(wind gusting)
(ominous music)
- [Man 1] Most people involved in--
- [Woman 1] Looking for a signal--
- [Man 1] Searching for extraterrestrial intelligence.
- [Woman 1] From an alien civilization.
(overlapping speech drowning each other out)
- [Man 1] Never to be explained.
(suspenseful music)
- [Robert Dixon] Science always seeks the unknown
for answers that we don't understand yet.
Why did Columbus sail across the ocean?
To see what's there,
and discover other people's or other lands.
Are we alone in the universe,
or is there really other intelligent life out there?
- [Seth Shostak] The question of intelligent life
is really a big question because it goes beyond
just having biology.
It's biology that got clever enough
to understand the universe.
- [Robert Gray] If there are other civilizations out there
we automatically know that all
the questions of life are answered yes.
- If we did discover an actual signal
from an alien civilization,
it would profoundly change human beings.
- [Seth Shostak] This is discovery.
It isn't the kind of science you learn about
in middle school where you have an hypothesis
and you try and falsify.
You can't falsify this hypothesis.
You can't prove they're not out there.
All you can do is discover that they are.
- [Robert Dixon] So we have these 50 digits,
so it looks like a bunch of random numbers.
- 6EQUJ5, that was exactly what we were looking for.
- [Robert Gray] I don't think many people have looked
into it in much detail.
- [Man 2] It's an intriguing case 'cause it's a mystery.
We don't know what it was.
- [Tom Burns] It was the strongest signal I ever saw.
An enormously powerful signal.
- It is the best evidence that we know of,
of coming from some other civilization.
(static hissing)
(electronic warbling)
(gentle music)
- [Narrator] Why do we search?
Mankind had always been fascinated
by the possibility of life beyond Earth.
The idea of other civilizations thriving
on distant planets captivates the imagination.
We are driven, perhaps by the hope,
that humanity is not alone in the universe.
And by science's promise to always seek the unknown.
On August 15, 1977, a massive radio telescope
operated by the Ohio State University
detected an unusually powerful signal from deep space.
The signal had all the characteristics
scientists expected in a transmission
from an intelligent extraterrestrial source.
The event lasted for 72 seconds
and was never heard again.
Named the Wow! signal, it was a tantalizing moment
in the search for extraterrestrial life.
And for the relatively young science of radio astronomy.
- [Robert Dixon] Started going up, it went 6EQUJ5
as it faded off to the other side.
That's a tremendously strong signal.
We'd never seen anything like that before.
And that told us that this really
is a very strong narrow band signal
that did not come from some natural source.
- [Narrator] Most are familiar with the traditional science
of optical, or visible light, astronomy.
Optical telescopes capture light rays
and magnify distant objects for closer observation
by the human eye.
In comparison, radio astronomy focuses on the invisible,
the radio frequency portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Radio telescopes are specialized antennas
and radio receivers that can detect the radio waves
emanating from distant celestial objects.
- Every object that produces energy,
every star, every galaxy, produces energy
all along the energy range,
which we call the electromagnetic spectrum.
The trouble with a visual telescope
is that it only looks at a part of that spectrum,
why I have one right here,
that is very narrow and a very small part.
We actually see a very small part of the universe.
On one hand you have the higher energies
like ultraviolet and xrays and gamma rays.
On the lower end, down below the red,
you have the very low frequency energies
like infrared and radio.
This is very, very narrow.
It happens to be the part we're interested in,
because it's the part that we can actually detect.
So you can look at a lot more information
about a star at the radio end of the spectrum
than the very limited amount of information
you get in the visual end of the spectrum.
- [Narrator] Although radio waves from space
were first detected in the early 1930s,
and the first radio telescope was built shortly thereafter,
worldwide interest in radio astronomy escalated
in the years following World War II.
The United States was eager to invest
in this new branch of science.
- [Karen O'Neil] We were kind of in the space race.
We were in this idea that our country
wanted to be the best in the world
in terms of science and engineering.
We wanted to be out there and were willing to spend,
a lot of money, frankly, to do that.
So we spent a lot of money, we got men on the moon,
we built telescopes, we built a lot
of fundamental science facilities here in the country.
And that was fantastic,
and that just led to so many advances.
- [Michael Holstine] You know, after World War II
there was a lot of technological achievement,
especially in electronics
and with radar coming on the scene and all of that.
But, you know, the war took its toll
on most of the nations.
But for whatever reason, Europe,
especially England and Australia,
really ramped up radio astronomy research.
The United States didn't.
They kind of lagged behind until about mid-50s.
Part of the reason was that instruments
to detect radio signals from space
are just so expensive to build.
A single university generally can't afford
to build what you'd need to build to be successful.
- [Narrator] As radio astronomy continued to evolve,
a young professor of electrical engineering
at the Ohio State University
observed its development with keen interest.
His name was John Kraus.
In the 1930s, Kraus followed scientist Karl Jansky's
historic discovery of radio noise
flowing from the center of the Milky Way galaxy.
He was fascinated by the potential
for using cosmic radio waves,
rather than visible light, to observe the universe.
- [John] In 1930, essentially all that we knew
about the heavens had come
from what we could see or photograph.
Karl Jansky changed all that.
A universe of radio sounds
to which mankind had been deaf since time immemorial
now suddenly burst forth in full chorus.
- [Narrator] During World War II, Kraus met Grote Reber,
a radio engineer from Wheaton, Illinois.
Reber had continued Karl Jansky's work,
scanning the Milky Way with a homemade receiver
and a 30-foot dish antenna built in his backyard.
For a decade he was the world's only
active radio astronomer,
producing the first maps of the radio sky.
His antenna design was the forerunner
of modern radio telescopes.
- [John] He told me about his equipment
and observations of the Milky Way
with a contagious enthusiasm.
If we had not been at war,
I think I would have started building
a radio telescope then.
But it was not until 10 years later,
at the Ohio State University,
that I had a chance to do it.
- [Narrator] When John Kraus joined the Ohio State faculty
in 1946, he invented the helical antenna.
The unique corkscrew-shaped design
would ultimately find widespread use
in satellite communication.
In 1952, Kraus utilized the new antenna design
to build his first radio telescope.
With the help of Ohio State students,
he constructed a 50-meter array
of helical antennas on university farmland.
While a sky survey conducted with the helix array
proved successful, Kraus realized
that a much bigger telescope was needed.
Within a few years, he was ready to build
the massive radio telescope
that would ultimately capture the Wow! signal.
- He had grand plans of making
the telescope 2,000 feet wide.
Money for that was not forthcoming,
so I saw at one point he had reduced that
to 720 feet wide, money was not forthcoming,
so he reduced it to 360 feet wide
for the paraboloid.
- [Narrator] In 1956, John Kraus negotiated an agreement
to utilize a 20-acre site owned
by Ohio Wesleyan University.
The property was dedicated for
the construction and operation
of the Ohio State University Radio Observatory.
This large radio telescope, designed to listen
for signals in deep space,
was appropriately nicknamed the Big Ear.
With a grant from the National Science Foundation,
Kraus began construction on the Big Ear in late 1956.
Under his supervision, university students
did much of the construction work.
Ultimately, the process took five years.
