Wow! Is RIGHT!

Back in 1977, a signal from deep space was detected. It was something that had never been seen before... or since.

It wasn't quite the same as the aliens playing back the musical notes from their spacecraft in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, or even E.T.'s signal as he phoned home. But a full 72-second powerful radio signal captured in 1977 has all the markings of man connecting with extra-terrestrial life.. for a little more than a minute.

It was Jerry Ehman, then a volunteer for SETT (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) at the Big Ear radio telescope of The Ohio State University (at the time located at Ohio Wesleyan University's Perkins Observatory in Delaware, Ohio), who detected the signal on August 15,1977, while scanning radio waves from the deepest part of outer space. The signal was a steady series of radio waves, picked up by the telescope as it looked skyward while the Earth rotated. The computer recorded the signal as a mixture of six numbers and letters.

As Ehman examined the printout, the recorded signal popped off the page. What caused it? What was it? Who was it? So surprised was Ehman that he wrote Wow! in the margin of the print-out, the name tagged to the signal today.

Was this an alien entity sending an intentional message?

It was coming from a place in space that human beings have not reached, in the constellation of Sagittarius, about 120 light years away.

For months, Ehman and others tried multiple times to again find the signal by aiming the telescope in the same direction where the signal had originally come from, but it was never found again. Other attempts over the years with advanced equipment also failed to detect it.

In 2012, the 35th anniversary of the discovery of the Wow! signal, mankind finally responded to the signal, in a way only modern man could. The Arecibo Observatory sent out a random sorting of 10,000 Twitter messages in the direction of where the Wow! signal came from so many years ago. Among those boosts were celebrity videos. Scientists attached a header to each message to indicate the messages are intentional and from us.

Wonder what they'll think after viewing 72 seconds of Lady Gaga? - Mike Payne

Source: Unsolved Mysteries