Aug 15, 1977, and a radio telescope at the Big Ear Radio observatory picked up a strong radio burt as it scanned the sky for alien signals. What later became known as the “WOW” signal, written by a volunteer scientist whose job it was to scan through the days of printout to look for interesting signals, the signal has captured the imagination ever since, but what exactly was special about 6EQUJ5 ?
Jerry R. Ehman, the astronomer who found the signal spoke out about the multitude of correspondence he still gets on the topic, with people claiming to have cracked the code, or added new meaning to the message the aliens had sent.
Truth is, Ehman explains, 6EQUJ5 was not a message, it was a human made code to visually show the strength of the signal being received. Because the code could only use 1 character, it was decided that 0 - 9 wasn’t sufficient, so they started using letters after that. So, it’s not a secret alien code, but rather, a human code to show the strength of signal being received.
What really excited Ehman was the way the code builds up then tapers out, just as you’d expect if a moving telescope passed by a strong radio burst. Equally, the signal was in a very specific frequency and not elsewhere.
Sadly, despite numerous attempts to home in on the location, nothing has ever been repeated.
Back then, computers automatically filled up their memories then dumped it to printer, freeing up the memory for another search. There was no automated alarms or alerts to signal a find, only the keen eye of Ehman spotted it.
Today, a similar message would be alerted to astronomers all over the world, so within moments of detection, verification would be taking place in many locations. Oddly, since we started being able to do this, ET has gone quiet, and we’ve not found quite so many candidate signals. Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute suggests the aliens must have realised we have advanced a little since 1977, and gone silent :)
Source : https://astronomy.com/news/2020/09/the-wow-signal-an-alien-missed-connection
