Original subtitles

(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)