Aside from the eighth grade social studies student who thought "Seti" was an ancient Egyptian deity, many people have strange ideas about just what the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence actually is, or what it does.

Some folks think its a "National Agency." This was promulgated by  a line in the movie Starman, in which a government official flashes a badge and announces "I'm from SETI."  Never let it be said that Hollywood lets facts stand in the way of a good movie.

The reality is that SETI is a field of research, carried on by a group of 30 scientists from several different countries. There is a SETI Institute - but no "National SETI Agency."

Another misconception is the idea that this is the primary purpose of radio telescopes. In fact, while SETI does make occasional use of these, these radio arrays spend 95% of the time observing quasars and other celestial phenomena.

The third misconception has to do with the length of time that SETI has been on the job. A common argument by politicians (not the best nor the brightest of people) wielding budget axes runs like this: "SETI has been listening for nearly fifty years and hasn’t discovered ET, so SETI is a failure."

As with many other issues, politicians making this statement demonstrate their ignorance about what SETI is and how it actually works. While SETI actually did go on-line in 1960, the search for alien intelligence has not been continuous over intervening decades. In fact, during the first twenty years, the twenty-three targeted SETI projects comprised a total of three months of actual search time.

It should also be noted that a "radio telescope" is not like your AM/FM Radio. It is an extremely precision, directionally-sensitive instrument, searching one ten-millionth of the sky at any given time, and over a very limited spectrum, running from 1GHz to 10 GHz containing about nine billion channels. Each sky position requires at least 90 observations to cover all of that "real estate."

One last point: not all SETI projects are given equal priority. To date, only two SETI projects have done any significant searching at all. (It's a big universe out there....)