On August 15, 1977, Ohio State's 'Big Ear' radio telescope caught a narrowband signal so strong, so perfectly alien, that Jerry Ehman scrawled one word on the printout. Decades of listening at the same spot in Sagittarius have returned nothing but silence. Was it a message, a comet, or a burst of stimulated hydrogen?
The people whose entire job is hunting alien signals explain why this one still haunts them: a 30-sigma spike at the protected hydrogen line, textbook-perfect, and gone.
A full documentary reconstructing that summer night at Big Ear and the decades of failed attempts to hear it again. The best cinematic way in.
The famous printout code '6EQUJ5', the antenna geometry that means it came from the sky and not the ground, and the full catalog of every explanation ever floated.
John Michael Godier digs into the more exotic natural hypotheses — and why 'boring' explanations for the Wow! signal turn out to be strange in their own right.
The 2024 archival re-analysis proposing the signal was a hydrogen cloud briefly lit up like a cosmic maser by a passing burst of radiation. Natural — but rare and spectacular.
Scientific American weighs the maser hypothesis against the case for a one-off event — and asks whether 'solved' is really the right word for something that never repeated.
Astronomer David Kipping's Cool Worlds lab steps back to ask the hard question: what would it actually take to confirm — or forever rule out — an intelligent origin?