Above: Jerry Ehman's note on the printout of the signal.
Below: The Big Ear Radio Observatory covered an area larger than three football fields.
Image: Courtesy of bigear.org *
1977: The Big Ear Radio Observatory at Ohio State University picks up a strong signal that appears to come from outer space. Is it the first encounter with intelligent extraterrestrial life?
Whatever it was, it so startled Jerry Ehman, the volunteer who was monitoring the Big Ear when the signal came in, that he scrawled "Wow!" onto the computer printout, and astronomers ever since have referred to it as the "Wow! signal."
Astronomers immediately swung their telescopes to the point in the sky where the signal appeared to originate and searched for other evidence of an alien presence, but in vain. The failure to locate anything made a lot of people, including Ehman, skeptical.
"Even if it were intelligent beings sending a signal, they'd do it far more than once," Ehman told the Cleveland Plain Dealer in a 1994 interview. "We should have seen it again when we looked for it 50 times. Something suggests it was an Earth-bound signal that simply got reflected off a piece of space debris."
If intelligent life elsewhere does succeed in contacting us earthlings, it will have to be without the help of the Big Ear. The facility was closed in 1997, after nearly 40 years of operation, and demolished by developers to make room for a golf course and a bunch of houses.
(Source: Bigear.org)
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