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