- When John Kraus got the money to build the place
he didn't have very much money,
so between 1956 and 1963 they constructed
this gigantic thing, as big as three football fields,
with the use mostly of volunteer helpers
and graduate students, so it took a long time.
- [Robert Dixon] The design of Big Ear was intended
to make it the most sensitive telescope
for the least amount of money.
And it was John Kraus' original design that did that.
- [Jerry Ehman] There's only one other telescope in the world
that was built like it
and that was in France, Nancay, France.
- [Robert Dixon] And if you can imagine here,
a large flat surface of aluminum foil
three acres in extent.
At one ends was a curved parabolic reflector
standing on the ground.
On the other end was a flat surface,
tilted up like this,
which could be tilted up and down.
And out in the middle of the ground plain
there was some things that we call feed horns
that look like scoops,
which were pointed toward the parabolic part,
and they scooped up the radio waves.
Signals came down from the sky,
they bounced off this flat reflector,
traveled horizontally across this big field of aluminum
to the parabolic reflector.
Which focused them down to these scoop-like horns
sitting in the middle of the ground plain.
- [Narrator] Unlike today's parabolic dish antennas,
the Big Ear could not be electronically controlled
to pan the sky on demand.
Rather, it depended on the rotation of the Earth.
- [Robert Dixon] The telescope could not steer in the left-right direction.
You could only steer in the up and down direction.
But that's okay, because we can center a certain angle
and then allow the Earth to turn.
And as the Earth turned, then the beam was swept up,
a little strip all around the whole sky
in 24 hours as the Earth turned.
And we'd sit there for a couple days
and then we'd change the angle slightly
and cover another little stripe
all around the whole sky like that.
So in that way we could cover the whole sky.
- [Narrator] When completed in the early 1960s,
the Big Ear was one of the world's
largest radio telescopes.
It was designed to be a versatile survey instrument,
capable of observing large sections of the radio sky.
- [Tom Burns] When it was finally built,
using its old computer with 16K of memory
to help collect the data,
they managed for the next 10 years
to do a map of the entire visible sky.
- [Robert Dixon] I came here in 1963 as a graduate student
working for Professor John Kraus.
I was placed in charge of analyzing the data
coming from our radio telescope,
which had just gone on the air.
We were looking for natural sources of radio signals,
not intelligent sources.
That's why the telescope was built.
This was in the early days of radio astronomy.
When we were just really getting established
as a mainstream science.
And there have not been any big survey
of the entire sky to discover
all the radio signals that were there.
People had used dish antennas.
They've used antennas like that
to look at certain stars, certain galaxies,
and study them in detail.
But nobody had searched the whole sky.
So we were like the pioneer explorers.
And we created this huge catalog of 20,000 objects
and we published huge maps
showing what the sky looked like to the radio telescope.
- They discovered objects like quasars
and observed them, which at the time
were the most distant objects
ever observed by any telescope.
One of the quasars, for instance,
was about 12 billion light years away,
which we now know is considerably far back,
almost to the beginning
of the creation of the universe in the Big Bang.
- They discovered 20,000 radio sources.
Only 10,000 were known at the time.
So it was a big deal,
a big contribution to
what was known in radio astronomy.
- You guys want to go down to the scope?
- [Deana] Yeah, we going up?
- Yeah, you want to.
- I guess.
I've got the right shoes. - [Michael Holstine] Your shoes are all right?
Y'all can all ride in the back. (chuckles)
(truck engine revving)
(gentle music)
- [Woman 2] Why do we search for E.T.?
Ever since the beginning of human history
we've always looked out to what's out there.
- [Michael Holstine] The Green Bank Observatory is important to this area.
It's one of the premier science facilities
in the state of West Virginia.
And as far as radio astronomy goes,
it's one of the premier observatories in the world.
You know, it's a treasure.
- [Narrator] Nestled deep in the hills of West Virginia,
the Green Bank Observatory is home
to the world's largest, fully steerable radio telescope.
The site hosts eight radio telescopes
and more than 60 years of scientific discovery.
Like the Big Ear telescope in Ohio,
the Green Bank story began in the late 1950s.
America's interest in radio astronomy was growing.
The Green Bank site was chosen for building
the first National Radio Astronomy Observatory
in the United States.
- [Karen O'Neil] If you look back historically,
coming out of World War II in particular,
there was a lot of interest in radio waves
and radio technology, and of course the beginnings
of radio astronomy got started.
So people started listening to the cosmos,
listening to the sky.
And if you move forward up into the 1950s,
late 1950s by then, you had,
radio astronomy was an actual science.
There was places around the world
that were studying radio astronomy.
Certainly if you look over to Europe and Asia,
Russia was already building significant
radio telescopes at the time.
The Netherlands was already building
significant radio telescopes.
And other countries were starting to look at it.
Within this country, although radio astronomy
was acknowledged as a field of science,
there wasn't any significant radio telescope
that the astronomers could use.
Instead there was a lot of fantastic instruments,
but kind of built in people's backyards,
built in people's laboratories.
- So in 1956, they started searching for a place
to put this new National Radio Astronomy Observatory.
And there were a lot of criteria.
I mean, radio astronomy's a very sensitive science.
The signals are very weak.
So you had to look for a place
that didn't have a lot of people.
You know, people are noisy.
And they build things that are noisy.
Especially in the radio spectrum.
So they wanted a low population area.
They wanted it to be free of things like
overhead high-tension power lines,
because those things can create noise.
And several other criteria that,
scientific staff sort of short listed
to about 29 sites up and down the east coast.
And it turned out that Green Bank, West Virginia
was the ideal, or most ideal, place.
So in 1957 the Green Bank site was dedicated
and we started building telescopes.
- [Narrator] As telescopes began to rise
from the ground up, the advantages of having
a National Radio Astronomy Observatory
in rural West Virginia quickly became apparent.
Green Bank soon attracted professional radio astronomers,
including those interested in a new subset of astronomy,
the search for extraterrestrial intelligence,
also known as SETI.
- The reason a lot of astronomers came here
in the early years of NRAO
is, first of all we were building
the biggest and the best instruments in the world.
And we were pushing the boundaries of what we knew
radio telescope's could accomplish
and radio receivers could accomplish.
- [Karen O'Neil] One of the best things that happened
when the idea of a National Radio Astronomy Observatory
was first decided, was this idea
of radio quiet zones.
So now you have a piece of land
that's beginning to build a lot of radio telescopes
and you have legal guarantees around it
that you're not gonna see a lot of noise
like you would anywhere else
that might build a radio telescope.
As soon as you have those two pieces,
you have a very obvious location to come
if you want to go look for weird signals, frankly.
You don't want to do that someplace
where there might be a lot of other noise
you have to find it through.
And so the existence
of a National Radio Astronomy Observatory
combined with the radio quiet zones around here
made this a perfect place for a lot
of radio astronomers to come,
including Frank Drake and many of the other
pioneers of radio astronomy in this country.
- [Narrator] Dr. Frank Drake, a radio astronomer
regarded as the father of modern SETI,
was a young staff astronomer at Green Bank in 1960.
He devised an experiment using interstellar radio waves
to search for signs of intelligent life on distant planets.
Drake called his experiment Project Ozma.
Conducted with one of Green Bank's 85-foot telescopes,
it was the first modern search
for extraterrestrial intelligence.
