You may be familiar with the famous “Wow!” signal. If you’re not familiar with the story, back in 1977, a radio telescope at Ohio State University detected a 72-second radio burst from space. Astronomer Jerry Ehman circled the printout with a red pen and wrote the word “wow!” beside it.
We’ve never heard such a signal again. There was no follow-up—just a one-time 72-second burst in a narrowband radiofrequency that has puzzled researchers for years. There have been theories, of course. And today, we get a brand-new one from our favorite Harvard astronomer—and the guy who thinks every inexplicable space occurrence is probably aliens—Avi Loeb.
I’ve written about him a lot recently, mostly because he’s fun and seems more hopeful than crazy. And if you guess that a mysterious space occurrence is “aliens” enough times, eventually you’ll be right.
As you’d imagine, he interprets every odd behavior of the mysterious 3I/ATLAS space object as being yet another example of how that thing is somehow of alien origin. Even though NASA scientists, expressing an abundance of caution and restraint, assume it’s just a regular old comet that’s just doing weird things.
Occam’s razor and all that.
Remember That Signal Beamed at Earth in the 1970s? Scientists May Have Found the Source.
Loeb posits that the mysterious “Wow!” signal might have a source. That source might have been 3I/ATLAS, whatever it is.
3I/ATLAS was discovered this year, and it’s only the third known visitor from beyond our solar system. According to Loeb, it’s potentially a technologically advanced floating space…thing from a distant civilization.
Loeb crunched some numbers and found that the object and the “Wow!” signal came from eerily similar directions. The odds of that being a random alignment? About 0.6 percent, he says. Low, in other words.
There’s a problem with that: in 1977, 3I/ATLAS would’ve been about 600 astronomical units away, which is roughly in the neighborhood of 55 billion miles. For it to beam a signal all the way to the earth from 55 billion miles away, it would’ve needed a transmitter powered with something like a nuclear reactor.
There’s also the fact that no telescope has detected any transmissions from 3I/ATLAS. So, Loeb is calling for what essentially amounts to a police stakeout of a space object. Round-the-clock surveillance in the hope of capturing some signal emitted from 3I/ATLAS that could potentially reveal it to be a stealthy alien artifact…or whatever it is.
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