Speaker 1: Welcome to Unexplained Extra with me Richard McClean smith. For
Speaker 1: the weeks in between episodes, we look at the stories that,
Speaker 1: for one reason or other, didn't make it into the show.
Speaker 1: In last week's episode, The Final Flight, we looked at
Speaker 1: the tragic story of Australian Training Corps pilot Fred Valentige
Speaker 1: and his mysterious disappearance one evening in October nineteen seventy eight.
Speaker 1: Fred had been attempting a solo flight across the Bass
Speaker 1: Strait just to the south of Melbourne, Australia, when he
Speaker 1: vanished without a trace. In a famous final communication between
Speaker 1: Fred and air traffic control, it appeared that Fred was
Speaker 1: being tracked by a large UFO just prior to his disappearance, if,
Speaker 1: as some believe, Fred had in fact fabricated the event.
Speaker 1: It has been suggested that the Australian release of Steven
Speaker 1: Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind in March of
Speaker 1: that year may have served as a possible source of inspiration.
Speaker 1: Yet only six months previously, something far more fantastical had
Speaker 1: occurred that would no doubt have been noted by Fred,
Speaker 1: a young man with a keen interest in UFOs and
Speaker 1: the hunt for alien life. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence,
Speaker 1: or SETTI, is the term given to humanity's collective attempts
Speaker 1: to find signs of intelligent life in the universe. Of course,
Speaker 1: we may always have looked to the night sky and
Speaker 1: wondered whether or not we were alone, but it wasn't
Speaker 1: until a remarkable discovery confirmed in eighteen eighty seven, that
Speaker 1: we began to conceive of a way in which we
Speaker 1: might actually begin to find out. In eighteen sixty four,
Speaker 1: Scottish physicist James Maxwell proposed his groundbreaking theory that electricity, magnetism,
Speaker 1: and light were in fact all manifestations of the same phenomenon.
Speaker 1: His findings, published as a paper titled A Dynamical Theory
Speaker 1: of the Electromagnetic Field, marked a paradigm shift in our
Speaker 1: understanding of the laws of the universe, but also gave
Speaker 1: us the means with which to listen to it. For
Speaker 1: it was in Maxwell's understanding of electromagnetism that the concept
Speaker 1: of radio waves themselves a type of electromagnetic radiation, was
Speaker 1: first theorized. However, as is often the case, the maths
Speaker 1: would predate the technology needed to prove the theory. By
Speaker 1: some years. In the end, it wasn't until eighteen eighty seven,
Speaker 1: Over twenty years later, the German physicist Heimrich Hurtz, working
Speaker 1: in his lab at the Carl's Rue Institute in Germany,
Speaker 1: generated the radio waves that finally proved Maxwell's theory to
Speaker 1: be correct. Now, for the first time ever, we had
Speaker 1: the ability to send and receive communications wirelessly overseemingly vast distances.
Speaker 1: A decade later, Italian inventor and electrical engineer Guglielmo Marconi
Speaker 1: would pioneer the first practical radio transmitters. Owing to Maxwell's
Speaker 1: initial discovery, it was well understood that, since radio waves
Speaker 1: were a form of electromagnetic radiation, the Earth should, in
Speaker 1: theory be bombarded by signals from any number of celestial
Speaker 1: sources throughout the universe. However, after the discovery of the
Speaker 1: ionosphere in nineteen o two, most physicists assumed that any
Speaker 1: radio transmissions from outside the atmosphere would be instantly deflected
Speaker 1: back into space, and so it was in nineteen thirty
Speaker 1: three when Carl Gutjanski, who was working for Bell Laboratories
Speaker 1: in Hondell, New Jersey, made an extra dary discovery. Having
Speaker 1: missed out to a T and T in the race
Speaker 1: to build the first transatlantic telephone communications Bell Labs were
Speaker 1: hoping to improve on the system with the use of
Speaker 1: short radio waves. The only problem was trying to figure
Speaker 1: out a way to stop the pesky static from interfering
Speaker 1: with the transmissions. It was Jansky's job to try and
Speaker 1: determine once and for all, just where exactly the static
Speaker 1: was coming from. A short time later, he had his answer.
Speaker 1: Sought of. Two sources were found to be coming from
Speaker 1: either near by or far off thunderstorms, but the third
Speaker 1: source was a steady, consistent hiss of unknown origin. The
Speaker 1: hiss would rise and fall in a period approximating a
Speaker 1: standard rotation of the Earth, so it seemed reasonable to
Speaker 1: assume it was generated by the Sun. But curiously, the
Speaker 1: signal seemed to repeat just four minutes, shy of twenty
Speaker 1: four hours. What Jansky eventually discovered was that the signal
Speaker 1: was not coming from the Sun at all. It was
Speaker 1: coming from somewhere in the middle of the Milky Way.
