The Almanac of Collapsing Records

The Wow! Signal — Ohio, 1977

The Big Ear radio telescope observatory, a farm field outside Delaware, Ohio

August 15, 1977 — a volunteer astronomer at a university radio telescope built into an old farm field, the great flat reflector turned to the sky, the sky survey grinding out its printouts night after night on fanfold paper

A column of numbers no earthly thing should make. This breach reads the VOLUNTEER AT THE PRINTOUT: a farm-field radio telescope grinding out its nightly survey in strings of characters, days-old paper reviewed by hand, page after page of ordinary noise — until one narrow band of the strip carries a burst that swells and fades in the exact shape a signal from deep space would draw, six characters climbing far past anything seen before. The witness is read only at the desk and the reading: the machinery and the tedium held softly in the background, the moment itself all wonder. The fragment is the subject's own: the sudden certainty that something out there had answered, the one word they wrote in the margin — and the memory beneath it of a time the ordinary suddenly cracked open and showed them something enormous, a moment of astonishment they never let go of.

From the record

the Big Ear radio telescope, run by Ohio State University, sat in a field outside Delaware, Ohio, conducting a survey listening for radio signals from space
the telescope's output was printed as columns of numbers and letters on fanfold paper, reviewed by hand by volunteers days after it was recorded
on August 15, 1977 a signal appeared in one channel, lasting about 72 seconds, rising and falling in the pattern expected of a source beyond Earth
the intensity was recorded in a code where a sequence of characters marked the burst as 6EQUJ5, far above the background
a volunteer astronomer reviewing the printout circled the column and wrote 'Wow!' in the margin in red ink, giving the signal its name
the signal was never detected again despite repeated later searches

The era door

a plain metal-framed door in the cinderblock wall of the observatory shack, the paint chipped institutional green, a spring hinge that pulls it shut behind you

BIG EAR — AUGUST 1977

Walk this day yourself — free

A guided walk with Wallace — you are placed inside the record as a witness, and you carry a memory of your own back out. Free, ~20 minutes.

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