The Marcy and Butler successes have given fresh impetus to the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence. Such is the importance of this exploration of the universe that the US Government set up a project to look for intelligent life as long ago as 1975.
And we designed a SETI system which is a complex signal detection system for detecting a faint spike like this which stands up against the background noise, which might be characteristic of a radio signal transmitted by another civilisation out in the Galaxy.
It was just a year before a signal was found. Big Ear was the first SETI radio telescope on earth run by volunteers at the Ohio State University in Columbus. In 1977 it was listening to the stars, waiting for the spike of radio energy which would confirm the existence of another form of intelligent life in the universe when, without warning, exactly the signal that scientists were looking for turned up on the print-out.
We had a big, very noisy, clunky printer that printed out a line every ten seconds and generated about a foot of paper a day, and our staff scientist Gerry Ehman would come in here every few days and page through that and see if anything had happened. And he paged through there and saw exactly what we’d all been looking for all these years. And he got so excited that he wrote W-O-W exclamation mark in the margin of the computer printout. It was never out intention that be used as a name, but it just stuck. And so now this is known as the Wow! Object. And of course he called me and John Kraus and others and we then proceeded to search a hundred or more times with the telescope on successive days - never saw anything again. We investigated very carefully to ensure that this was not a hoax or an equipment malfunction or anything obvious like an aeroplane or a satellite that’s known, or a nearby planet, or a star or galaxy - none of those things was there. So we know the signal was clearly of intelligent origin. The question is - is it our intelligence or somebody else’s intelligence.

GC
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