Contact Conference

s and encourage serious, creative speculation about humanity's future. Contact was conceived by anthropologist Jim Funaro in 1979, and the first formal conference was held in 1983 in Santa Cruz, California. Twenty-six annual events have followed, several held at NASA Ames Research Center. In many previous years, the COTI HI project involved teams of high school students in the creation of scientifically accurate extraterrestrial beings, and in simulated encounters between two such races. Many spinoff organizations have formed, on line, and as far away as Japan. One such organization is the Contact consortium which is focused on the medium of contact in multi-user virtual worlds on the Internet. Contact has been closely allied with the SETI Institute, and its early participants created the hypothetical planet Epona. The 27th Contact conference was held on March 31 - April 2, 2012 at the SETI Institute and the Domain Hotel, in Mountain View, California. The 28th conference will be held on a biennial schedule, thus in the spring of 2014, probably in northern California.