I've spent my whole career in radio astronomy. Got my PhD from Michigan, spent years at Ohio State. I've analyzed more data than I can remember. But there's one moment, one piece of paper, that changed everything. August of 1977. I was working as a volunteer on the SETI project at the Big Ear radio telescope. That's the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, for your listeners who don't know. Now, I should explain how this worked. The Big Ear was this enormous radio telescope near Delaware, Ohio. About the size of three football fields. It wasn't a dish like most people picture. It had two huge reflectors, one flat and one curved, that worked together to collect radio waves from space. Beautiful piece of engineering. The equipment actually came from the Navy originally, Cold War stuff designed to listen for Soviet submarines. After the Cold War wound down, they gave it to us scientists. We used it to search for narrowband signals, the kind that don't occur naturally. The kind an intelligent civilization might send. My job was analyzing the computer printouts. Nobody was at the telescope during observations. The receiver and the IBM 1130 computer did everything automatically, recording data on these long sheets of printer paper. Our technician Gene would stop by my house every few days, drop off stacks of printouts, and I'd go through them by hand.
So it's a few days after August 15th, probably the 19th. I'm sitting at home going through the latest batch of printouts. Just routine work, you know. Page after page of numbers and letters representing signal intensities across fifty different channels. Mostly noise. Ones and twos and blanks. That's what you expect. remember when this story first came out, still gives me chills - Jared' Then I turn to a new page and I see it. Channel two. A sequence that made my heart stop. Six characters, 6EQUJ5. I knew immediately what I was looking at. That pattern, the way the intensity rose and then fell, it matched exactly what we'd expect from a narrowband point source. Something out there, far away, sending a signal directly at us. The 'U' in that sequence meant the signal peaked at thirty times the background noise. Thirty sigma. That's not supposed to happen. I grabbed my red pen and circled those characters. And without thinking, I wrote one word in the margin. Just came out of me automatically. 'Wow!' That's all I wrote. I didn't know that word would follow me for the rest of my life.
I called our director, Dr. Kramer, immediately. Then our assistant director, Richard. They came over and we just stared at that printout together. The signal had come in at ten sixteen at night Eastern Standard Time on August 15th. It lasted exactly 72 seconds, which is precisely how long the Big Ear could observe any given point in the sky as the Earth rotated. The frequency was 1420 megahertz. The hydrogen line. That's significant because hydrogen is the most common element in the universe. Back in 1959, two Cornell physicists theorized that if any civilization wanted to make contact, they'd probably broadcast at that frequency because any intelligent species studying the cosmos would already be listening there. The signal came from the direction of Sagittarius. A remote point in the sky, nothing particularly notable about it. We checked every possibility. Satellites, aircraft, ground-based transmitters, planets. Nothing matched. That frequency band is protected internationally. Nobody's supposed to be broadcasting there. I even went to Navy Intelligence, asked if it could be some classified military project. They said no. It wasn't us. It wasn't any known source. And here's the thing that still bothers me. The Big Ear had two feed horns, two beams that scanned the sky about five minutes apart. We should have seen the signal twice. But we only saw it once. One beam picked it up. The other didn't. Like someone turned a flashlight in our direction for just over a minute, then pointed it somewhere else.
[ Story continues in the full game... ]