8 Creepiest Broadcasts Ever Caught On Tape
6. Wow! Signal
Back in 1977, Jerry Ehman, an astronomer working at the Big Ear Radio Telescope, was trawling through the piles of data that had been collected. The Big Ear Radio Telescope was tasked with "listening" to the big, empty skies above Earth in the hope of picking up any evidence of extraterrestrials. As Ehman scanned over the pages of 1s, 2s and 3s, an unexpected sequence jumped out at him: 6EQUJ5.
He circled it and wrote "Wow!" in the margin, giving the signal its name. The strong signal appeared to have come from a point within the constellation of Sagittarius, but when the scientists pointed their telescopes back at the same point, it had disappeared, so what could it have possibly been? To be clear, 6EQUJ5 isn't an alien word for "Take us to your leader", but a representation of the signal strength. It was, however, smack in the part of the radio spectrum that we would expect aliens to communicate on and lasted for the full 72-second window that the telescope was looking at it, before disappearing, never to be seen again.
Could it be that the aliens had taken a rest from sticking anal probes up humans to try and have a proper conversation, or was it just a bit of passing space junk? Well, just in case it was the former, 35 years after receiving the Wow! signal, humanity replied with a package of messages submitted through Twitter using the hashtag #ChasingUFOs. You know, just in case the aliens are super into social media.