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If there's something you'd like to say to aliens, now's your chance. The Wow! signal, a mysterious radio transmission detected in 1977 that may or may not have come from extraterrestrials, is finally getting a response from humanity. Anyone can contribute his or her two cents — or 140 characters, to be exact — to the cosmic reply via Twitter. All tweets composed between 8 p.m. EDT Friday (June 29) and 3 a.m. EDT Saturday (June 30) tagged with the hashtag #ChasingUFOs will be rolled into a single message, according to the National Geographic Channel, which is timing the Twitter...

SETIÂ’s Colossus by Paul Gilster on May 31, 2013 For the most part, the focus of SETI since Project Ozma has been directed at intercepting signals deliberately sent our way. It doesnÂ’t have to be so, of course, because extraneous signals from a civilization going about its business would also be profoundly interesting, and even a civilization not much more advanced than ours might be throwing off powerful evidence of its existence through the planetary radars it uses to detect potential impactors in its own system. Whether or not the Ohio State WOW! signal was a SETI detection remains unresolved,...

Of the many "maybe’s" that SETI has turned up in its four-decade history, none is better known than the one that was discovered in August, 1977, in Columbus, Ohio. The famous Wow signal was found as part of a long-running sky survey conducted with Ohio State University’s "Big Ear" radio telescope. The Wow signal’s unusual nomenclature connotes both the surprise of the discovery and its sox-knocking strength (60 Janskys in a 10 KHz channel, which is more than 50 thousand times more incoming energy than the minimum signal that would register as a hit for today’s Project Phoenix.) But is...

In recent years, researchers led by Abel Méndez—lead author of the new study and director of the Planetary Habitability Laboratory at the University of Puerto Rico—have contributed significantly to that evidence through the AWOW project. In August 2024, Méndez and his colleagues published findings that suggest the Wow! Signal stemmed from the sudden brightening of a cold hydrogen cloud due to a transient source of radiation such as a magnetar. These neutron stars have magnetic fields strong enough to excite the atoms in hydrogen clouds and elicit a burst of brightness. Re-evaluating the Wow! Signal Now, Méndez’s team has meticulously...

Mysterious radio wave flashes from far outside the galaxy are proving tough for astronomers to explain. Is it pulsars? A spy satellite? Or an alien message? BURSTS of radio waves flashing across the sky seem to follow a mathematical pattern. If the pattern is real, either some strange celestial physics is going on, or the bursts are artificial, produced by human – or alien – technology. Telescopes have been picking up so-called fast radio bursts (FRBs) since 2001. They last just a few milliseconds and erupt with about as much energy as the sun releases in a month. Ten have...

The Wow! signal represented as "6EQUJ5". Credit: Big Ear Radio Observatory and North American AstroPhysical Observatory (NAAPO) ====================================================================== Amateur astronomer and YouTuber Alberto Caballero, one of the founders of The Exoplanets Channel, has found a small amount of evidence for a source of the notorious Wow! signal. In his paper uploaded to the arXiv preprint server, Caballero describes searching the Gaia database for possible sun-like stars that might host an exoplanet capable of supporting intelligent life. Back in 1977, astronomers working with the Big Ear Radio Telescope—at the time, situated in Delaware, Ohio—recorded a unique signal from somewhere in space....

After spending decades listening for radio signals, Optical SETI has made a remarkable discovery! Repeating optical signals have been detected coming, not from one star, but three! Natural explanations have come up blank, and Aliens are actually being discussed! SETI breakthrough! NASA scientist discovers three repeating ET signals coming from nearby stars! | 19:57 The Angry Astronaut | 195K subscribers | 11,074 views | June 24, 2025

On August 15, 1977, the Big Ear radio telescope on the campus of Ohio State University recorded a 72-second narrowband signal onto a paper tape. Several days later, Jerry Ehman, an astronomer at the university, studied the tape and found the signal so unusual that he scrawled the word Wow! next to the data points. Since that time, the signal has been discussed at great length in the astronomy community, but nobody has been able to explain its origin. The researchers focused their efforts on that star system using two telescopes, the Green Bank Telescope and the Allen Telescope Array....

In 1977, radio astronomer Jerry Ehman was looking through observation data from the Big Ear Radio Telescope....searching for evidence that alien civilizations might be trying to communicate using radio waves... ... The search generated...nothing but the background radio transmissions of the Universe. But then he saw a data signal so interesting and unique that he circled it and wrote “WOW” in a red pen... Ehman circled the characters “6EQUJ5”, distinguishing them from all the other 1s and 2s on the field of data. What does this code mean? ... Why does it start with a 6 and then end with...