If you think that missing an important phone call is frustrating, imagine how astronomer Jerry R. Ehman felt in 1977 when he looked over telescopic data from the day before and discovered a strong signal from space that had lasted for over a minute. The signal was picked up by the Ohio State Radio Telescope, an enormous mechanism known as the "Big Ear" that tracked the skies for signals every day. This particularly strong narrowband radio signal, which rose and fell as one would expect if it were sent from a single source, was so shocking that Ehman wrote "WOW!" in red ink next to it on the printout. Efforts to detect the signal again failed, but Robert Dixon, the director of the Ohio State Radio Observatory at the time, said it almost certainly had an "intelligent origin," and was not just some type of cosmic interference. While some attempts have been made to explain the signal via other causes, such as comet emission, the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute continues to collect data from the point of origin of the so-called WOW! signal, hoping to come in contact with it again.
Keeping an eye on the skies:
- World leaders Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, and Winston Churchill all claimed to have seen unidentified flying objects.
- More than 40,000 Americans have insurance to protect them in case of alien abduction.
- The first noteworthy UFO report occurred in 1947, when a businessmen said that he had seen nine objects flying at thousands of miles per hour near Mount Rainier in Washington.