The real story
Big Ear, Ohio State University's radio telescope, was volunteer-run and scanning the sky for SETI. It logged signal strength as a single character per channel, so '6EQUJ5' meant the signal climbed far above the background noise and back down over 72 seconds, which is exactly what a fixed point in space would look like as Earth's rotation swept the telescope past it. Jerry Ehman found it a few days later while going through the printouts at his kitchen table.
The frequency sat almost exactly on the 1420 MHz hydrogen line, where SETI researchers guessed an alien civilisation might choose to transmit. Nobody has ever caught it again, despite many searches. Big Ear was demolished in 1998 to make way for a golf course. In 2024 one team proposed a natural cause: a cold hydrogen cloud briefly brightened by a burst from a passing star or magnetar. It remains unproven.
