Fact check: Did NASA receive an SOS call from another galaxy?

Origin 

As people's interest grew more in space exploration due to NASA-SpaceX's latest launch of American astronauts to the International Space Station, a number of conspiracy theorists have been sharing unverified news regarding NASA and other space entities. Be it spotting of UFOs/aliens or receiving signals from different galaxies, the internet is filled with conspiracies that cannot be backed by any evidence to prove them right. Similarly, the viral article which claims that NASA received an SOS call from another galaxy back in 1998. 

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SOS call from space?

Image courtesy - NASA on Unsplash

The article posted by Alienstar, which has garnered over a million reads claims that NASA intercepted a message from another galaxy back in January 1998, but couldn't translate and decode it till 2011. The alleged message sent by another galaxy was deemed to be over 80,000 years old and was believed to be coming farther away than the nearest Andromeda galaxy. The article claims furthermore that the message asked for help. 

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The article goes onto making blatant claims that the planet or galaxy which sent the distress call is most likely to be destroyed due to nuclear weapons such as on planet Earth. Whereas it also states that the civilization sending the distress call to Earth is most likely to not be any more advanced than humans. The article claims that the aliens sending the signal for help to earth could not leave their planet as they weren't evolved enough to do so. The article bases all it claims on a video that was posted back in 2016 on YouTube. 

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The video above titled 'NASA received SOS call from Another Galaxy?' has over six million views on YouTube. The video has evidently garnered a lot of popularity over the years as it makes a sensational claim but it does not back it up by any formidable evidence. Whereas on the other hand, a detailed fact check on the video posted above was also done on YouTube by the BillsChannel. The fact-checking video of NASA receiving a distress call from another galaxy was deemed fake by a UFO expert named Robert Kiviat. The video itself has garnered over a million views on youTube. Check it out below - 

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Google Trends Analysis

As the article about NASA receiving an SOS call from another galaxy started going viral on the internet, people took to Google and searched to confirm whether the story is true. This resulted in a surge of search results focussing on the topics like 'NASA SOS call from another galaxy', 'NASA received SOS', etc. Check it out below -