Wow! signal
From the UAP Encyclopedia, the open encyclopedia of UFO and UAP history · 🗓️ Event
Contents 4
| Type | Event |
|---|---|
| Also known as | Wow signal |
| Date | 15 August 1977 |
| Telescope | Big Ear, Ohio State University |
| Frequency | About 1420 MHz (hydrogen line) |
| Length | 72 seconds |
The Wow! signal was a strong, narrow-band radio signal recorded on 15 August 1977 by Ohio State University's Big Ear radio telescope during a SETI survey. Astronomer Jerry Ehman, checking the computer printout days later, circled the code "6EQUJ5" and wrote "Wow!" beside it. It is still the most famous candidate signal in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. It was never detected again.[1]
What was recorded
Big Ear was a fixed telescope that let Earth's rotation sweep the sky across its view, so any point in the sky stayed in view for about 72 seconds. The Wow! signal rose and fell over exactly that time, as a real source in the sky would. It was near 1420 MHz, the natural radio line of hydrogen that SETI researchers had expected others to use, and it came from the direction of the constellation Sagittarius.[1]
"6EQUJ5" is not a message. Each character is the signal's strength in one 12-second interval, with letters standing for values above 9; "U" was more than 30 times the background noise.[1]
Searches for a repeat
Ehman and others pointed telescopes at the same patch of sky many times over the following decades, including with the Very Large Array in New Mexico. Nothing was found. A one-off signal cannot be confirmed or studied, so most scientists treat it as unexplained rather than as evidence of a civilisation.[1]
Proposed natural explanations
In 2017 one researcher suggested a passing comet; other astronomers rejected the idea. In 2024 a team led by Abel Méndez of the Planetary Habitability Laboratory, working with archived data from the Arecibo Observatory, proposed that a sudden flare from a source such as a magnetar briefly brightened a cold cloud of hydrogen gas, making it glow strongly at 1420 MHz. They found several similar but much fainter signals in the Arecibo archive. The team calls this a hypothesis, and critics note it needs several coincidences at once.[2][3]
References
Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia articles “Wow! signal”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.
This page was last edited on 14 November 2026. Articles are written in our own words from the sources listed under References; disputed claims are attributed to the people who made them.
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