WOW Signal:
The 'Wow! signal' was received at 11.16pm on August 15, 1977 - the night before Elvis died - as a radio telescope in Ohio swept its gaze through the constellation of Sagittarius.
In Ohio, a 37-year-old man named Jerry Ehman was transfixed by another startling event that—at least for searchers for extraterrestrial intelligence—potentially was even more momentous.
Ehman, a volunteer researcher for Ohio State University’s now-defunct Big Ear radio observatory, pebrused data from the telescope’s scan of the skies on August 15, a few days earlier. In those days, such information was run through an IBM 1130 mainframe computer and printed on perforated paper, and then laboriously examined by hand.
But the tedium was shattered when Ehman spotted something surprising—a vertical column with the alphanumerical sequence “6EQUJ5,” which had occurred at 10:16 p.m. EST. He grabbed a red pen and circled the sequence. In the margin, wrote “Wow!”
Ehman’s excitement over that bit of arcane information stemmed from the Big Ear’s mission at the time, which was searching space for radio signals of the sort that might be emanated by extraterrestrial civilizations, if they were attempting to make contact with intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. To Ehman, this signal, which had come from the direction of the constellation Sagittarius, looked an awful lot like it could be such a message.
Two aspects of this signal immediately caught the attention of Ehman and project director John Kraus, who saw the results the following morning.
First of all, 37 seconds was precisely the time it takes the Big Ear scanning beam to survey a given point in the heavens.
Because of this, any signal coming from space would follow precisely the "Wow!" signal's pattern - increasing and then decreasing over 37 seconds. This practically ruled out the possibility that the signal was the result of Earthly radio interference.
Secondly, the signal was not continuous, but intermittent.
Kraus and Ehman knew that, because Big Ear has two separate beams that scan the same area of the sky in succession, several minutes apart. But the signal appeared on only one of the beams and not on the other, indicating that it had been 'turned off' between the two scans. A strong, focused, and intermittent signal coming from outer space: could it be that Big Ear had detected an alien signal?
But was it sent by an advanced civilization?
Curiously, the signal was picked up by only one of the scope’s two detectors. When the second detector covered the same patch of sky three minutes later, it heard nothing.
This indicated either the unlikely possibility that the first beam had detected something that wasn’t there, or that the source of the signal had been shut off or redirected in the intervening time. The observatory researchers trained their massive scope on that part of the sky for a full month, watching closely for a repeat of the mysterious signal.
Nothing interesting was observed during those thirty days, yet scientists were at a loss for an explanation of the original event. Planning to return to that patch of sky periodically, the Big Ear continued its broader purpose.
Several times over the next twenty years, longtime SETI researcher Robert Gray and his colleague Kevin B. Marvel arranged for further scans of that region of space. They managed to obtain some time on the META array at the Oak Ridge Observatory in Massachusetts, and the extremely sensitive Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico, which is made up of twenty-seven 25-meter radio dishes.
They detected some extremely faint sources of radio emissions in the infamous patch of sky, but nothing like that of the “Wow!” signal.
“Wow” remains the strongest and clearest signal ever received from an unknown source in space, as well as the most fascinating and unexplainable. The signal’s original discoverer Jerry Ehman doesn’t care to speculate on its source, and he remains scientifically skeptical.
“Even if it were intelligent beings sending a signal,” he said in an interview, “they’d do it far more than once. We should have seen it again when we looked for it 50 times.”
What was it? A miscommunication or something else.