Perhaps Tesla was right: In 1977, the Earth received a signal from space that no one has ever understood

The year 1977 is likely to remain in the memory of ufologists and alien life searchers for a long time to come: On 15 August of that year, an event occurred that gave humanity hope that we are not the only form of intelligent life in this universe. Astronomer Jerry Ehrman spotted a signal from deep space in the data collected by the Big Ear radio telescope.

OBOZREVATEL tells the story of the signal, which is known as WOW, and explains how Nikola Tesla could have predicted it before the end of the 19th century.

WOW!

On August 15, 1977, astronomer Jerry Ehrman was digging through endless data from the Big Ear Radio Telescope at Ohio University (USA). Among the many 1's and 2's that recorded the power of the signal received by the radio telescope, the strange code 6EQUJ5 immediately caught his eye.

Ehrman was so impressed by what he saw that he circled the code with a red pen and wrote WOW!

Of course, there was no question that the radio telescope had received an encrypted extraterrestrial message in the form of the 6EQUJ5 code, which had to be solved. Everything is a bit more trivial, though certainly fascinating.

The signal received by Big Ear came from the constellation Sagittarius, near the globular cluster M55, as the radio telescope scanned the cosmos for signals.

All tracked data was recorded in a graph, with signal strengths ranging from 1 to 9, and when the signal exceeded these values, letters of the Latin alphabet were used, from A to Z. Each number/letter in the graph meant that the radio telescope received a signal of that strength for 10 seconds.

So when Ehrman noticed 6EQUJ5 on the graph, he was so impressed that he wrote WOW! The code meant that the radio telescope had encountered a signal source whose strength was 6, and then it rose sharply to U and fell just as sharply to 5. All this lasted about one minute.

Neither before nor after that, when listening to space, had humanity ever received such a powerful signal. The highest level ever recorded was U.

Subsequently, astronomers tried to trace the signal again and launched a scan of the same part of the sky in the constellation Sagittarius, but it was in vain. If the signal source was there, it disappeared without a trace. Attempts to pick up the signal in other parts of the sky also failed.

Later, more powerful radio telescopes were used to search for the possible aliens, but the answer was silence every time.

Whether it was really a signal from aliens and whether it could carry any information value, humanity will probably never know.

Ehrman himself, despite his initial enthusiasm, later lost his enthusiasm. He admitted that he doubted that the signal was received from representatives of intelligent extraterrestrial life. In his opinion, the most likely explanation was that Big Ear had picked up a classified military satellite or an Earth radio signal reflected from space debris.

However, the secret satellite theory has a flaw: if it was indeed a satellite, the signal would have been picked up by other observatories located elsewhere on earth. But this did not happen.

On the other hand, if it was aliens, why did they never repeat their signal again? Are they waiting for a response from us?

In any case, in 2012, researchers used the Arecibo Observatory to send a signal from Earth containing messages, tweets and photos in the direction the WOW signal came from. So far, there has been no response.

Tesla's prophecy

At the end of the 19th century, the famous inventor Nikola Tesla announced that he had managed to pick up an extraterrestrial signal. He believed that the source of the signal was alien life from Mars.

At the time, he said that the signal was complex and incomprehensible to humans, but expressed confidence that sooner or later humanity would be able to understand it.

"Their means of interplanetary communication may be perfect, but we have not yet learnt their language. It's not even possible to offer a code yet... Suffice it to say that a message from Mars, which may be a triangle for them, will look like some other shape for us, and vice versa," the scientist said.

It is possible that the WOW signal was indeed sent by an alien intelligence, but humanity is not yet sufficiently developed to understand it.

As OBOZREVATEL previously reported, the M55 globular cluster contains a black hole that was first photographed by humanity.

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