A message beamed into space invites aliens to visit Lexington, Kentucky

If you were an alien from TRAPPIST-1, a star some 40 light-years away from Earth, searching for signs of intelligent life, you might spot an odd burst of infrared light coming from our solar system. If you were wily enough to infer that the infrared light was a message in binary code from another civilization, you might decipher it and piece together a pixelated image.

Then, if you — the alien — somehow understood English, you’d be able to read the message at the bottom: “Visit Lexington, Kentucky.”

That’s the best-case scenario the Lexington Convention and Visitors Bureau envisioned when it beamed an interstellar travel advertisement into the cosmos in late October, inviting aliens to comeenjoy the city’s bluegrass fields and bourbon.

The tourism bureau announced the moonshot travel ad in a news release Tuesday as part of a campaign to attract more Earthly visitors. But the extraterrestrial outreach was real, and grounded in research of potentially habitable planets and previous efforts to transmit messages about humanity to the stars, experts told The Washington Post — leaving an infinitesimally small chance that an alien’s first message from Earth could be an invite from the Bluegrass State.