According to researchers from the University of Manchester, for several decades now, we may have been accidentally blasting directions into space that aliens can follow to find us here on Earth, and these signals have been coming from an unlikely source: airports.

New research out of the University of Manchester, led by astrophysics PhD candidate Ramiro Caisse Saide, shows that the electromagnetic noise from global airline and military radar is leaking into space, and aliens up to 200 light-years away could hear it. These signals aren’t just random background static. Their patterns are so specific and regular, they’d appear “clearly artificial” to any E.T. with a decent telescope and a physics degree.

That means, if there’s an alien race out there looking for radio signals from deep space, they would know that our sounds weren’t just the usual creeks and squeaks of the universe. They would know these were sounds made by intelligent creatures.

Military radar beams, in particular, are sweeping space in concentrated bursts that would stand out like a lighthouse to anyone watching from a nearby star system.

Sending messages into space is nothing new. Humanity has been doing it intentionally — you know, just in case — for years. We don’t see anybody floating around out there that we can contact directly, but in 1977, we launched two gold-plated phonograph records into space containing all sorts of information about life on Earth. A few years before that, the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico (which you might remember from the final set piece of the James Bond movie Goldeneye) was used to blast some binary code into space containing some similarly basic information about the building blocks of life on Earth.

Those were very intentional messages we deliberately laced with basic facts of human life on Earth to give any potential visitors a crash course in the fundamentals of who we are. Turns out, we’ve been sending a lot more than we once thought. Aliens might soon find out some thrilling new information, like that a flight from Newark is cleared to land on runway four.

All of this raises concerns, like should we be screaming all of our business into the farthest reaches of space for everyone to hear, even if it’s something as mundane as chatter between pilots and air traffic controllers? But whether or not we should be nervous about who, if anyone, is listening isn’t the point. The cat’s out of the bag.

This will help us refine our search for alien civilizations by letting us know that maybe we should be fiddling with the dials to tune in for signals like the ones we’ve been accidentally blasting out there. Maybe one day, if we’re lucky, we too will be able to listen in as an alien flying machine lands on runway four.