Flying saucer sightings, alien encounters, and abductions only exist in movies and in the minds of tricksters, liars, or highly suggestive people. There is no record or scientific evidence that there is life beyond this planet. No one has visited us or even contacted us from other worlds.
However, that does not mean that the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence is impossible. In fact, it’s not even too unlikely, given the enormity of the universe. The famous Drake equation tries to quantify the probability that there is someone out there to contact, and the truth is that, although it is a theoretical approach, it has led some scientists to assure that intelligent life in the universe must be something relatively common.
Despite this, and although for decades attempts have been made to detect any type of signal that may come from an extraterrestrial intelligence, no one has been able to receive or establish communication with any being from another planet .
The closest thing to a contact with another form of intelligent life was a signal detected on August 15, 1977 by the Big Ear radio telescope in Ohio, which was looking for extraterrestrial radio signals within the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence project (SETI by its acronym in English). The telescope scanned the sky and transmitted the collected data to a machine that recorded the signals in the form of codes, which were printed on meters and meters of continuous paper. That day, the young professor Jerry R. Ehman reviewed the records and found an anomalous signal, of great intensity, coming from a place located about 220 light years from Earth and whose origin could not be the background noise .
Ehman was impressed by that sequence of numbers and letters ─6EQUJ5─, he picked up a red pen, circled it and wrote down a single word next to it: “Wow!”, Involuntarily baptizing the first serious indication of a possible extraterrestrial contact, the Wow Signal. !
There has been much speculation about the origin of the signal captured by the Big Ear. Some hypotheses have suggested that it could come from an advanced civilization, although the truth is that no matter how much we tried to search again, nothing similar was received. Jerry R. Ehman himself was of the opinion that it must have been some signal originating from Earth and reflected in some piece of space junk.
Recently, the astronomer Antonio Paris, of St. Petersburg College in Florida, has pointed out another possible origin. Paris claims that the signal is related to the passage of two comets that are now known to have been traveling through that area at the time the message was detected. The large hydrogen clouds released by these celestial bodies would be the cause of the famous signal, according to the researcher.
Soon, both comets will pass through the same area again, and Paris is looking for funding to install a telescope with which to demonstrate its theory and finally reveal the origin of the mysterious signal .
