This week I reviewed Seth Shostak's book, Confessions of an Alien Hunter.  You can read the full review at at LasVegasWeekly.com, but here's a preview:

According to the Roper Center, most Americans believe extraterrestrials have visited our planet in UFOs and that the U.S. government is covering it up. A smaller percentage of Americans believe that aliens exist, but that we haven’t found them yet (or vice-versa). Seth Shostak falls into the second group.

Shostak heads up the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), a privately funded research organization that scours the universe for signs of extraterrestrial life. So far, Shostak’s team has come up short. But in their defense, they’ve only been given enough funding to check out 0.0000005 percent of a single galaxy.

Shostak’s new book, Confessions of an Alien Hunter: A Scientist’s Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, chronicles his quest to find radio signals broadcast by Little Green Men (LGM). Scientists like Shostak use the term LGM ironically; if the SETI enterprise were to find an extraterrestrial, it’s extremely unlikely he/she/it would resemble that of Hollywood cinema.

According to Shostak, the reason SETI spends most of its time looking for alien radio signals (as opposed to sending out spacecrafts) is that even the closest stars are several light-years away.

“It seems unlikely on statistical grounds that [aliens would] be any closer than a few hundred light-years,” Shostak writes—and if the real aliens are as hostile as the ones in the movies, well, maybe that’s not such a bad thing. “Any extraterrestrials who come here can be safely reckoned to be centuries or more ahead of us, technologically speaking. Any earthly defense against such a society would be like the armies of the American Civil War making plans to battle the U.S. military of today.”