by Mike Krumboltz

Assume that aliens do exist and will one day come to Earth. Odds are they don't speak English. How are you going to communicate with the little green men and beg them not to enslave you? A scientist named John Elliott is working on a solution.

According to several sources within the Buzz, the Englishman is developing a way to decipher alien languages into understandable words and sentences. How can he do this when no aliens have ever given voiceover samples? A blog from Discover Magazine explains that Elliott developed a computer program that analyizes 60 languages from around the world. The goal is to be able to find a trend among those very different languages that will reveal a pattern in the way aliens may communicate.

Elliott, for his part, is realistic about his goal. According to Discover, the forward-thinker suspects that alien languages will be very different than human languages. He simply wants to be able to break up "extra-terrestial messages into nouns and verbs." Allow us to diagram a sentence to get the process started: E.T. (subject) phone (verb) home (object). That was easy. Now, bring on the aliens!