UFO, page 20
It was out of these conditions that the idea for a national radio observatory, governed by a consortium of colleges and universities and funded by the US government, had been born. After a nationwide survey of thirty suitable locations, the National Science Foundation had moved forward in the summer of 1956 with the $3.5 million purchase of five thousand acres surrounding Pocahontas County, a flat, shallow valley that would experience less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the radio interference that the Naval Research Laboratory faced in DC. Construction for the remote site would run about $9 million, and engineering plans were put in place for a telescope, larger than anyone in the US had yet seen. The town of Green Bank, population twenty-one, some four hours’ drive from DC, would be transformed into radio astronomy’s “Shangri-La,” one report declared, and scientists began to line up what experiments and investigations they wanted to pursue, from studying the sun to understanding the hydrogen line. The groundbreaking took place in the local high school gym at the height of the space race, just thirteen days after the Soviet launch of Sputnik.
To preserve the radio silence around the facility, the Federal Communications Commission designated the “National Radio Quiet Zone,” a giant rectangle that would eventually encompass roughly 108 miles north and south and 120 miles east and west, stretching across 8.3 million acres of West Virginia, Virginia, and a sliver of Maryland, within which electronics and broadcast transmitters were severely restricted. The US Navy also began secret construction of its own giant $79 million antenna inside the quiet zone, a few valleys over near the village of Sugar Grove. Ultimately, though, the scale of the six-hundred-foot antenna—so wide that the Washington Monument could be laid sideways inside with room left over, and an engineering feat compared to the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge—was too massive to be kept secret, and news reports revealed it as part of the effort to explore outer space and the origins of the universe. Popular Mechanics called the antenna “the biggest machine that men have ever built,” but construction was abandoned in the 1960s after the military had spent $63 million alone on it, with no tangible results.II
* * *
Drake was one of Green Bank’s first three staff members, and upon his arrival the site’s grand title was more aspirational than reality—construction hadn’t even started on the site’s two main telescopes, and so Drake and his colleagues quickly started building a much more modest model, effectively copying an eighty-five-foot instrument from other existing designs in order to get the observatory up and running.
As he watched the new tool rise from the hillside out his window, Drake marveled at the advancement he had seen in just a few short years. The two telescopes he’d used at Harvard would likely have not been able to detect signals from other civilizations more than just a few light-years away, but between the larger sizes at Green Bank and new advances in radio technology—like the invention of a solid-state maser, which improved sensitivity a thousandfold and would lead to the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics for its inventing trio, and a parametric amplifier, which increased Green Bank’s sensitivity a hundredfold—the theoretical detection scale had been pushed out as far as twelve light-years, an amount of space that included multiple sun-like stars. Earth could now realistically detect signals from other civilizations.
“It was a remarkable idea whose brilliance has been dulled by long familiarity,” wrote astronomer Seth Shostak decades later. “Hardware that we’ve already built for other purposes, accessible right here on the ground, could discover sentient beings living on unseen worlds. We could find cosmic company with no more effort than turning a dial.”
Over burgers and fries at a nearby diner, Drake pitched his colleagues on using the new technologies to look for life beyond Earth. After an awkward silence, the observatory’s director, Lloyd Berkner, responded enthusiastically. “He had a reputation in science for being an optimistic gambler, and he loved the idea,” Drake recalled. “In fact, before the waitress brought our check, he gave me authorization to proceed.”
Drake named the effort Project Ozma, after Princess Ozma, the ruler of Oz (“I, too, was dreaming of a land far away, peopled by strange and exotic beings,” Drake wrote later), stepping fully into one of the oldest intellectual quests of humanity, the chance to figure out whether we are alone in the universe, what science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke has called “one of the supreme questions of philosophy.”
* * *
The idea that we’re alone in the universe as humans is largely a Western one—and the debate that we’re not is a mostly recent one. From almost the dawn of human time, early scholars and scientists had considered the origin of the universe, including Lucretius, who early in the first century BC had imagined the existence of atoms and speculated, “We must realize that there are other worlds in other parts of the universe, with races of different men and different animals.” Indeed, the seemingly controversial idea that would consume Drake and the modern scientific community is a debate largely unique to Western, Judeo-Christian traditions. Many Eastern and Indigenous traditions, like Buddhism, have long recognized and embraced what’s formally known as the “plurality of worlds” or “cosmic pluralism,” the idea that there are many inhabited worlds, perhaps even many of them “human,” spread about the universe. Pythagoreans even believed that the moon and stars were peopled by other humanlike beings.
