Ohio State University Radio Observatory

But Owen Wilson's a Scorpio, a science question.

What surprising name was given to the strong radio signal detected on August 15th, 1977, by the Big Ear radio telescope at the Ohio State University? The signal has not been detected since, but since it came in the, from the direction of Sagittarius and bor- uh, but came from the direction of Sagittarius and bore the expected hallmarks of extraterrestrial origin.

We can lock it in.

Okay.

But there's still one long-standing false alarm that still doesn't have a consensus as to what it actually is.

The Big Ear Telescope at Ohio State University was massive.

It was three football fields wide, and from 1973 to 1995, its job was to listen for extraterrestrial radio signals.

And as astrophysicist and radio astronomer Emma Chapman explains, it did just that.

So it's very bizarre.

So on August 15, 1977, the Ohio State University Radio Observatory Big Ear Telescope picked up a strong narrow band radio signal during a sky survey.

A few days later, astronomer Jerry Amon saw the printout, circled the sequence, it was 6EQUJ5, and wrote WOW next to it.

Yep,

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.

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.

Just breaking.

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

On the night of August 15, 1977, astronomer Jerry Ammon 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, one for a faint signal, nine for a strong one, and letters A through Z for even higher intensities.

This is a hallmark of artificial technology.

And then there's the seventy-two second window.

The Big Ear telescope did not track stars.

It stayed stationary and let the Earth's rotation sweep the sky.

So the Wow Signal was discovered on August 15th, 1977 in I- Ohio State.

They got a Big Ear telescope that they picked it up on from the constellation Sagittarius.

Okay.

And it matched the frequency of what they consider to be neutral hydrogen.

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

On the night of August 15, 1977, astronomer Jerry Ammon 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.

This is a hallmark of artificial technology.

And then there's the 72-second window.

The Big Ear telescope did not track stars.

It stayed stationary and let the Earth's rotation sweep the sky.

Occasionally, a tantalising signal would appear, only to be explained away as terrestrial interference, satellite transmissions or instrumental artefacts.

The most famous of these remains the WOW signal, a 72-second burst of narrowband radio emission detected by the Big Ear Telescope in Ohio in 1977.

The signal matched the profile of what an artificial extraterrestrial transmission should look like.

It was strong, narrowband, and came from the direction of the constellation Sagittarius.

Through the 1970s and 80s SETI programs expanded incrementally.

NASA's Ames Research Center developed plans for a systematic search.

The Ohio State University's Big Ear Telescope conducted a long-running sky survey.

Soviet astronomers launched their own parallel efforts.