Speaker 1: Early in the twentieth century, a number of scientists, including
Speaker 1: Nikola Tesla and Lord William Kelvin, had speculated on the
Speaker 1: use of radio waves to contact lifeforms on other planets.
Speaker 1: But it wasn't until astronomer Frank Drake's nineteen sixty project
Speaker 1: Uzma that scientists took seriously the possibility that other civilizations
Speaker 1: might in fact be trying to contact us, and may
Speaker 1: have been doing so for quite some time. Drake's project
Speaker 1: is widely considered the birth of the modern Setti movement
Speaker 1: and inspired many others to pick up the mantle. But
Speaker 1: such projects require inordinate amounts of ambition and money. Fortunately,
Speaker 1: it was the nineteen sixties, and certainly in the case
Speaker 1: of the United States, never before or since had so
Speaker 1: much been invested in space exploration. It was a remarkably
Speaker 1: complex decade for the young nation, in which a new
Speaker 1: soul appeared to be awakening, embodied by the civil rights
Speaker 1: movement and the social optimism of Jack Kennedy's government. It
Speaker 1: was an optimism that grew in spite of less palatable agendas,
Speaker 1: but ultimately one that could not drown out the sound
Speaker 1: of distant bombs coming from the far East. It was
Speaker 1: a nation, in one sense blossoming in color, but in another,
Speaker 1: bleeding to death on the jungle floor of Vietnam, a
Speaker 1: nation drafting disproportionately poor or black soldiers to fight in
Speaker 1: unknown places, and yet at the same time a nation
Speaker 1: inspiring the world as it stepped forth from the Apollo
Speaker 1: eleven lunar module to plant a foot on the dusty
Speaker 1: surface of the Moon. The space race may have begun
Speaker 1: as a cynical and divisive battle to demonstrate economic primacy,
Speaker 1: But as Neil Armstrong emerged from NASA's spacecraft on July
Speaker 1: twenty first, nineteen sixty nine, what the world saw was
Speaker 1: nothing but a human being alone in the vastness of space,
Speaker 1: unfettered by politics or religion, his face and skin color
Speaker 1: hidden under a hulking, cumbersome spacesuit. In that moment, no
Speaker 1: country had ever before created an image of such profound symbolism,
Speaker 1: a moment to obliterate what divides us, revealing instead that
Speaker 1: above everything else, humanity was all of us. In that moment,
Speaker 1: we were all Neil Armstrong, taking one small step for
Speaker 1: humans and one giant leap for human kind. And then
Speaker 1: almost overnight, the funding dried up. The installation of the
Speaker 1: Nixon administration in nineteen sixty nine brought a raft of
Speaker 1: ideological changes, many of which were at odds with the
Speaker 1: scientific community. By nineteen seventy three, President Nixon had not
Speaker 1: only abolished the post of Scientific Adviser, but also the
Speaker 1: entire Office of Science and Technology. By the end of
Speaker 1: the year, spending on non defense based research and development
Speaker 1: had been reduced by a third. As a result, the
Speaker 1: National Science Foundation was forced to make drastic cuts to
Speaker 1: a number of research projects, including one particularly ambitious operation
Speaker 1: that had been running out of Perkins Observatory at Ohio
Speaker 1: State University since nineteen sixty five. Are you always taking
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Speaker 1: others and not yourself. Now it's time to take care
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Speaker 1: get started. That's teladoc dot com slash Unexplained podcast. The
Speaker 1: project was the brainchild of American physicist John D. Krause,
Speaker 1: who in nineteen fifty five proposed the modest plan to
Speaker 1: conduct a radio survey of the entire universe. Two years later,
Speaker 1: construction began on a structure of truly epic proportions, formed
Speaker 1: of one flat tiltable reflector measuring three hundred and forty
Speaker 1: feet by one hundred feet in height, a fixed curved
Speaker 1: reflector measuring three hundred and sixty feet by seventy feet
Speaker 1: in height, and a vast aluminium ground covering. By the
Speaker 1: time it was completed five years later, the telescope covered
Speaker 1: an area the size of three football fields. Fittingly, it
Speaker 1: was given the name Big Ear. The telescope was turned
Speaker 1: on in nineteen sixty five. Eight years later, Big Ear
Speaker 1: had recorded seventy percent of the sky and picked up
Speaker 1: over twenty thousand radio wave emitting objects, some of which
Speaker 1: had come from the furthest reaches of the universe, with
Speaker 1: a great number of them previously unknown signals. But in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy two, owing to the funding cuts, the United
Speaker 1: States Congress voted to end the Ohio Sky Survey. Perversely,
