Despite decades of searching, SETI scientists have found no evidence of ET signals from space.

The lack of success could be due to the staggering amount of data that must be collected and analyzed.

Our cognitive biases might also hinder the search for ETs, blinding us to evidence staring us in the face.

Thus, searching for ET in our cogntive blind spots could improve the odds of finding ETs, if they exist.

When I was an intelligence officer, we had a saying about looking for "bad guys" in terrorist networks: "Don't look for your lost keys only under the lamppost." This means don't restrict your hunt for the truth to easy-to-search areas, especially places where you want and expect the evidence to be or where your cognitive biases blind you.[1]

Another important concept we were taught is "Beware of mirroring": meaning, it's dangerous to assume a foreign actor has the same perceptions and motivations that we do. For instance, foreign intelligence officers may engage in cyber hacking for personal financial gain as well as intelligence gathering, something that US officers—with extremely rare exceptions—never do. Thus, a particular hack by a particular foreign adversary may or may not signal official interest in the hacking target.

To avoid pitfalls such as "lamp-posting" and "mirroring", we sometimes enjoyed success using the concept of negative space, where we explicitly enumerated our own expectations, desires, biases and beliefs, then posited that........

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