- It was an experiment to literally go out and listen.
Let's go see if we can find
signals from another intelligent life out there.
So it's in this particular case,
Project Ozma was using radio waves,
so the same type of technology we use today
with the Breakthrough Listen project.
Frank had to spend many, many hours per star
to just look, to get the level of sensitivity
he thought he would need in order to see a signal.
He pieced all that together to just see
for the first time ever,
let's just go take a measurement
in the very scientific manner to see if we can see
a signal from alien life.
Obviously he didn't see anything.
If he did, this would be a very different
conversation we're having.
- [Ellie White] So this is the Drake Lounge,
you can see it's furnished 1960s decor all the way.
All the original furnishings and decorations.
So it looks basically exactly as it did back in 1960
when Frank Drake and all his colleagues gathered here
to discuss the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
Frank Drake was not the only famous scientist here,
there were famous scientists
from Carl Sagan to Philip Morrison.
So the fun thing we always try and do
is say, "Hey, which chair did Carl Sagan sit in?"
So it's sort of neat history about this place.
- [Narrator] In 1961, following his experience
with Project Ozma, Frank Drake organized
a meeting at Green Bank to discuss the possibility
of searching for intelligent extraterrestrial life.
In preparation for this meeting
he created an equation that laid the groundwork
for a meaningful scientific dialogue about finding E.T.
It became known as the Drake Equation.
- [Ellie White] At that time there were very few people in the world
who were interested in the search
for extraterrestrial intelligence.
So Frank Drake being one of them,
he started thinking about what are all the factors
that influence the probability of life elsewhere.
So he was starting to think about things
like star formation and exoplanets per star,
and things like that.
So he thought, "Well, this actually fits
"into the form of an equation."
- [Karen O'Neil] He just started writing these factors down
and saying, "This is what it's gonna take."
We have to know, well we have to know
a whole lot of things, but we have to know about
how many planets are there out there
in the universe, for example.
Of those planets, how many could actually sustain life?
And you have to piece all of these factors together
and it makes an equation.
An absolutely beautiful and fairly timeless equation
which is the Drake Equation.
What's been amazing about the Drake Equation
is certainly you can take a look at it now,
many, many years later,
it's really still the equation that you need
in order to look and say
what is the probability of finding this?
- [Ellie White] L is the lifetime of a communicating civilization.
We only have one example of such
a communicating civilization, and that's us.
So people try and estimate how long do you think
a civilization like ourselves would last.
Would it last 50 years, 100 years, 500 years,
a million years, you know that sort of determines
how many civilizations you're going to detect.
Because the longer they're out there
the longer they're communicating
and the more likely it is that you'll detect their signals.
(gentle music)
- [Michael Holstine] What Frank did was consider a way
to theorize the potential for the existence
of an extraterrestrial civilization.
A lot of his numbers, a lot of his assumptions,
we're sort of proving were correct,
or very close to being correct.
So that narrows the guesstimate factor
down to a more knowing true figure.
You're still talking about 100,000 potential sites
that you have to look at in this huge galaxy.
Still becomes a daunting task.
- [Nichol Cunningham] SETI's always been about good science.
They have to make assumptions
about what they're looking for.
That's, you know, a really difficult thing to do
when you don't know what you're looking for.
They've always been trying to do
the best science they can with the equipment
and telescopes and things that they have.
- [Karen O'Neil] SETI is such an integral part
of the history of Green Bank Observatory
that you can't come here as an astronomer
and spend any time and not start hearing
not just about what's happened here on site with SETI,
but also what's happened just around the country
and around the world with SETI.
Including things like the Big Ear telescope,
Wow! signal, and all of those types
of studies that have been done.
(lawn mower engine humming)
- [Tom Burns] This would be some of the radio equipment
that they use to modulate the data,
to collect that data.
With a radio, essentially what we might call a radio,
except that it monitors many frequencies
at the same time, and just for fun,
if you wanna modulate some of that information
and put it on a screen, you can use an oscilloscope.
That's why old science fiction movies look so great,
because they have those oscilloscopes running.
- [Narrator] From 1963 until the early 1970s,
Ohio State's Big Ear telescope conducted a survey
that covered 70% of the entire sky.
Their comprehensive Ohio All Sky Survey
produced detailed maps of the radio sky
that proved useful to astronomers throughout the world.
But by 1972, budget shortages forced
the National Science Foundation
to terminate funding for the Big Ear.
That decision closed one highly successful chapter
in the Big Ear's history, and began another.
- [Robert Gray] In the early 70s they ran out of money.
The National Science Foundation stopped funding them.
New areas of astronomy and new telescopes were being built
and that's when Bob Dixon put in a new receiver,
better suited to finding the narrow band signals
that people think might be out there
if other civilizations are broadcasting at us.
- [Narrator] In 1971, Bob Dixon attended
a large gathering of scientists and engineers
at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.
The group shared ideas about the possibility
of detecting signals from extraterrestrial civilizations.
Their findings were published
in a report titled "Project Cyclops".
The goal of Cyclops was to assess what it would take
to mount a large search for radio signals
from interstellar civilizations.
Widely circulated by NASA,
the final Cyclops report strongly influenced
the development of a SETI program
at the Big Ear Radio Observatory.
- [Robert Dixon] I became very interested in SETI at the time.
Finding for the radio observatory nationally was lost.
We realized we have a wonderful radio telescope here,
and this would be a wonderful purpose to put it toward
as the first large telescope dedicated
to searching for extraterrestrial life.
We have a perfectly good staff of people
who would be willing to volunteer,
and we attracted more volunteers.
- I was actually a volunteer
at the Ohio State University radio observatory.
My job was as a radio astronomer.
Specifically looking at the computer printouts
from the radio telescope.
- So we had the equipment and we had the people.
And we reconfigured some things
and we put it together.
And we started that search.
- [Narrator] Unlike the All Sky Survey,
which had utilized wide band radio waves
to search for naturally occurring signals,
the Big Ear SETI program demanded
a much more narrow focus.
- Natural signals, they sound the same
no matter where you tune your radio.
If you had like your AM radio,
it would sound the same hissing sound no matter what.
On the other hand, an intelligent signal, we believe,
would be tuned in only at one point on the dial.
And that's what we're looking for, a narrow band signal.
Narrow band signals are artificial.
There are not very many things in nature
that make narrow band signals.
- [Narrator] The Big Ear SETI program
began in December 1973.
With no external funding and a volunteer staff,
the program and equipment were set up to operate
with as few people as possible.
In just a few years, the Big Ear would make
one of the most intriguing discoveries
in the search for intelligent extraterrestrial life.
A signal that continues to fascinate.
(suspenseful music)
(static crackling)
(printer clicking)
(suspenseful music)
- [Robert Gray] From what I've been told,
the Wow! signal was a signal that came in,
lasted for 72 seconds.
And it looks to me like a radio source, like a real one.
- [Narrator] On the evening of August 15th, 1977,
the Big Ear telescope was engaged
in its on-going mission,
the search for narrow band radio signals.
With its flat reflector set at a predetermined angle,
the Big Ear's beam rotated with the Earth,
patiently scanning a continuous strip of the night sky.
