Was the Wow! signal evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence? Forty years later, the debate continues: Edd Wheeler (Opinion)

A 1983 file photo of Ohio State University's "Big Ear" radio telescope where, 40 years ago this week, scientists searching for signs of intelligent life in outer space detected the still-debated Wow! signal. A recent assessment attributed the signal to hydrogen clouds from two comets but Edd Wheeler writes in the op-ed below that Jerry Ehman, the astronomer who famously named the moment with his "Wow!" notation on the printout, is not ruling anything out. (Plain Dealer Historical Photograph collection, File, 1983)

TUCKER, Georgia -- The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) was first conceived almost 60 years ago by the late Carl Sagan. In 1974 it took institutional form at the University of California, Berkeley. Today, its modern computers monitor 100 million frequency channels for potential signals from space.

However, lack of a credible finding of putative aliens has resulted in detractors calling SETI the Great Martian Chase.  

SETI's most noted reception occurred 40 years ago this week, and was registered by three scientists, with shoestring budget and staff, using a primitive IBM computer having only 64,000 bytes of memory.

The "Big Ear" telescope at the Ohio State University Radio Observatory that operated from 1973 to 1997 was SETI's longest and most famous operation. Though small by later standards, it was then one of the world's foremost radio telescopes, a curved reflector 70 feet high and 420 feet long on its aluminum plane.      

Just after 11 p.m. on Aug. 15, 1977, it recorded a type of transmission not encountered previously or since.

While Big Ear was monitoring the 1420-megahertz frequency, one reserved for scientific use in belief that potential extraterrestrial intelligence might broadcast on the frequency for neutral hydrogen, the most common element in the universe, signals were received from the direction of the constellation Sagittarius.    

They were recorded at 12-second intervals of ten seconds for reception followed by two seconds of data processing by the computer. The transmission produced data that followed the observatory's antenna pattern more than 99 percent accurately.

Upon seeing the computer readout, astronomer Jerry Ehman simply penned "Wow!" on it, thus famously naming the transmission. He soon ruled out possible sources like ground emission, aircraft, satellites, and space debris.

Ehman believes the average signal strength was constant throughout the unprecedented length of 72 seconds and that the six intervals were only timed recordings caused by the design of equipment and antenna pattern.

There was little doubt by all on-scene scientists that they had accurately recorded an artificial transmission, one caused by something other than natural phenomena such as pulsars.    

Ehman initially was cautious about conclusions on the source. But in his 20th anniversary report on the "Wow!" signal, he wrote that "Big Ear" data were reliable and, lacking evidence to the contrary, that the source was probably extraterrestrial intelligence. Although he now thinks the matter an "open question," he continues as before to believe that the signal is "a tantalizing candidate" as ETI, which he reiterates as "certainly a possibility." 

Fellow scientist Robert Dixon confidently stated that the source was from "beyond the moon." He wrote in 1985 that, for SETI's first decade and among its 30,000 "detections," the Wow! signal was clearly "most prominent."  

The late Dr. John Kraus, as quoted in a 2012 book on the topic by Robert H. Gray, ventured that it might have been an ETI "signal" but that this was speculative.    

In 2016, scientists at the Center of Planetary Science, a small group near Tampa promoting astronomy, suggested the Wow! signal likely was not an artificial transmission but a natural phenomenon caused by radiation from massive hydrogen clouds surrounding two remote comets discovered in 2006 and 2008.

As evidence, they presented a recorded radio signal emitted by a comet at 1420.25 megahertz, very close to the frequency of natural hydrogen monitored for many years by "Big Ear."  

It is uncertain whether this finding solidly refutes the Wow! transmission as a possible ETI signal.    

An inherent problem is that humans may not be "wired" to recognize a real interstellar "signal."  

Britain's Astronomer Royal Martin Rees is chairman of the Breakthrough Initiatives, a ten-year, $100 million search for extraterrestrial intelligence, intended to answer Stephen Hawking's query, "if we are alone in the dark."      

Rees emphasizes that putative aliens likely possess intelligence fundamentally different from ours, and thus "may package reality" and convey it in ways not understandable. He seeks a "manifestly artificial" signal.

However, if certainty is the gauge, how can signal receipt be manifestly established if the source has different intelligence and expression than ours?    

The Wow! signal was not manifestly from ETI, yet it seemed credibly outside the solar system. Some question whether intelligence, as we know it, exists beyond Earth.

At the 40th anniversary of the Wow! signal, it is time to acknowledge that, in a galaxy of 400 billion stars and a universe of more than 500 billion galaxies, we may not comprehend the possible qualities of intelligence in other worlds, but by probability it is incomprehensible that extraterrestrial intelligence does not exist.

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The Breakthrough Initiatives will formulate a compact yet substantive interstellar signal about humans, our values and achievements.  

An equal concern has gone unmentioned. What if Earth was identified as a living world long before man's appearance, and what should be our concern if distant observers have intelligently and correctly concluded that we have produced the likes of Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Bach, and Newton, along with Tamerlane, Stalin, and Hitler, and with an identifiable practice of superpredation?  What then might a potential signal from afar look like?

Wow! indeed.  

Edd Wheeler, a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy and a veteran of the Vietnam War, is a former federal administrative law judge whose articles on the Wow! signal and Breakthrough Initiatives have appeared in the "Journal of the British Interplanetary Society."

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