Profile: Charles S. Wackerman, Sr.

Personal background
On July 4, 1999 I retired. Shortly afterwards I moved from the urban, crowded,and cold (at least in the winter) Baltimore-Washington area to the warmer (well actually HOT) rural wide open spaces of south central North Carolina. Since then I've passed my amateur radio exam (KI4BWW) and become quite active in that hobby, especially on 6 meters; buit a few computers for myself and neighbors, and read just about everything I can get my hands on about World War II, and of course participated in the SETI program. There is life after retirement (if anyone doubts that, they should follow my daily schedule). Retirement gives me time to indulge my curiosity about the universe again, for the first time since I was a kid.

I watched the night sky with awe when I was a child and it set my imagination off into dreams of the future. After watching "Space Cadets" in the early 50s, I was naturally drawn to watch and read about the great NASA adventure of sending man to space and the moon, and was bitterly disappointed that they stopped there. When the original Star Trek aired in the 60s I became a fan and have followed it since, even to the current Enterprise series. I feel very deeply that humanity must follow the path of the fictional crews of the various Star Trek ships and explore "strange new worlds" and meet other cultures and races of beings. SETI is a very important part of that because it seeks knowledge we must have if we go out there some day.

I run SETI because I want to participate in the greatest hunt that mankind has ever conducted -- the search for alien inteligence.
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
Yup, they are certainly out there. And though I am not inclined to believe most of the UFO stuff, I wonder if some of them might not have been here from time to time to study us and our planett (very quietly and unobtrusively), and I often wonder if they avoid direct contact with us (as the Vulcans in Star Trek::First Contact had done) because we are "not yet mature enough" to join the wider family of sentient life in our galaxy. In fact, I sometimes wonder if we even disserve tto be called intelligent life forms -- given our constant efforts to ruin our environment and kill each other in wars and terrorist acts. Nonetheless, I would love to be a witness (or participant) in our "first contact" as I think it will have a profound effect on humanity.
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