Rest in peace, NASA Relay 2 satellite. The spacecraft was one of two launched at different times in the 1960s by the US space agency to serve as experimental communication satellites. Unlike NASA’s Relay 1, which transmitted American TV signals into Japan and Europe, Relay 2 was used for barely a year. It stopped operations in 1965 and its transponders were believed to have died in 1967
The key word here is “believed” - because one year ago this month, researchers in Australia were certain they'd heard Relay 2 returning radio pulses to earth in much the same way some so-called "zombie" satellites, like the famous AMSAT OSCAR-7, have been known to do.
In this case, no seances or Ouija boards were necessary to understand this message from The Great Beyond. Some scientists theorize that the pulses came from the discharge of electrostatic energy, or ESD, that had built up on Relay 2 over time. Another theory is that its impact with a micrometeoroid released a cloud of plasma capable of sending such a signal.
Researchers plan to study both ESD and the micrometeoroid effect in the hope of a better understanding in the future. It's not about alien life or afterlife, then: Just breathing new life into solving more mysteries of space.