A free public lecture on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence will be presented by a NASA scientist at 8 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 26, at the University of California, Davis. The talk about extraterrestrials -- life forms that may exist outside of the Earth and its atmosphere -- will be presented in Room 66 of Roessler Hall. It is sponsored by the campus chapter of Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society of North America, which includes students and faculty. Guest speaker will be Jill Tarter, a project scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center near Mountain View. She will talk about the "Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence: Science Fact, Not Fiction." Tarter works with signal-processing equipment designed to detect microwave radio frequencies that could originate from advanced technologies elsewhere in the universe. She has been involved in searching for extraterrestrial intelligence for more than 20 years and, since 1989, has worked on NASA's Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project. Scientists working on the SETI project are looking for evidence of civilizations with sophisticated technologies that may exist on planets orbiting other stars. The project is part of NASA's program aimed at understanding the origin, evolution and distribution of life in the universe.