republic. in fact, at the foot of mt. ararat on which noah's ark is said to be reached. a symposium sponsored jointly by the national academy of sciences and the united states and the soviet academy of sciences. on the question of contact with extraterrestrial intelligence, this was a six day meeting which ran from morning to late at night and involved a a large group of people, around 40 or 50 people from mostly from other ussr. but a few of the nations it involved. in addition to physicists and astronomers, biologists, chemists, anthropologists, archeologists, historians, people concerned with coding messages and decoding them and was a turning point. i think in the study of the subject, not because some striking new opinions were or results were expressed, but because i think it marks the turning point in the increasing respectability of the subject. it is now okay to talk about life elsewhere or intelligent life elsewhere, whereas a decade or two ago it wasn't okay, it was considered too speculative to be worth any investment of time. as an example of the modern scie