consistent pattern you’d expect from an orbiting planet. But what could possibly cause such a thing? Gotta be aliens, right? Clearly someone—something—has assembled a megastructure around its sun, like that hollow Celestial head in Guardians of the Galaxy. Or maybe it’s a solar array, collecting energy-giving radiation and preventing light from reaching NASA’s telescope.

This, of course, is almost certainly poppycock. When you’re searching the vast expanse of space, lots of things look like they could be signs of extraterrestrial life. Astronomical observers are constantly looking for tiny glimmers of information in the mess of noise that streams through space toward Earth, and often, things that at first look like signals end up being mirages. This has all happened before; it will all happen again. For example:

Pulsars

In 1967, astronomer Jocelyn Bell was monitoring signals from the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory, trying to analyze the behavior of quasars, energy-spewing regions surrounding supermassive black holes within distant galaxies. What she found, though, was a series of regular pulses, always from the same part of the sky, that she labeled LGM-1: Little Green Men. Soon, though, she found similar signals coming from another part of the sky, and realized that she wasn’t seeing messages from two different alien civilizations: It was radiation from a spinning, magnetized neutron star—the first measured pulsar.

Wow!

On August 15, 1977, a volunteer astronomer named Jerry Ehman picked up an interesting signal while he was going through the logs of the Big Ear Radio Observatory at Ohio Wesleyan University. He noticed a burst of activity, lasting 72 seconds, in the 1420 MHz wave band—a frequency banned from Earth-bound use, and impossible to generate without a transmitter of some sort. (It’s called the Wow! signal, after a note Ehman made on the printout of the data.) The radio waves came from the direction of the Sagittarius constellation, but repeated efforts to listen into the signal again failed—leading many to believe that the signal must have come from Earth and reflected off of something in space. To be fair, no one ever figured out what the signal was…but no one ever saw it again, and the observation was after-the-fact. Maybe it was just a bug. (Or Bug-Eyed Monsters! But probably not.)

Sparks at Parkes

In 1998, astronomers at the 64-meter Parkes radio telescope in Australia started noticing mysterious radio signals called perytons—unexplained, millisecond-long bursts. The researchers there didn’t immediately cry alien, though; they could tell that the radio signals were terrestrial in origin, because they showed up across the entire spectrum monitored by the telescope. They didn’t know until this year, however, exactly where those emissions came from: a microwave oven on the observatory’s campus, which released a short, powerful radio signal when staffers opened its door in the middle of heating. (See? It’s a cookbook!)

Excitable Exoplanets

As planetary scientists continue to discover exoplanets, they’re also stumbling across a subset that could—based on spectral signatures, size, and distance from their respective suns—foster life. In 2010, one Australian astronomer made the mental leap to intelligent life, claiming to have seen a suspicious pulse of light coming from the direction of the first potentially-habitable exoplanet Gliese 581g. But he had noted the signal two years before, and only reported his observations after the planet was discovered—a case of confirmation bias if there ever was one.