Astronomer and engineering physicist Tarter, co-founder of the California-based Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute, has been ET-hunting for more than 25 years, and is credited with moving the search from the lunatic fringe to the mainstream.

Tarter, due in Dunedin this week as a keynote speaker at the New Zealand International Science Festival, was named by Time magazine in 2004 as one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th centur. Jodie Foster's character in the movie Contact is said to be largely based on Tarter.

As a member of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, Tarter regularly studies so-called UFO sightings, and says she's not yet seen credible evidence of alien life.

Kaikoura's "balls of light" sighted in 1978 created worldwide attention - but were later attributed to Japanese squid boats.

Tarter will tell New Zealand audiences about her institute's new and future use of sensitive radio and optical telescopes to scan the universe for ET transmissions.

So how do we know our technology is going to be on the same wavelength?

"A very good question. But if the appropriate technology is something we haven't yet invented we can't exactly use it."

The best we have are radio waves which can travel across the galaxy without being absorbed by the dust between the stars. Any communication, of course, will be a one-way street - given that any message takes 100,000 years to cross the galaxy.

"It's probably not going to be a snappy conversation," she agrees.

Any information encoded in a signal will be "probably repetitive" and thought out by civilisations who have made contact among themselves long before we came into the picture.

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