First contact for real? The enduring mystery of the WOW! Signal.

Forty-seven years ago today, on August 15, 1977, humanity may have received a signal from an extraterrestrial intelligence. It happened at Perkins Observatory in Delaware, Ohio, and if E.T. was really calling, the man who picked up the line was Jerry Ehman, an astronomer from the University of Michigan. A radio telescope called the Big Ear—no longer in operation—was scanning the sky looking for radio signals that might not be natural in origin. What the Big Ear heard that day was a strong narrow band radio transmission. It’s rather difficult to describe exactly what happened, so I’ll quote from this report written by Dr. Ehman in 1998:

“I began my routine review of the computer printout from the multi-day run that began on August 15th. Several pages into the computer printout I was astonished to see the string of numbers and characters “6EQUJ5” in channel 2 of the printout. I immediately recognized this as the pattern we would expect to see from a narrowband radio source of small angular diameter in the sky. In the red pen I was using I immediately circled those six characters and wrote the notation “Wow!” in the left margin of the computer printout opposite them. After I completed the review of the rest of the printout, I contacted Bob Dixon and Dr. John D. Kraus, the Director of the Big Ear Radio Observatory. They were astonished too. Then we began an analysis of what has been called for 20 years the “Wow! source”. Analyses have continued even through recent years as ideas needed to be tested.”

The part of the sky corresponding to the origin of the signal is in the constellation Sagittarius, which is not known to have exoplanets or any stars similar to the Sun. It’s also helpful to understand that “63QUJ5” was not the content of the signal, like a code of some kind. That exact juxtaposition of numbers and letters was simply how the computers interpreting data from the Big Ear telescope measured the intensity of radio bursts it was receiving. The message itself, if that’s what it was, did not have any intelligible content. It was not, for example, like the bursts of radio pulses in groups of prime numbers, as astronomer Carl Sagan envisioned in his 1985 science fiction novel Contact, made into an excellent film in 1997 by director Robert Zemeckis. And no one “heard” it at the time, as if a person was sitting at a console all night wearing headphones and listening for signals. It was not discovered until Dr. Ehman looked at the print-outs from the Big Ear’s monitoring, three days after the event occurred.

How is it that we don’t know if it was a signal from intelligent aliens or not? Well, the central issue is that nobody has ever heard it again. Numerous attempts have been made to scan the exact same frequency of the signal, from the early 1980s through the late 1990s, including with the Very Large Array, the network of radio telescopes in New Mexico (which incidentally appear in the film Contact). Dr. Ehman himself has said that if it was alien in origin, we probably should have been able to pick it up again. Why would aliens trying to contact us “blast” us with one 72-second signal, on one night, and then never repeat themselves? Of course we can’t know.

If it wasn’t aliens, what was it? One possible interpretation is that the signal was a rogue bit of Earth-origin radio traffic that bounced off a piece of space debris orbiting the Earth, like a glint of light flickering off a car’s mirror in the distance. A major problem with that theory is that the frequency of the signal—1420 MHz—is restricted, and theoretically only astronomers can use it (for, among other things, searching for extraterrestrial signals). Also, a piece of reflective space junk would be expected to move quickly through the sky. The source of the WOW! Signal was stationary.

Brian Dunning, a well-known skeptic, did an excellent investigation on the WOW! Signal. You would expect someone known for his rigor in critical thinking to be dismissive of the alien/extraterrestrial possibilities of the event. Actually he was not. Here’s what he had to say:

“Wow! has tantalized by evading almost every suggestion put forth to explain it. For one reason, that frequency range is protected; nobody on Earth is allowed to transmit on that frequency. We know the signal did not come from an aircraft or spacecraft passing overhead, because the signal was consistent with a point in the sky that was not moving. No known planets or asteroids were in a position that they could have reflected the signal toward Earth. Any space debris would have had to be absolutely still in space relative to the Big Ear, which is unlikely, and not tumbling, which is also unlikely. Even complicated astronomical effects like gravitational lensing and interstellar scintillation (basically twinkling like that which we observe stars doing visually) have technical reasons that make them very poor candidates to explain Wow!

In conclusion, yes, an alien intelligence is still a candidate explanation for the Wow! signal. But there’s no evidence for this.”

Most of you who are regular readers/viewers of my stuff know that I’m a highly skeptical person. Conspiracy theories irritate and annoy me, and I’ve long been active in debunking them with facts and evidence. I don’t believe in “paranormal” phenomenon like ghosts, cryptids or ESP. I do not believe that UFOs are extraterrestrial spacecraft (despite having seen one myself many years ago). Yet I can’t dismiss the possibility that the WOW! Signal was in fact an artifact of extraterrestrial intelligence. We can’t prove it, but the chances that the voice we heard from the sky on August 15, 1977 was from an alien intelligence don’t seem small enough to me to dismiss. Every couple of years I revisit the subject of the WOW! Signal and check to see if there’s any new serious scholarship on it, or if it’s been solved or explained in a convincing way. To date, it has not been.

The possibilities of the WOW! Signal are fascinating. If it was a signal, it may not have been directed at us; it may have been some sort of accidental transmission, which might explain why it was not repeated. But it really could be a signal from an alien intelligence. Then again, it might not be, but unlike oodles of spurious UFO “sightings” over the years, this is one potential alien contact that we cannot rule out.

In 2020, long before my YouTube channel became popular, and some time before I began making the long deep-dive videos for which I’m most well-known today, I made a short video (13 minutes) about the WOW! Signal, contrasting it with the true story of a crude hoax from that same year, 1977, in which a prankster in Great Britain tried to fool people into thinking they were hearing a message from aliens. I set the video to be unlisted when my channel started to become big, so very few people have ever seen it. I embed it below in case you’re interested. It’s unlisted; you won’t find it catalogued on my channel.

We simply don’t have enough information to determine what we heard that night. Perhaps someday we will. If it does turn out to be confirmed, the date August 15, 1977 might well become the most important date in human history—the day we made first contact.

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