The SCETI project is lead by Hector Hernandez (21 December 1963 –) a Puerto Rican scientist and artist with specialty in extraterrestrial phenomena and communication. He has been a member of our staff here at SCETI since 2001.

Hector Hernandez is generally credited as the father of Cardassiology, the scientific study of Cardassian. Based on crucial groundwork laid by Jean-Luc Picard and Geordi LaForge, Hernandez recently translated parts of the Arecibo stone, showing that Cardassian is a writing system of pictograms with very distinct pronunciation unlike any other known language.

He was born in Bayamón, a suburb of San Juan, which is the capital of Puerto Rico, where he lives to this day. As a child, he showed an extraordinary linguistic talent. By the age of 16 he mastered a dozen languages and he got a reputation of being able to communicate with even animals and plants. As a child he spend much of his time walking around in the fields, listening to the sound of crops growing, and in an attempt to produce some kind of response, he constructed intricate low-frequency instruments which he would play really loud next to the crops. These instruments later proved to be the starting point for Hector’s interest in sound and media art.

By the age of 20 he could also speak Portuguese, Danish, Chakobsa, Pinguish, Newspeak, Zaum, Klingon, Quenya, Sindarin, Chaldean, and Tamarian in addition to Spanish and English, which is the official languages in Puerto Rico.
In 1998, he became Professor of Cosmological Languages. His interest in unusual languages, especially Klingon, led to Hector being entrusted with the task of deciphering the writing on the Arecibo Stone. He has spent the last 5 years on this project. His 2004 article ‘the precise system of Cardassian pictograms’ gave birth to the entire field of Cardassiology.

After the success of deciphering Cardassian and with no new objectives in sight, he seemed to lose interest in his scientific work. He turned his attention to the field of art; where he, with his unusual background, seem to be able to somewhat redefine the genre of media art. With his extensive knowledge of the ancient Danish culture on the Virgin Islands (The Danish West Indies) and the Danish language, he decided to move to Denmark to undertake studies at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art.