What do you think about this?
On the fifteenth of August in 1977, a radio telescope in Ohio nicknamed the Big Ear was quietly scanning the sky for signs of intelligent life. A few days later, a volunteer astronomer named Jerry Ehman was going over the printouts when one column of numbers stopped him cold. For seventy two seconds, the telescope had picked up a narrow, powerful burst of radio energy from the direction of the constellation Sagittarius. It was about thirty times stronger than the background hum of space. Stunned, Ehman circled the reading and wrote a single word in the margin: Wow.
What made it so tantalizing was where it sat on the dial. The signal came in almost exactly at the frequency of hydrogen, the most common element in the universe, long considered the natural channel an alien civilization might choose to broadcast on, precisely because any astronomer anywhere would be listening there.
For nearly fifty years since, astronomers have pointed telescopes back at that patch of sky again and again. The signal has never returned. Its rise and fall matched exactly what you would expect from a fixed point in the heavens sweeping through the telescope’s view, which argues against a passing satellite or an earthly glitch.
Could it be that for seventy two seconds in 1977, we caught one word of a conversation never meant for us, and have been straining to hear the rest ever since?
A one time natural fluke, or a message we will never decode? What do you think the Wow signal really was?
What do you think about this? Scans of Gunung Padang in Indonesia show hidden chambers deep inside the hill, and one team dated its oldest layers to 25,000 years ago. The study was retracted in 2024. The chambers have never been opened. Natural hill, or the oldest pyramid on Earth?
What do you think about this? Edgar Cayce gave over 14,000 trance readings, all written down and still on file. He said proof of Atlantis would rise near Bimini in 1968. That year divers found a half mile road of giant stone blocks there. True seer, or lucky guess?
What do you think about this? Waverly Hills Sanatorium in Kentucky built a 500 foot tunnel just to move its dead out of sight of the living. It closed in 1961. Visitors still report a boy rolling a ball across empty floors. Restless spirits, or a dark building playing tricks on the mind?
What do you think about this? In 1891, a poor French priest named Bérenger Saunière began tearing up his church floor, then spent the next two decades funding lavish buildings on a stipend that should not have covered it. Real treasure, or a secret about how he ran his church?
What do you think about this? Puma Punku’s H-shaped stone blocks, cut from andesite by a culture dating to roughly 600 CE, are flat to within a couple millimeters, with no known metal tools hard enough to do it. Lost technique, or something we haven’t caught up to yet?
What do you think about this? The Georgia Guidestones were commissioned anonymously in 1979 by a man calling himself R.C. Christian, and no one ever learned his real name before the monument was bombed on July 6, 2022. Message, or a monument that did not deserve to stand?
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