Incoming radio waves were automatically
processed by computer.
Computer printouts provided a chronological record
of the alphanumeric date for later analysis.
- [Jerry Ehman] When we set up the receivers and the computers,
we did it with a purpose of not having to have
a large group of people maneuver data
and do various things,
because that was time consuming, costly, and so forth.
We built everything into the receiver and the computer
to do things on their own.
- [Robert Dixon] We had, at that time, a 50 channel receiver.
So we have 50 different receivers.
You can imagine having 50 radios sitting on your counter,
each one tuned to a slightly different frequency.
And the output of all those 50
was going into the computer we had at the time.
And we had written programs to record, carefully,
each of those 50 signals.
And the intensity of each of those
was then printed out on a sheet of paper.
Channels one through 50 running across the paper.
- [Narrator] Shortly after 11 p.m., the Big Ear
registered a signal many times stronger
than the normal levels of radio noise.
The signal lasted for 72 seconds, rising and falling
as it passed through the Big Ear's beam.
No one was present to witness the event,
but the computer system recorded
the sudden escalation in signal strength.
And the data printout clearly showed
the tremendous spike in intensity.
The moment passed, and Big Ear continued
scanning the sky throughout the night.
- There's nobody there, typically, to look at it.
And then at that time, the computer,
after it printed everything out,
would be taken off to Jerry's house
and he'd look at it, and he'd look through it
and see what he could find.
- [Jerry Ehman] Computer records were delivered to my home every,
oh about two times a week.
A printout that contained three
or four days worth of observations.
- [Tom Burns] What you get when you're looking at data
from a radio telescope is just a big ream
of paper with numbers on it
representing what the signals were at various frequencies.
- [Jerry Ehman] When I would get home from teaching,
or at night after supper,
I would sit down with the computer printout
and start to look for anything interesting.
The data that included August 15, 1977,
and two or three days past that.
Just a few pages into that
I saw the pattern 6EQUJ5.
And I saw, okay the numbers are increasing,
hitting a peak, and then dropping off.
That's exactly what we expect
for a strong narrow band signal.
- [Narrator] Since its discovery, there has been a popular
notion that the Wow! signal can somehow be decoded.
That its alphanumeric sequence
harbors some hidden meaning or message.
In truth, the use of numbers and letters
was a practical method for describing the intensity
of radio signals observed by the Big Ear.
The computer printouts generated
by the Big Ear featured 50 columns,
one for every channel being monitored.
Each column had room for a single digit.
Low intensity signals were assigned a one.
Stronger signals were assigned a higher number.
Because the printout columns were limited
to single digits, signals stronger than a nine
were assigned a letter value.
A 10 became A, 11, became B, and so on.
This simple method clearly demonstrated
the intensity of the Wow! signal.
In purely numerical terms,
the Wow! signal was 30 times higher
than the lowest levels of random radio noise.
- We were trying to think of how could this
be a fluke of some kind?
It's the biggest thing we ever saw.
- [Jerry Ehman] Within 10 seconds or less,
with my red pen I circled the 6EQUJ5
and wrote the word wow, exclamation point.
And it's fortunate, I got to thinking about this later,
that wow is kind of like an expletive,
but a good expletive and so it didn't have to be deleted.
- [Robert Gray] In searching for E.T., the Wow! signal
is the best candidate that's ever been seen.
- [Seth Shostak] The thing about the Wow! signal is that it had
the characteristic shape,
the change of intensity with time,
followed what you would expect
from some transmitter that's up there
in the sky moving with the stars.
That's what made it so appealing,
so different from the kind of
normal interference that you get.
- [Narrator] Amazed by the Wow! signal's intensity,
Jerry Ehman continued reviewing the computer printouts
from the night of August 15th,
and the days immediately after.
He was searching for evidence
that the incredibly strong signal had repeated.
- [Jerry Ehman] I was especially interested to see
if that same signal came back a day later,
which would mean in the same position in the sky.
It didn't.
It didn't appear on the third or fourth days, either.
After I got through looking at all the printouts,
I called Dr. John Kraus and said,
"We've got something interesting here."
- [Narrator] The Wow! signal presented many questions.
Was it a natural celestial phenomenon?
Could it have been a man-made signal
from a passing satellite?
Was it an artificial signal from an intelligent,
extraterrestrial civilization?
John Kraus, director of the Ohio State Radio Observatory,
and his assistant director, Bob Dixon,
immediately began to investigate
and eliminate the possibilities.
- [Robert Dixon] This is the scientific method.
To discover something extraordinary
you need extraordinary proof.
And so we wanted to eliminate everything else we could.
And now interference is the common situation
with radio astronomers.
But we have interference all the time
to the radio telescope, but we know what it is,
we recognize it, we've done it for so long.
We recognize it for what it is.
And the characteristics of local interference,
say coming from the Earth, is totally different.
Interference pulses on and off,
it'll look like little static jumping up and down.
Never does it follow the curve
of the radio telescope like that.
Because what that means is the telescope was scanning
across that area in the sky
and it went across whatever was sending that signal
and it went back down.
It followed exactly the theoretical curve
that it should follow for the shape
of the antenna pattern of the telescope.
That's another astounding piece of evidence.
- [Jerry Ehman] Dr. Kraus did the bulk of the investigation
as to what it could be.
He looked at stars, galaxies, planets,
satellites, and anything else
that could have sent the signal.
And didn't find anything.
- [Robert Dixon] Is it equipment malfunction?
No, we ruled that out.
Is it some planet or star or something, no.
I mean, one could say it might be
an Earth satellite of some kind, but,
the strikes are against that.
Because we're using a frequency that's protected
internationally for any transmitter.
Nobody's allowed to transmit there,
it's reserved for scientific research.
So for a satellite to be transmitting there
they'd have to be disobeying that rule.
But the fact is, if it's a satellite,
it has to be moving in the sky.
It would have to be moving at exactly the right rate,
and that's just really not very practical
to think about that.
Is it a hoax?
Well, Jerry and I are the only ones
that could have pulled this hoax
by fiddling around with the computer program,
and I know I didn't do it,
and I'm pretty sure he didn't do.
So we knew that it was there.
- [Narrator] The Big Ear continued to search
the same section of sky for 30 days
following the Wow! signal discovery.
Eventually, it scanned the area again
for 70 more days.
The signal never reappeared.
- [Robert Dixon] And what was even more puzzling is,
we actually had two beams in the sky at the time.
Slightly, a few minutes apart from each other.
And when it went through one beam, we saw it,
and it went through the other beam, we didn't see it.
So that means that the signal turned off
at the time we we're looking at it,
and that's even more exciting.
Because no natural signal would have done that.
- [Narrator] The Big Ear design featured
two large feed horns, situated side-by-side
near one end of the telescope's aluminum ground plane.
The dual horns acted as funnels for the radio waves
bouncing off the parabolic reflector.
Essentially giving the Big Ear two beams
for observing and capturing data.
After passing through one beam,
a radio wave would be picked up in the second beam
a few minutes later.
The Wow! signal's failure to appear in the second beam
did cause excitement.
It also caused ambiguity.
- If we were to pick up the Wow! signal today,
you would be able to, at least with some SETI experiments,
you would be able to follow up right away, right away.
You would immediately start looking at it again.
