On August 15, 1977, an Ohio radio telescope caught a signal from Sagittarius so strong and so clean that the astronomer circled it in red pen and wrote 'Wow!' It has never been heard again — and the hunt for what it was is still going.
John Michael Godier's calm, thorough overview — the ideal entry point into why one 72-second blip has obsessed astronomers for half a century.
Decode the famous string '6EQUJ5': it isn't a message but an intensity plot, peaking at 30 standard deviations above the noise near the 1420 MHz hydrogen line.
The moment itself — Jerry Ehman reviewing a printout days later, seeing the anomaly, and scrawling the word that named it forever.
The scientist re-analyzing the original Big Ear data explains his 'Arecibo Wow' project and why the signal may have a natural, repeating cousin.
Scientific American on the leading natural explanation: a magnetar's flare slamming into a cold hydrogen cloud, making it blaze briefly in radio.
A pointed rebuttal to the 2017 comet hypothesis that briefly claimed to have solved the case — a lesson in how debunkings get debunked.
Space.com surveys the newest archival analysis narrowing down the source — and why 'probably not aliens' still isn't the same as 'solved.'