By Greg Gillespie
Assistant Editor, THE INSTITUTE.
Jerry Ehman wasn't expecting to hear his name mentioned on "The X-Files,"
but then, stranger things have happened.
Take, for example, the reason Ehman has gained a certain amount of fame
among astronomers and fans of extraterrestrial: He was the junior professor
at Ohio State University who came across the "Wow!" signal in August of
1977, the most famous and inexplicable microwave anomaly to date.
Why "Wow!"? The signal was named after the comment Ehman wrote in the
computer printout margin when he discovered the signal at Ohio State Radio
Observatory, where he was donating his time working on the Search for
Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project. The SETI project was at the
time using the radiotelescope at the observatory.
Armed with a paltry 1MB hard drive and 32KB of RAM, the data from the
observatory's computer was printed out and scrutinized by SETI volunteers,
who stopped by the observatory every few days to reset the telescope and
check the printouts. In mid-August, Ehman was checking the numbers when he
had the surprise of his life.
"I came across the strangest signal I had ever seen, and I immediately
scribbled 'Wow!' next to it," Ehman explained. "At first, I thought it was
an earth signal reflected from space debris, but after I studied if further,
I found that couldn't be the case."
Ehman later found that the signal fit the rise-and-fall pattern of an
antenna signal perfectly, ruling out the possibility of a fragmented or
bounced signal. The director of the observatory, IEEE Fellow John Kraus,
concluded that the source had to be beyond the distance of the moon, and a
check of man-made satellite data showed no publicly known earth satellites
were anywhere near the position of the signal source. Last but not least,
the frequency of the signal was near the 1420 MHz hydrogen line, where all
radio transmissions are prohibited on and off the earth by international
agreement.
So, just what did happen up there? Ehman, who is now working for the
private, non-profit SETI League, allows that "we still don't know what it
was, and probably never will," but holds on to the belief that there's
something out there, perhaps beyond the horizon as we know it.
"Very simply, I think there are undoubtedly many intelligent civilizations
out there, some of which are certainly more advanced than we are and if they
wanted to send us a beacon signal, this would be the best way to do it using
the least energy," Ehman said. "But I've trained as a scientist, maybe too
well, and I'm still waiting to see them first hand. I'm definitely a
skeptic."
Well, skeptics definitely abound. Congress cut off all funding for the SETI
project in 1993, and the Ohio State Radio Observatory is scheduled to be
shut down on Dec. 31, 1997, to make way for a golf course and housing
development. But Ehman and others in the SETI League are determined to
continue the search. Why? Because the payoff, Ehman said, would be bigger
than the mother of all winning lottery tickets.
"Can you imagine the information that could be gleaned if someone is out
there?" he said. "I hear people saying that this is all a waste of time, but
if you don't look, your chances of seeing or hearing something are even
smaller."
To whet your appetite further, the O.S.U. radiotelescope has also picked up
thousands of unexplained narrowband pulses since it became operational in
1973. The signals, clearly not from any single source, extraterrestrial or
otherwise, could be some form of unknown astrophysical phenomenon.
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