Now, you could say, "Yes, but they did that at Ohio State."
They did, they followed up with one more observation.
That was an automatic feature
of the antenna they were using.
So two minutes after they find Wow! signal
they looked at it again, and that's it.
But of course, today you would keep looking at it,
keep looking at it, keep looking at it
for minutes and minutes and minutes and minutes,
and if you didn't find it you would say
it's probably interference.
- [Narrator] In the years since its discovery,
the Wow! signal has been recognized worldwide
as a significant event in the search for E.T.
Many still believe it's the best evidence to date
of a communication from an intelligent
extraterrestrial source.
Others question its scientific validity.
- [Seth Shostak] The Wow! signal certainly was a strong signal, right,
there was no doubt about a signal being there.
That's the not question.
The question isn't was there a signal,
the question is where did that signal come from?
Did it really come from outer space?
Did it come from something artificial?
Did it come from something natural?
Did it come from the Earth?
And of course nobody knows.
- [Scott Gaudi] It remains unexplained.
It was a highly significant signal
that was unexpected and difficult to explain
by natural phenomenon, but it was never repeated.
It could never be verified.
And so we're left, really not knowing what caused it.
You could imagine if an extraterrestrial civilization
was intentionally trying to contact us
they wouldn't just send us one signal
and then leave us hanging for, you know,
many years wondering what that signal meant.
(wind rushing)
- [Robert Gray] This is a movie of the galaxy M33.
This came from the VLA in January of this year.
What I'm looking for here is a big colored dot
that's not always there,
that's only at one radio picture at one frequency.
Which might be a radio signal
pointed our way from the galaxy M33.
No one's ever looked at this before.
No one's ever seen this little movie I'm playing.
This is what I call the small SETI radio telescope
I built in the early 1980's.
And this displays the direction the antenna's pointing,
and this actually controls the antenna.
So this 12-foot dish that's feeding
electrical signals into this
is being pointed around by a 1944
surplus military radar pedestal.
- [Interviewer] Where's the dish that you use with this?
- Well, the dish is outside.
Watch your step a little bit.
(gentle music)
[Robert Gray] I first heard about the Ohio State Wow! signal
when I read an article about it in Cosmic Search magazine.
A small radio astronomy magazine
being published by John Kraus, the founder and designer
of the Ohio State radio telescope.
He wrote an article that described this unusual
and intriguing signal they discovered in 1977.
I was a data analyst, a computer jockey,
programmer at the time.
This seemed so intriguing to me
that I called the people at Ohio State,
called Bob Dixon I believe.
Somewhat to my surprise, he didn't reject
when I suggested I'd visit Columbus, Ohio,
then look at the radio telescope and data personally.
Everything I heard about the Wow! signal
seemed more and more intriguing and,
more and more likely to be a real signal from the stars
rather than interference.
(suspenseful music)
- [Narrator] Since the early 1980s,
Robert Gray has been searching for the Wow! signal.
Like Grote Reber several decades earlier,
Gray searched the sky using his home brewed equipment
and 12-foot dish antenna stationed in his backyard.
Along with writing "The Elusive Wow",
which chronicles his searches,
Gray has hunted the Wow! signal at the
Harvard Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory
in Massachusetts, the Very Large Array
in Socorro, New Mexico,
and the Mount Pleasant Radio Observatory
at the University of Tasmania.
- [Robert Gray] The Ohio State Wow! signal was only seen once.
It was present for six 10-second measurements,
so it wasn't just a quick flash.
But it wasn't seen twice for 72 seconds
like a constant celestial source should be.
This is a flaw in the Wow! signal,
that it was only seen in one beam.
- [Narrator] Some astronomers believe the Wow! signal
appeared in only one of the Big Ear's beams
because it was man-made interference,
or perhaps some sort of natural anomaly.
But an opposing school of thought
suggests another possibility.
A radio signal from an intelligent extraterrestrial source
might appear intermittently.
- [Robert Gray] It's possible that the Wow! signal
didn't show up in the second horn
because it was some kind of sweeping signal,
like a cat's eye beam of a transmitter
that was sweeping across the sky
and swept across the Ohio State beam
in merely a few minutes.
Most people involved in searching
for extraterrestrial intelligence
have one of two scenarios in mind.
One, is a beacon that's shining all the time,
so anytime we happen to look at a certain spot in the sky
we'll see it, if we're tuned to the right frequency.
That's a terribly expensive thing to do.
The amount of power is way more
than all the power on Earth to operate
a beacon that shines in all directions all the time.
The other scenario is a big antenna
that points our way every so often.
A directed beam, and that uses a lot less power.
That's the reason why big radio telescopes are so big
is that they see a smaller spot in the sky.
And for a transmitter that means that they're
only shooting the power towards a small spot in the sky,
so you'd need a lot less power.
The drawback to a directed antenna pointing at us
is it's probably not gonna be pointing at us all the time.
That's another possible explanation
for something like the Wow! signal being intermittent.
- [Narrator] Despite his continued searches
and long-term effort, Gray has not been able
to find the Wow! signal again.
- As far as I can tell, having talked
to nearly everyone in the field,
no one else has ever looked for it.
No one except for me has tried to follow up on it.
And my observations are admittedly those
of a non-professional and might very well
have had some flaws.
The professional astronomical community
has never really looked hard for this thing.
It might be worth doing so.
(waves splashing) (car engines rumbling)
- [Woman 3] Times she has a happy-- - [Woman 4] Not that I heard.
- [Seth Shostak] People will ask me at parties,
when they hear what kind of work I do,
they say, "Well, are you close?"
I don't know what that means, are you close.
Because until you've found a signal that you can verify,
and that is clearly extraterrestrial in origin,
you've not had any close calls,
you've not had any successes,
you've been looking, looking, looking.
It's like, you know, Captain Cook in the South Pacific
in the 1770s, right.
Every day he just sees more water around the ship.
And so, "Well, are you close?"
Well, he doesn't know whether he's close.
- [Narrator] As a senior astronomer for the SETI Institute,
Seth Shostak has been an active participant
in the institute's SETI observing programs.
He has written and lectured extensively
about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence,
including the Wow! signal.
- [Seth Shostak] The Wow! signal, of course, continues to intrigue people,
and maybe people think that it's our best case
for a signal from extraterrestrial intelligence.
I find that maybe a little bit, I don't know, overstated.
To say it's our best case.
It's an intriguing case 'cause it's a mystery.
We don't know what it was.
But then again, if you look back into that era,
in the late 1970s, there were other
SETI experiments running as well.
And they would come up with mysterious signals, as well.
They would come up with signals that were seen only once.
And that had the hallmarks of the kind
of signal you're looking for.
But they didn't have the great name, Wow! signal.
They were just sort of anonymous signals
coming from a certain spot on the sky.
I've written occasionally about a signal
that we picked up in 1997, which was the,
to my mind, the most interesting candidate signal
that we've ever gotten.
And for most of the day it looked like it was the real deal.
Turned out it wasn't, it was due
to a solar research satellite,
a European solar research satellite.
SOHO was the name of the satellite.
But for about 16 hours or so we weren't sure,
we thought it might be the real deal.
And that was actually a very interesting event.
