The WOW Signal: You have been poked by E.T.

Many people are aware of S.E.T.I. : the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence but did you know that in 1977 a radio observatory in Ohio actually found something?

What The Fact?

Image how you’d feel; you’ve spent years devoting your time to the search for extraterrestrial life by monitoring hour upon hour of white noise and meaningless data with no pay, no girlfriend (probably) and nothing to show for it except a free lifetime membership to the Sigourney Weaver fan club and then ‘boom’ , it happens. The S.E.T.I. inbox flashes from zero to one!

Well this happened to a Dr. R. Ehman on August 15th ‘77 at the Big Ear Radio Observatory of Ohio State University.  Okay,..he very probably had a wife and kids and might not even like the ‘Aliens’ films but you get the picture.

Dr. Ehman detected a 72 second long signal from space somewhere in the direction of the Sagittarius constellation that matched, or was very close to the signature that they were specifically looking for; one that arguably could not have been created naturally.  They dubbed it the WOW signal because Ehman printed the signal, circled it and wrote the word “WOW” right next to it as if to say…well…WOW!

So What Does It Mean?

Well, the short sequence of letters in the code that are interesting are ‘6EQUJ5‘.  The reason they’re particularly interesting is because each of those characters represents a measure of signal intensity and if you look at the rest of the data, it doesn’t ever really get much higher than around 6.  In the sequence ‘6EQUJ5‘ the U represents a signal intensity of between 30.000 and 30.999 which is the strongest signal the ‘Big Ear’(pictured below) had ever received.  On top of that, 72 seconds is exactly how long the ‘Big Ear’ could monitor one area of space for at any given time so a continuous extraterrestrial signal would be expected to last that amount of time!

Listen Carefully, I Shall Say This Only Once…

Here’s the bitch of it all,..it’s never happened since.  The signal was only detected by one of the ‘Big Ear’s two erm,…ears and when the second ear scoped the same chunk of space just three minutes later,..nothing!

The observatory spent the next 30 days closely monitoring that same patch of sky and came up blank so; what in the hell was it? Well, there are a whole bunch of possible answers to that.

It Must Be The Baking Soda!

Originally, skeptics were scratching their heads, desperately trying to find any possible natural origin of the signal.  What they came up with was something that sounds like some kind of crazy ass dutch space porn; it’s something called Interstellar Scintillation,..ooh yeah!

Interstellar scintillation is kinda cool because it’s the reason that stars appear to twinkle.  In very basic terms, it’s caused by light being refracted in the atmosphere due to small scale fluctuations in air density. The idea was that a much weaker signal had been refracted in this way and somehow focussed on the ‘Big Ear’. There’s a problem with that theory though.  Further research into the WOW signal phenomenon using the ‘Very Large Array’ in New Mexico , which is much more accurate technology showed that no such event could have occurred. So where do you look from there? What does Dr. Ehman think it was?  In fact, Ehman, doesn’t think much of it anymore; in his own words…

“We should have seen it again when we looked for it 50 times.”

But Should We? Ever heard of the Arecibo Message?

No? Few have. You’d think that if we were serious about finding intelligent life out there we’d be banging out interstellar messages quicker than Mork on acid right? I’m afraid not.

The only serious attempt we’ve made at making first contact ourselves was in 1974 when we pointed the Arecibo radio telescope out at a cluster of stars 25,000 light years away for just under three minutes.  That’s it! So how come we expect the WOW signal to be constant? It seems a little hypocritical to me!

What Do You Think It Means?

As much as I’d like the signal to be an encoded version of the Facebook poke, it’s pretty unlikely; that’s gotta be so yesterday for them.  So what do you think? Is this really some kind of interstellar “hello world” or was the strange boost in signal strength just a really big bird poo on the dish?  Either way, this is one of the most compelling and unexplained mysteries of modern astrology and one we’ll be talking about for many years to come.