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“Whales are intermediaries for extraterrestrial beings. They are intelligent creatures with a language foreign to us.”Josie Hubbard, a SETI researcher who studies animal behavior at the University of California at Davis, believes this experience of communicating with animals could help us when it comes time to communicate with aliens.

As you can understand, communicating with a humpback whale is not easy. “Their language is very complex,” says Lisa Walker, a scientist who also works for SETI and studies whale songs. They make sounds that resemble screams, groans, and squeaks. Researchers have been trying to find out what all these sounds mean for many years.

In December 2023, the team played underwater recordings of humpback whales to other whales off the coast of Alaska. While most mammals ignored them, a female named Twain began circling the boat, imitating and repeating these sounds.

It was a “conversation call,” as Josie Hubbard put it. This is what whales call each other. They make sounds similar to “screams” and “thumps” and appear to be a means of finding others and communicating with each other.

However, it was not a very intellectual conversation. The scientists themselves do not know exactly what was said in their recordings.

Maybe we just said hello, he said hello, and we said hello again, but it was definitely communication.
– says Lisa Walker.

Twain did this 36 times in 20 minutes.

“We believe this is the first such communicative exchange between humans and humpback whales in humpback language.”” said Brenda McCowan, a behavioral scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and lead author of a paper detailing this shift.

Although no one knows whether we will be able to contact extraterrestrials, this experiment is an exciting, albeit early, attempt to communicate with intelligent life living on the same planet as us.