It was a good thing it happened, in my mind,
because it showed us what happens
if you actually pick up a signal
that is what you're looking for.
The Wow! signal may be a case of the triumph
of branding over product, perhaps.
- [Narrator] Whether it's the best case of a signal
from E.T., or an unintentional triumph of branding,
the Wow! signal may be the most widely recognized event
in SETI's short history.
In the years since the Wow! discovery
SETI experiments have continued,
benefiting greatly from advancements in technology
and more sophisticated search techniques.
Still, there are those who feel
we have barely scratched the surface.
- [Robert Gray] It's hard to describe how modest
our searches have been so far.
We've typically only looked for a minute or two
in any one direction and any one frequency.
It's entirely possible that there's
beamed transmissions pointed at us from other stars,
that if we happen to point a big antenna
in the right direction,
tuned to the right frequency, we would hear.
We simply haven't conducted a long enough search yet,
at enough different frequencies
to even know if that's possible.
- [Seth Shostak] Most SETI experiments you spend very little time
looking at any given direction
at any given spot on the radio dial.
Seconds, minutes, no more than that.
And you might say well that doesn't sound
like a very good strategy.
Maybe they do broadcast in our direction,
but only once a day or once a week or once a year,
you're gonna miss 'em, most likely.
And that's true.
But if you're doing this experiment
you have to decide what's the better strategy.
Are you gonna use that time to just keep looking
in the same direction at the same frequencies
or are you going to look at another star system?
It could be that somebody is not incessantly
targeting the Earth, 'cause after all,
they probably don't know that homo sapiens is here, right.
Unless they're within 70 light years
they haven't picked up the kind of radar
or FM radio or television signals
that would betray our presence.
They know there's life on Earth
because of the oxygen in our atmosphere,
but they don't know that there's any
intelligent life, so you know,
how much money would you spend
to relentlessly target some other planet with a signal
if all you knew was that it had biology.
Maybe all it's got is microbes.
That's the situation that obtained here
for a couple of billion years, so you know.
Maybe you don't spend a lot of money there,
but maybe what you do is you have a long list
of all the planets that you know have life
and you just target them all sequentially,
you give them a quick ping, right.
You give them a ping and then you come back
two weeks later and you ping them again,
or maybe two years later or 200 years later.
And you just ping them occasionally
and see if anything happens.
And you know, the Wow! signal could have been a ping,
that's certainly a suggestion.
That's just one possibility, there are many possibilities.
And unfortunately that doesn't turn it into science
until you can prove that one of them is true.
- [Narrator] Scientific opinions continue to differ
about the origin of the Wow! signal.
Even with the controversy, it remains an extraordinary event
in the broader search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
- I think probably the majority of astronomers
think that it was just some naturally occurring phenomenon
that just happened once.
We're left really not knowing what caused it.
We can't really be sure that it was
an extraterrestrial civilization.
SETI's based on the presumption
that we are not the only civilized society in the galaxy,
and that there are civilized societies in the galaxy
that are willing and able to communicate with us.
There are two primary paths by which
we are looking for life in the universe.
One is a systematic, more scientific path.
The first step that you might want to know is,
well, are there planets around other stars at all?
Then if you know that there are planets
around other stars, the next thing you might wanna ask is,
well do those planetary systems
look anything like our own.
Once we find some solar systems like ours
then what we really want to look for
are planets like the Earth, pale blue dots.
So those are rocky planets with thin atmospheres
located at the right distance from their parent star
where they can have liquid water on the surface.
And that's a lot of the way in which we go about science,
is we take one step at a time.
We build upon previous advances in knowledge
till we ultimately get to the final question that we want.
SETI, on the other hand, is kinda like taking a novel
and going back to the last chapter
and reading that and finding out what happens.
It's kind of cheating, in some sense,
it's not going through the whole book.
So you're just trying to look directly
for intelligent civilizations immediately,
without having to go through all the systematic process
of leading to the discovery of life.
The opinions of SETI and scientists
that are searching for life range from
it's a crazy thing to do to it's a reasonable thing to do.
- [Robert Dixon] SETI is only for patient people.
Because you can search a lifetime and never find anything,
but it's still so interesting and important
that you always do it.
So that's why people like Jerry and I
get involved in doing things like this.
The big danger in SETI is called anthropomorphism.
Looking at things from the viewpoint of man,
because that's the only way we can.
We try not to think about specific signals,
but look at general signals which are narrow band,
which would be characteristic of any such signals.
- [Michael Holstine] I think that the Wow! signal,
even though it couldn't be identified,
couldn't be verified,
was a kickstart to the continued search
for extraterrestrial intelligence.
I mean you think about even a young scientist,
a young astronomer, who is trying to decide
what his path or what her path may be,
you read something about the Wow! Signal
and it gives you a whole new door to open.
It gives you another possibility.
- We're looking for something that we don't know
is there or if we're gonna ever be able to detect it.
And that's a difficult thing to justify.
But it's also potentially one of the most
important questions we ever want to answer.
So you have this balance of something
that's very high risk, but very high gain.
- [Michael Holstine] The search for extraterrestrial intelligence,
I think it's fair to say to some extent
has had a stigma associated with it.
(dramatic music)
- [Nichol Cunningham] The perception of SETI is the UFOs and sightings.
That little green man with big eyes.
And it's been potentially difficult
to shake off that association.
- [Scott Gaudi] There's an entire culture of people
that believe in UFOs, and that we have in fact
been contacted by aliens many, many times.
- [Karen O'Neil] Of course there's a lot of excitement
around the idea of aliens, of SETI,
of any of that, because,
how could it not be just incredibly exciting
to think that there is some other race out there,
some other very exotic type of race
out there in the universe, and the idea that hey,
we'll be able to interact with them
is just really, really enticing and really, really exciting.
- [Tom Burns] We get a lot of UFO reports at Perkins,
in one form or another.
And I have to say,
it's always, always, always some natural event.
There was one thing that I saw one time
I had no idea what it was.
These beautiful white points of light
darting around, darting around.
They were just a whole lot of them.
So I got in my car and I drove toward it, what was it?
It was a bunch of seagulls dancing around a billboard.
The billboard lights tend to point up
and it was the lights reflecting off their stomachs.
Thought I had it, but it was seagulls.
- [Michael Holstine] The sensationalism that surrounds SETI research
can be pretty amazing,
and Green Bank has not been immune to it.
When a 300-foot telescope collapsed in 1988
there were, albeit tabloid,
newspaper headlines that said
"Aliens destroy radio telescope in Green Bank".
That's just proof of the need for people
to think about the fantastical.
To be exposed to the fantastical.
- If somebody could come up with one thing one time,
that they could describe to me
that I couldn't figure out what it was,
then I might be more interested in this kind of thing.
(gentle music)
- [Karen O'Neil] Human beings love to wonder why.
Are there beings out there in the universe
is just so tantalizing, so exciting to think
there's something else out there, we're not alone.
- [Scott Gaudi] As a skeptic, as a scientist I'm a skeptic,
and as a skeptic I have to say that
I don't believe there's been any real definitive evidence
of extraterrestrial life contacting us.
Of course which begs the question,
does that mean that such life is rare?
A lot of people are familiar with the Fermi paradox
which simply put is if intelligent life is out there,
where are they, why haven't they contacted us.
