Nestled between mountains in a secluded corner of West Virginia, a giant awakens: the Green Bank Telescope begins its vigil, scanning the cosmos for secrets.

If intelligent life exists out there, there's a good chance teams analyzing data from the world's largest, fully steerable radio astronomy facility will be the first to know.

For the past decade, this groundbreaking scientific endeavor has partnered with a pioneering, US government-funded site built in the 1950s to search for "technosignatures" - traces of technology that originate far beyond our own solar system.

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence was long dismissed as the realm of eccentrics and was even cut off from federal funding by Congress 30 years ago.

But today, it is experiencing a renaissance and seeing an influx of graduates, bolstered by advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, as well as recent discoveries showing that nearly every star hosts planets, many of which are Earth-like.

"It feels to me like this is something of a golden age," says Steve Croft, project scientist for the Breakthrough Listen initiative. Croft is an Oxford-trained radio astronomer who began his career studying astrophysical phenomena, from supermassive black holes to the emissions of exploding stars.

The telescope is located in the National Radio Quiet Zone, which dates back to 1958, when a West Virginian region was designated to help astronomers shield their sensitive equipment from interference.

This means no radio signals, no cellphone coverage and limited Wi-Fi. Even vehicles transporting staff to and from the telescope must run on diesel, as gas cars' spark plugs generate electrical interference.

"I think the community takes a certain pride in having a premier scientific facility right here," says Paul Vosteen.

Standing on the highest platform of the 100-meter dish, he points out the Allegheny Mountains, which act as a natural barrier for radio signals in this bowl-shaped valley.

Radio astronomy began by happy accident when US physicist Karl Jansky discovered radio waves coming from the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way, in 1933.

Since then, it has allowed astronomers to peer beyond the planets, stars and dust visible through optical telescopes.

From discovering pulsars to conducting sensitive observations of atomic hydrogen that shed new light on galaxy formation - and recently, detecting fast radio bursts - it has been key to numerous advances.

There's also a long-standing theory that if other civilizations exist, they might emit radio waves, just as ours has since the dawn of radio communication in the 19th century.

In Carl Sagan's novel Contact, humanity is first alerted to extraterrestrial presence by a retransmission of Adolf Hitler's opening speech at the 1936 Summer Olympics - the first TV signal strong enough to escape Earth's ionosphere.

Each year, in late spring, Breakthrough Listen's team from the University of California, Berkeley, makes a pilgrimage to the telescope during track maintenance for the 7.71-million-kilogram structure.

"It's relaxing; every time I'm here, it's nice being in the National Radio Quiet Zone because there's no cellphone, no TV - it's a kind of focused environment," says Matt Lebofsky, lead system administrator.

Inside the server room, the 6,000 whirring hard drives holding 40 petabytes of data - equivalent to 40,000 laptops - makes it impossible to speak without shouting.

"We're essentially looking for 'weird things' in the data," Croft says, something that suggests life forms might be trying to reach out, or that scientists are picking up their accidental transmissions.

There have been a few moments of heightened excitement in the community, including the 1977 detection of the so-called "Wow!" signal from the constellation Sagittarius, which remains unexplained.

More recently, in 2020, the team identified Breakthrough Listen Candidate 1 from the nearest star system, Proxima Centauri, but after extensive analysis, it was concluded to be human radio interference.

"It's not deflating at all," insists Lebofsky, who feels more optimistic than ever, given the vast amounts of data now being collected and processed compared to the early days. "I feel like the chances are improving exponentially every year."

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

Leading the search for extraterrestrial intelligence are, from left, chief engineer David MacMahon, Steve Croft and Matt Lebofsky through the Green Bank Telescope, which is, top, steerable via a track and whose dish is so huge that people on it are d

Hunt for ET aliens drives all corners of West Virginia