The Alien Hotline was open on Friday night. "You can call me Bill," said the first self-proclaimed ET of the evening. Saying he was here to study our planet, the caller was not by himself. His cohort? A yapping dog in the background. "Joseph" said that "in his natural form he looked very similar to humans," but that he was permanently altered before he came to Earth via a "time folding" process. On his home world, he claimed there were mountains that were 4 to 5 times taller than Mount Everest. Then there was "Zak" who said in his true state he was a "round ball of light." The being known as "Lowered Standard" declared himself to be part of the "Intergalactic Witness Protection Program." 'Nuff said.

Elsewhere in Open Lines Land, Mark from Oklahoma told a tale of two F15 planes getting tangled up in a time warp via a black cloud. Shannon shared her account of ghostly mishaps since the birth of her son. And another caller told of frightful experiences she underwent after encountering something like an electrical current as she lay in bed. "I felt like I was turned outside in," she said.

SETI@home's Big Day

In the first hour of the Friday night show, Dr. David Anderson, Director of the SETI@home project, discussed their recently announced plan to reobserve the top 150 signals gleaned from the program. Anderson said this will be a culmination of four years of work that involved four million people lending their computer power to search for extraterrestrial life. Between March 18-20th 2003, these promising signal locations will be tried out on the giant Arecibo radio telescope, to see if they yield any further data. The next project for SETI@home will make use of a telescope in Australia, Anderson said.