There are various solutions to this apparent paradox,
but one of them is simply that
there is no other intelligent life out there,
that we are the only intelligent life in our galaxy.
If I were a betting man, and I'm not, but if I were,
I would bet that simple life is probably fairly common
and we will probably find it, maybe not in my lifetime,
but certainly within the next few hundred years.
- [Seth Shostak] One of the problems with SETI
is that you can't guarantee success.
If you decide that as a young astronomer
you're gonna go study exoplanets,
you can be sure you're gonna find some
and you're gonna learn something new.
You can't miss, we've found thousands of exoplanets.
So, of course, you're gonna find some.
With SETI, there's no guarantee.
It may be that you spend decades,
maybe this take centuries, maybe more, who knows,
to find something.
And all that time you didn't find anything.
And you gotta be able to take that.
You gotta be able to say look, I'm down with that.
I can handle that.
- [Michael Holstine] I personally feel that it is entirely possible
that we will discover life beyond our own.
Can I definitively say that it's gonna happen
in my lifetime, no I can't.
Do I think it will happen?
I absolutely do think that it'll happen.
I do believe that there's life elsewhere beyond our planet.
How advanced that life may be is a question,
but, certainly if we have progressed
to the level of intelligence that we are,
and some argue that well maybe we aren't either,
I can't imagine that other potential life forms
haven't progressed far beyond where we are.
- [Karen O'Neil] Will we discover life that is beyond
just the cellular life and moving on to something
that is intelligent, boy you know,
it's such a guess.
We might.
- [Tom Burns] I think you have to be honest with people
from whom you are asking for funding.
The difficulties are great here
and the chances of success are very limited.
And you probably won't find anything.
- [Michael Holstine] Funding of basic research seems to be a challenge.
Especially in this day and age.
We can't say that we're creating anything.
We're not building widgets,
we're not selling something for retail,
we're doing basic research.
And basic research sometimes is a hard sell.
Americans like a result, you know.
They like something they can hold in their hands.
- [Ellie White] Careful.
- [Shopper] Where is Copernicus?
- [Ellie White] There's a tag in there
it says loose. - [Shopper] Is that Einstein
right there? - [Ellie White] Yeah.
- Ever since 2012, the observatory has faced
some issues in terms of decreased funding.
- [Narrator] As the first National Radio
Astronomy Observatory in the United States,
Green Bank had always been fully funded
by the National Science Foundation.
But changing federal priorities
created funding challenges over the years.
In 2012, the National Science Foundation
recommended a gradual defunding
of the Green Bank facility.
- [Michael Holstine] You know, the potential is there
that one of the options is dismantling the telescope.
You know, we disappear.
And the research that's done here at Green Bank
could disappear.
- There's nobody I'm aware of that would like
to see Green Bank close.
And I mean that all the way to the people
that are making the funding decisions
to cut back our funding.
They really don't want to see this place close.
Nobody wants to see this place close.
- While the observatory could find other
collaborative parties which could provide funding,
the problem with that is the NSF provides
open sky science, which means anyone
can come in and apply for time,
whether they have the money or not.
That is a really important thing to keep going.
We're just gonna try to do what we can to help
keep that secured.
The Green Bank Observatory has had
more impact than I can say
on my future and my ideas of what I'd like to do.
Aspects of astronomy that I was not familiar with.
For example, I've gotten so interested
in the instrumentation side.
I just think it's really important to have that background
in knowing your equipment and knowing
what you're researching,
so that you can do things like compare
is this an actual signal
or is this some sort of system issue.
Which I think is really important in SETI
as well as in every field of research in radio astronomy.
- [Michael Holstine] When I first met Ellie White,
her and her mother came into my office.
She was about 11 years old.
And the funding problems for Green Bank Observatory
had sort of just been released.
And Ellie had been, in her own time,
creating these cloth dolls of scientists.
So she picked her favorite scientific people from history.
And she had a Madam Curie doll and she had these others.
And the purpose of her visit
was to see if we might want to sell those in our gift shop.
Which I thought, well that's kind of cool,
you know maybe we could do something with her.
But what she said next is what I'll never forget.
It'll be one of those moments
that will live with me well after I'm retired.
The reason that she wanted to sell them in our gift shop
is because she wanted to give part of the proceeds
back to the observatory to help fund our mission.
- [Ellie White] So these are two of the scientist dolls.
This is Nicholas Copernicus and Albert Einstein.
I started showing them to people and they said
you should sell these, so I thought well,
I'll sell them and donate part
of the profits to Green Bank.
- [Interviewer] How appreciative have they been
about these dolls?
- Very, they're very appreciative and,
just it's great to hear some of the stories
of people who come in and buy 'em.
I think the first doll that was sold
was to a lady from New Zealand.
- [Interviewer] Will you keep doing this?
- Yeah, as long as I can keep up with the demand. (laughs)
- [Michael Holstine] Green Bank has had such a profound effect on her.
Just the exposure to what we do here
changed her completely.
She became so passionate about astronomy,
so passionate about protecting
the Green Bank Observatory, to make sure
that other people get the same reaction,
you know, get the same effect.
- [Deana White] Now this has been a life-changing experience
for Ellie, for Josh, my son, for us.
She's learned things about how to ask questions
without fear, to have curiosity
and enthusiasm about learning,
which is really what we are all striving for.
And it's what we look to the heavens for.
- [Karen O'Neil] Ellie's passion for science and for astronomy
is amazing and it's just really neat to watch.
If we were, heaven forbid, to stop funding
fundamental science then I think we lose a lot of things.
I think in the near term we lose a little
piece of humanity, I think.
We lose a little piece of our ability
to just ask the question why
and try to understand who and how we got here.
And then in the long term, if you don't have
people doing the basic fundamental research
you're not gonna have big breakthroughs
10, 20 years from now in understanding everything.
And to me that's the most important part of all this.
- [Stephen] It's time to commit to finding the answer
to search for life beyond earth.
The Breakthrough Initiatives are making that commitment.
- Breakthrough Listen takes the search
for intelligent life in the universe
to a completely new level.
- [Narrator] In 2015, Russian billionaire Yuri Milner,
along with Stephen Hawking, Frank Drake, and others
developed a long-term initiative dedicated to the search
for intelligent civilizations beyond Earth.
The highly funded SETI project,
known as Breakthrough Listen,
required the world's most powerful radio telescopes,
including the world's largest fully steerable scope
at the Green Bank Observatory.
Much like Ohio State's Big Ear Telescope many years earlier,
Green Bank's path led to the search
for extraterrestrial intelligence,
and the opportunity came at the perfect time.
- [Michael Holstine] It's interesting how the timing of these things works out.
The GBT and the Green Bank site
were in need of finding external sources of funding.
The Breakthrough Listen program
is a privately-funded project,
over 10 years, with $100 million being spent on it.
It is the next huge modern search
dedicated to extraterrestrial intelligence detection.
They needed to utilize the best technology
that they could find.
And the GBT, the Green Bank Telescope
is a radio telescope that can give them
more sensitivity, more sky coverage,
than any other radio telescope in the world.
- [Ellie White] The search for extraterrestrial intelligence
has been going on for more than 50 years now.