Speaker 1: the decision was a blessing in disguise for Setti, when
Speaker 1: it was decided to instead use the enormous telescope to
Speaker 1: focus solely on listening out for signs of alien life
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy three. The telescope was then pitched specifically
Speaker 1: at an area of the electromagnetic spectrum known as the
Speaker 1: hydrogen line. The line refers to the wave frequency roughly
Speaker 1: fourteen hundred and twenty megaherts of neutral hydrogen atoms, the
Speaker 1: most abundant substance in space. In nineteen fifty nine, astrophysicists
Speaker 1: Philip Morrison and Frank Drake reasoned that any advanced civilization
Speaker 1: would recognize the hydrogen line as the best frequency band
Speaker 1: to omit interstellar beacons, and so once it was set,
Speaker 1: the telescope would remain scouring the universe with each rotation
Speaker 1: of the Earth day after day, picking up the same
Speaker 1: familiar signals, But then something extraordinary happened. On Monday, August
Speaker 1: the fifteenth, nineteen seventy seven, forty seven year old SETTI
Speaker 1: volunteer Jerry Emmon finished his last shift and locked up
Speaker 1: the lab for the evening. Later that night, with Jerry
Speaker 1: tucked up in bed, back at the lab, lights blinked
Speaker 1: in the darkness and cooling fan's word as the printer,
Speaker 1: with its relentless metallic rattling, spewed out the data minute
Speaker 1: after minute, hour after hour. The familiar rhythms played out
Speaker 1: as the telescope's signals were analyzed and processed before appearing
Speaker 1: as alpha numeric code on the Sprocket fair paper. But then,
Speaker 1: at approximately ten sixteen pm Eastern Standard time, something upset
Speaker 1: the rhythm, an unusual signal that lasted no more than
Speaker 1: seventy two seconds before it was gone. Seconds later, as
Speaker 1: the lights continued to blink and the fans continued to hum,
Speaker 1: the printer settled back into its familiar metallic rhythm. It
Speaker 1: would be four days before Jerry would make it back
Speaker 1: to the observatory to analyze the data. On August nineteenth,
Speaker 1: just after dinner, Jerry made his way down to the
Speaker 1: lab moments later, he found himself staring down at a
Speaker 1: computer print out that was almost impossible to believe. The
Speaker 1: data is printed in columns, with each of the first
Speaker 1: fifty columns showing the intensity of a signal in relation
Speaker 1: to specific bands of frequency. The intensity was recorded on
Speaker 1: a scale of one to nine, with anything larger being
Speaker 1: represented by letters of the alphabet in an ascending scale
Speaker 1: from A to Z. Ordinarily, one would expect the redoubt
Speaker 1: to display mainly blank spaces where no intensity is recorded,
Speaker 1: or ones and twos for low intensity. But when Jerry
Speaker 1: looked at the print out from ten sixteen pm on Monday,
Speaker 1: August the fifteenth, his jaw dropped in a sea of blanks, ones,
Speaker 1: and twos. Standing out by a mile was the sequence
Speaker 1: six e q U J five. Without even thinking, Jerry
Speaker 1: grabbed a red pen, circled the numbers, and scrawled the
Speaker 1: word WOU in the margin. Not only had such a
Speaker 1: sequence never been seen before, the letter U alone had
Speaker 1: never before or been recorded by the telescope. The signal
Speaker 1: was later discovered to be coming from the direction of
Speaker 1: the constellation of Sagittarius, over two hundred like years away.
Speaker 1: To this day, the origin of the signal remains a mystery.
Speaker 1: As for Big Ear. In nineteen ninety eight, the radio
Speaker 1: telescope was ordered to be dismantled by the landowners to
Speaker 1: make way for a three hundred and eighty one LOTT
Speaker 1: development and a nine hole golf course. All elements of
Speaker 1: Unexplained are produced by me Richard McClain smith. Please subscribe
Speaker 1: and rate the show on iTunes, but feel free to
Speaker 1: get in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the
Speaker 1: stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps you have an
Speaker 1: explanation of your own you'd like to share. You can
Speaker 1: reach us online at Unexplained podcast dot com or on
Speaker 1: Twitter at Unexplained pod Now. It's time to take care
Speaker 1: of yourself. To make time for you, teledoc gives you
Speaker 1: access to a licensed therapist to help you get back
Speaker 1: to feeling your best. Speak to a licensed therapist by
Speaker 1: phone or video anytime between seven am to nine pm
Speaker 1: local time, seven days a week. Teledoc Therapy is available
Speaker 1: through most insurance or employers. Download the app, or visit
Speaker 1: teledoc dot com forward slash Unexplained Podcast Today to get started.
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