In the Western tradition, though, the school of thought known as Ptolemaic-Aristotelian dominated for centuries, a belief that the heavens revolved around Earth (not the sun) and that humanity was special, unique, and—as Christianity advanced—a gift from God. “For centuries Platonists, Aristolians, and Christians in their metaphysical speculation refused to accept that there were other ‘Earths’ analogous to our own,” Karl Guthke wrote in his defining intellectual history of humanity’s embrace of other worlds.
This worldview was challenged—and ultimately upended by Copernicus, who in the sixteenth century first posited that the Earth revolved around the sun and that, perhaps, some of the bright lights in the night sky were other neighboring planets and not just stars. It was a theory with dramatic implications for science, theology, philosophy, and even literature. Goethe wrote, “Of all discoveries and convictions none could have had a more powerful effect on the human mind than the teaching of Copernicus.” As Guthke traces, it took nearly a half millennium for Copernicus’s new science to evolve, as “the dangerous heresy ha[d] become a new gospel.” Only with the observation of Galileo in the early 1600s that the moon was similar to Earth and that Jupiter had moons of its own did Copernicus’s idea begin to gain more widespread acceptance, even as he sidestepped the implications of his observations. As Guthke notes, “Galileo himself, soon widely hailed as the ‘new Columbus,’ was sufficiently worldly wise to make a point of evading the delicate question of whether the planets were inhabited.”
For hundreds of years, as astronomy advanced and writers and thinkers began to play around with imagining worlds beyond, Christian scholars—whose entire faith tradition would be upended by the idea of other beings and planets—were primarily concerned with how such a discovery would be treated doctrinally: How does one square other worlds and other beings with the Christian teachings that God sent his own son to redeem us, sacrificing him for our sins, and that God created everything for the benefit of humans? What if the other inhabitants of other worlds somehow were better than humans, more advanced, happier, more blessed? In many ways, the debate for centuries paralleled the challenge the Catholic Church faced as European explorers discovered the Americas teeming with indigenous life. Would alien beings be animals, “humans” (that is, descendants of Adam and Eve), or something else—perhaps humans of a different lineage, not descendants of Adam, and thus untouched by original sin, thus beings who did not need to be redeemed?III
By the 1700s and 1800s, amid the Enlightenment, the debate began to progress on more scientific lines; Edmund Halley, as an aside in one of his works, declared “it is not taken for granted that the Earth is one of the Planets, and they are all with reason suppos’d Habitable.” Discoveries around 1860 by Gustav Kirchhoff and Robert Bunsen about spectrum analysis—that is, the science of breaking apart light to determine what elements are present in the light’s source in far-off celestial bodies—established for the first time that not only were there other planets and stars, but that they were made of the same elements as our solar system, planet, and sun, proof of a literal universality that the chemicals that make up us and our world also make up all the rest as well. It was becoming hard not to imagine that there might be other worlds out there.
Now, as Drake saw it, the group’s efforts inaugurated a third era of what he called the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). “For the first time, SETI embodied philosophical, qualitative, and quantitative elements,” he wrote. Project Ozma had the potential to be its defining effort.
Fate aligned again just as Drake began Project Ozma: Otto Struve, the man whose lecture long ago had inspired Drake to realize he wasn’t alone in imagining other life in the universe, stepped in as director of the observatory in July 1959. The new director’s outlook and support was all Drake could hope to have as he started his observations, building a receiver that studied that 21 cm hydrogen line where astronomers most imagined other civilizations would share signals—the interstellar water hole.IV
Drake had intended to keep his research secret until completion—the idea of using government resources to search for extraterrestrial life still seemed too controversial to him—but in September 1959, the Green Bank team was startled to read a Nature paper, written by two Cornell physicists, proposing just the type of study Drake was already leading. Radio telescopes, the Cornell team suggested, were now advanced enough to be capable of detecting interstellar signals, and “the probability of success is difficult to estimate, but if we never search, the chance of success is zero,” Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison wrote.
Their hypothesis had grown out of their own work in gamma rays, which crossed the galaxy before arriving at Earth, and Cocconi had first started to wonder if that was how other civilizations might communicate—but as they learned more, they concluded that radio waves made more sense.V Cocconi and Morrison even surmised in their piece that aliens would use the same frequency Drake had zeroed in on: the 21 cm hydrogen line.
Suddenly, Drake and Struve realized, their crazy idea might not be quite so crazy.
I. The significance of Struve’s talk flew right over the heads of most audience members; the Cornell Daily Sun’s write-up of the lecture didn’t even mention Struve’s stunning conclusion.