With the advent of Breakthrough Listen
20% of the Green Bank Telescope's time per year is dedicated
to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
And that is hundreds of hours.
Much, much more time and resources put towards SETI.
So I think that really ups your chances.
- Would we like to actually see a signal in there?
Of course, it would be amazing.
It would change the way we would look at the universe,
because it's one thing to say there might be
a signal out there, it's another thing to say
we have found a signal out there.
- Green Bank is searching for its own Wow! signal.
We are looking for the signal
that's gonna knock our socks off.
And we can't wait 'til we find it.
Why would we ever want to give up the capability
to expand our horizon?
And go back to a level where
even the most basic question about our universe
has to go unanswered because we didn't put a dollar into it.
If the GBT or the Green Bank Observatory
were to disappear, it's gone.
These are national treasures
located all around this country,
and some located all around the globe,
that we just don't want to give up.
The amount of money that it takes to run them
is minuscule compared to the potential
for expanding our knowledge that exists
because they are here.
(car engines humming)
- [Interviewer] This stuff is neat.
What are we looking at in here?
- We're coming to the Big Ear room.
This is the room that we created
in honor of the Big Ear,
and we made copies of the Wow! signal,
the data that we call the Wow! signal.
And we have built a beautiful scale model
of the telescope, the Big Ear Telescope.
Imagine taking this element right here, the collector,
and moving this enormous metal structure up and down
so that you collect information
from different parts of the sky than say straight up.
- [Interviewer] Can you take us out to the Big Ear?
- Sure, let's go.
That just happened, of course.
And we'll get that out of there eventually.
Humph, eventually.
I come back here practically every day.
Big Ear is just over the crest of this hill.
Oh, I hate to walk on a golf course in my street shoes,
but what are you gonna do?
Ladies and gents, Big Ear.
(gentle music)
- [Narrator] After losing federal funding in the 1970s,
the Big Ear telescope shifted to the search
for extraterrestrial intelligence.
Besides discovering the historic Wow! signal,
the Ohio State SETI Program was recognized
by the Guinness Book of World Records
for running the longest,
full-scale SETI program for its time.
In 1997, despite its contributions to radio astronomy,
developers decided the land under the Big Ear
would be better served as a housing development
and golf course.
- [Jerry Ehman] We got word that the land had been sold
out from under us, without even informing
Dr. John Kraus or anybody.
They simply sold the land to land developers.
And their goal was to increase the size of the golf course
from a nine-hole course to an 18-hole course,
and then to build some 400 homes on the land.
Just a few months before John Kraus died at age 94,
he decided he needed to write a little note
expressing this as a day of infamy,
the day that he received notification
that the Big Ear was going to be torn down.
- [Robert Dixon] That caused a great hue and cry,
and Ohio State University said
we are not going to spend money with lawsuits
fighting over developers.
So they threw in the towel.
(melancholy music)
- [Robert Gray] Had they had a well-financed research program going,
I think they might have survived.
Unfortunately, a lot of these major scientific instruments
get superseded, they become obsolete.
The interest of science, scientists,
and science funding agencies moves on.
- [Tom Burns] The Big Ear had its day.
It did important research in astronomy.
It did that SETI research for all of those years.
But there comes a time when old technology
simply has outlived its usefulness
and with sadness you tear it down.
It was a sad moment to see it go,
but the simple fact was
that it had outlived its usefulness.
It had its time in the sun,
and the land was useful for other purposes.
- [Interviewer] Do you think a golf course and
housing development, do you think that was useful?
- Well the fact is that, before the Big Ear came along,
the land was basically just wasteland.
It was covered with trees and brush.
And of course the Big Ear really
wasn't good for much anymore.
The simple fact was it was frozen in place.
You could no longer remove the main primary
light gathering device up and down like this,
so it was frozen in place like this.
So that what they essentially had to do
was to wait for the sky to rotate above them
if they wanted to collect information on a given star,
or from a given star to do SETI research.
- [Interviewer] People miss it?
- I would say there was a giant uproar
when the land was sold.
But by the time the Big Ear was finally torn down,
people weren't so upset about it.
(gentle music)
- [Robert Gray] Is the Ohio State Observatory an icon?
A temple of science that shouldn't
have been demolished?
It accomplished a lot, but I don't think it was an icon.
Unfortunately, if it turns out
the Wow! signal's the real thing,
that sometime, somewhere down the road
somebody demonstrates that it's an interstellar broadcast,
it'll be tragic that
the Ohio State Radio Telescope was torn down.
- [Seth Shostak] If the Wow! signal had been verified,
if it had been found again,
then, you know, it would be in every
history book in the world.
That would be in one of the most
important discoveries of all time.
And because of the fact that it has
this wonderful name, Jerry Ehman was really brilliant
to write wow next to it.
If he'd just made a check mark
probably nobody would have ever heard the Wow! Signal,
at least the public probably wouldn't have heard of it.
So that's the difference between
a confirmed result and an ambiguous one, unfortunately.
(gentle music)
- [Narrator] Why do we search?
The road is long, with few rewards.
The skepticism demanded by good science
tempers our excitement.
And discovery remains elusive.
And yet we persevere.
Fascinated by the possibility of what could be.
- [Robert Gray] Why care about life elsewhere?
That's a good question.
Life here is a riot of different forms,
colors, sizes, noises, environments, behaviors.
And I think that people probably have an innate
interest in whether something like that happened elsewhere.
And the only way to settle that question,
of course, is to go look.
- I do think there is extraterrestrial intelligent life.
And more than one instance in our galaxy,
and certainly in our universe.
- [Robert Dixon] The universe is so vast
and the Earth and the sun are not unique
in any way that we know of.
There are literally millions and billions
of other planets like the Earth.
It just seems scientifically improbable
that life would have emerged only here.
But on the other hand, someone has to be the first.
So maybe we are the first.
If so, it gives us a greater responsibility
to say, all right, we're the first,
we better not destroy ourselves.
We better repopulate the universe
and make things better for everyone.
And not blow ourselves up in some stupid way.
- [Scott Gaudi] We desperately want meaning of some sort.
We'd like to know why we're here.
Are we here just by random accident
or are we here on purpose?
We are trying to find context to our humanity.
- [Seth Shostak] It's really hard to predict
what the consequences of finding a signal,
proving that we're not alone.
What consequences that would have?
This would be sort of an inflection point,
a change in human civilization,
'cause we would know that somebody's out there.
If we could ever understand any part of the signal
that might change us much more,
because you would suddenly be privy
to knowledge that's most likely
far more advanced than our own.
So, you know, that could change everything.
- [Tom Burns] Think of the impact of it.
The entire world would be transformed
when each and every person on this planet realized
that we are not alone.
We live, sometimes, in a difficult,
ugly, violent world.
And you're looking for some solace from that.
And the one thing that
this search for extraterrestrial intelligence gives you
is that kind of hope.
We want this.
We want that sense, even more,
that we are capable of escaping
the tyranny of the gravity that holds us.
That we can soar outward into the universe.
And where do we find that?
In the hope, the faint hope,
that other civilizations have survived their crises,
been around for long enough
to be able to soar themselves.
We're lonely.
We want that sense
that we are not alone.
We want it so badly.
(tender music)
(inquisitive music)