When you think about UFO buffs and alien hunters you generally think of obese American dreamers with mild learning difficulties and a lost look in their eye. But that’s an unfair image and is only correct 95% of the time.

The Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) are a different bunch entirely. Formed decades ago, SETI are a group of full blown scientists (proper physicists and astronomers) with a passion for the unknown and a fine tuned barrage of scientific instruments at their disposal.

SETI have been sweeping the skies using minutely sensitive optical and radio equipment to search for anomalies that might have been generated in another world. They’re specifically looking for signals that appear to have come from an intelligent source.

Back in 1977 SETI picked up the so called Wow! signal on their Big Ear radio telescope. The Wow! signal appeared to come from deep space, be intelligent in origin and still to this day it’s yet to be explained away. The signal only lasted 72 seconds but it was more than 30 times stronger than the background noise, so something was definitely going on. Despite SETI’s best efforts, the signal has not been found again.

The image at the top shows the read out that caused the fuss at the time. It was the 15th August ’77 and SETI scientist Jerry Ehman was pouring over the readouts from the Big Ear telescope. To me the numbers look pretty much random, but to the trained eye of Ehman the readout was clear cut, he was so blown away by the level and intensity of the signal that he circled it and wrote “Wow!” hence the name.

So what does the code 6EQUJ5 mean? Well, the numbers represent the intensity of any signal received and as you can see in the read out, most of the numbers are low. If there’s a gap then the signal is very weak, but if the signal gets to above 10 (which is rare) they switch to using letters instead of numbers i.e. if the signal’s intensity is between 10 and 11 they put an “A” and if it’s between 11 and 12 it’s a “B”. The letter “U” was the most intense signal ever recorded from space, 30 times louder than normal deep space.

So was it an intelligent source of sound? The frustrating thing for the SETI guys is that it never returned. They ruled out some of the more obvious causes like equipment glitches and satellites etc., but without a rerun it’s difficult to really know what was going on.

Here’s a video of the sound itself, you can’t hear radio signals of course, so this is an audio read out of the intensity of the radio waves. See what you reckon: