Jerry R. Ehman

This was a, a signal that lasted for 72 seconds.

It's called the Wow! signal because, uh, Jerry Ehman, who was the astronomer watching this unusual signal, uh, coming from space, actually wrote the word "Wow!" with an exclamation point on the piece of paper beside the signal as it was printing out on the computer printer.

Now, it wasn't a message.

It was just, like, a, a, a deafening signal that they were picking up, but we had never heard that before.

We've used billions of frequencies, and despite the universe being just shy of 14 billion years old, we've detected nothing.

Well, that's apart from the Wow signal in 1977, where a 27-second radio burst was detected by astronomer Jerry Ehman at Ohio State University.

He obviously found it so striking that he wrote WOW in the margin.

It has never been explained or repeated and remains the most alluring unresolved signal in SETI history.

It was a cosmic hello that immediately turned into a dial tone.

On the night of August 15th, 1977, astronomer Jerry Ehman was reviewing data printouts from the Big Ear Radio Telescope at Ohio State University.

The telescope was sweeping the sky, looking for radio signals that stood out from the background noise in the universe.

In those days, the data was printed as a series of alphanumeric characters representing signal intensity.

She tweeted, "We have no idea what's going on, but we know it's definitely something cool." The Parkes Observatory in Australia picked up the signals.

The discovery is being compared in significance to the recording of the Wow! signal, a strong narrowband radio wave found by Jerry Ehman in nineteen seventy-seven.

That radio burst, picked up by the Big Ear radio telescope of Ohio State University in the US, bore all the expected hallmarks of a non-terrestrial origin, but has not been detected since, right? If you wanna read more about this, and there's a lot more to read, uh, you're gonna wanna...

You really are going to wanna go to my website, artbell.com, and read this.

Was it indeed a one-off burst of energy, or was it a civilization that went extinct shortly after broadcasting? Or maybe just a bizarre one-in-a-billion-years fluke of cosmic physics that we don't yet understand.

Jerry Ehman, the man who discovered it, remained skeptical throughout his life, often stating that we would have seen it again, his words, if it were truly a beacon.

Yet he never found a terrestrial or natural explanation that fit all the facts.

But for 72 seconds in 1977, the universe seemed to speak.

Joue de façon responsable.

On the evening of August 15, 1977, a volunteer astronomer named Jerry Ehman sat down at his kitchen table with a stack of printouts from Ohio State University's Big Ear radio telescope.

What he found buried in columns of letters and numbers would become the most famous signal in the history of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Scrawled in red ink, Ehman wrote a single unfiltered reaction in the margin.

Okay.

An astronomer named Jerry Ehman was reviewing these, these data printouts from the Big Ear radio telescope at Ohio State University.

And Big Ear, that was a, a pretty substantial telescope for its time, right?

It was.

Essentially, yes.

But here is why this is so different than 1977.

If Jerry Ehman had found the Wow signal on the far side of the Moon, there wouldn't have been decades of debate about it, right?

There wouldn't have been.