7 Times We Really Thought We'd Found Aliens
1. The Wow Signal
Jerry Ehman was an astronomer working at the Big Ear Radio Telescope back in 1977. The Big Ear was tasked with "listening" to the big, empty skies above Earth in the hope of picking up any evidence of extraterrestrials. One night, Ehman was sifting through the data when an unexpected sequence jumped out at him: 6EQUJ5.
This stuck out as extremely odd amidst the 1s, 2s and 3s in the rest of the readings, almost like an intentional signal. He circled it and wrote "Wow!" in the margin, giving the "Wow Signal" its name.
The letter represented a sudden spike in signal strength that lasted for the full 72-second window that the telescope was looking at it, before disappearing, never to be seen again. It could have been a rogue terrestrial signal, or a random bit of space junk, but that hypothesis begins to fall down when you consider that no other telescopes picked it up, either at the time or since.
Was it the friendly alien wave we've been waiting for? We'll probably never know.
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