Edward Snowden's views on communication have taken an extraterrestrial turn after he told Neil deGrasse Tyson how aliens could be talking about humans in an encrypted language.
Halfway through the hour-long chat, Tyson asked the NSA whistleblower how would aliens want to communicate with us.
And in Snowden's opinion, the answer boils down to ET signals being encrypted and therefore, harder to understand.
"If you had an alien civilisation trying to listen to other civilisations or our civilisations trying to listen to aliens, there's only one small period in the development of their society when all of their communications will be sent via the most primitive and most unprotected means.
"When we think about everything that we are hearing through our satellites or everything they are hearing from our civilisation, if indeed there are aliens out there, all of their communications are encrypted by default.
"So what we are hearing that's actually a television show...or a phone call or their planets and their own GPS constellation is indistinguishable to us from cosmic background microwave radiation."
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Snowden is not of course, the only person to suggest that ET chatter could be more advanced than human-to-human conversation.
On Friday, an expert from the SETI Institute said the human race is not developed enough to understand messages from aliens.
Dr Nathalie Cabrol told the DailyMail.com: "If there is a civilisation out there that is only 1,000 years older than we are, who knows what type of technology, or what type of process, they've put into communicating with others.
"We're just scratching the surface here. We're looking at the universe from our own standpoint.
"We tend to ask questions in the way we do. But what kind of thought process an alien civilisation may have, we really don't know.