II. With time, the secret life of Sugar Grove would become one of the military’s most important eavesdropping sites, as it became a central part of the global listening network by US intelligence and the National Security Agency, established by Harry Truman in 1952 but not publicly acknowledged by the US government until 1975. In reports by the New York Times published after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, James Bamford called Sugar Grove Station the nation’s “largest eavesdropping bug” and later revelations from Edward Snowden would show that the facility intercepted millions of calls, emails, and text messages per day for the NSA.
III. The Bishop of Chester, John Wilkins, wrote in the 1630s a treatise, The Discovery of a World in the Moone, or, A Discourse Tending to Prove That ’tis Probable There May Be Another Habitable World in That Planet, about whether the residents of the moon were likely to live in a state of blessedness and how best to bring them to salvation.
IV. As Drake recalled, “There’s something aesthetically appealing about the idea of communicating with aliens at an interstellar waterhole, just the way so many species of animals have traditionally gathered at the waterholes of Earth, to share another vital resource. We suspect that water is very important to life elsewhere in the universe as well. What’s more, the electromagnetic waterhole occupies a very quiet region, containing the least possible extraneous noise from the Galaxy (and the Earth’s atmosphere). This fact makes it a logical choice as a frequency for transmitting signals over great distances. That is, it appears logical to us. Time will tell if the logic has truly universal appeal.”
V. Their paper in Nature was titled “Searching for Interstellar Communications,” and Morrison for decades would maintain it was a better—and more accurate—name than SETI. “SETI has always made me unhappy because it somehow denigrates the situation,” he told an interviewer in 2003. “It wasn’t the intelligence we could detect; it was the communications we could detect. Yes, they imply intelligence, but that’s so evident that it’s better to talk about getting signals from them.”
19 Phantom Signal
While Frank Drake was elated at the press attention that the Nature paper received, Otto Struve fumed. Others were about to claim the credit and notoriety that should belong to the Green Bank observatory, and to preserve that authority, he seized upon a lecture opportunity at MIT to preempt the announcement of Project Ozma, rewriting one lecture to focus on the new search for extraterrestrial intelligence. In November 1959, he laid out a grand vision to a rapt audience in MIT’s Kresge Auditorium as part of its Compton Lecture Series. “It is probable that a good many of the billions of planets in the Milky Way support intelligent forms of life,” the astronomer said. “To me this conclusion is of great philosophical interest. I believe that science has reached the point where it is necessary to take into account the action of intelligent beings, in addition to the classical laws of physics.”
The announcement made headlines in the science community, and colleagues came out of the woodwork to support Drake’s flight of fancy. One day, an English electrical engineer came by the observatory; Drake set him to work on the receiver he planned to use for Ozma, calibrating it to make sure it could differentiate between real interstellar signals and random electrical fluctuations. The head of a Boston firm, meanwhile, offered Drake a prototype parametric amplifier that would significantly boost the receiver’s sensitivity—the equipment was so delicate that one of the firm’s engineers drove it to Green Bank, nestled in the passenger seat of a Morgan sports car.
Early on the morning of April 8, 1960, the first formal observations began. Assisted by his two female student assistants—Ellen Gundermann and Margaret Hurley,I Drake spent about forty-five minutes crouched five stories off the ground inside a garbage can–sized device installed inside the eighty-five-foot telescope dish, turning the amplifier. “It had the simplest possible output device: a chart recorder, consisting of a pen that wiggled with each sound received from space, leaving squiggles describing sounds on a moving strip of paper,” Drake later recalled in his memoir.
By 5 a.m., all there was to do was sip coffee, and wait. The room was filled with tension and excitement. “What we were doing was unprecedented, of course, and no one knew what to expect,” he remembered. “It was as though we expected the aliens to speak to us at any moment.” Just in case, he had a loudspeaker and audiotape recorder at the ready.
They began with Tau Ceti, a star in the Cetus the Whale constellation, that was roughly similar to the sun and about twelve light-years away. Hours passed with nothing and finally Tau Ceti set over the horizon around noon. Then the team moved to Epsilon Eridani, a young star in the southern constellation of Eridanus that is just ten light-years away and the third-closest star visible to the naked eye.
Within just five minutes, the room erupted into chaos. “A burst of noise shot out of the loudspeaker, the chart recorder started banging off the scale, and we were all jumping at once, wild with excitement,” Drake said. “I felt I was reliving my encounter with the Pleiades all over again, only this time I wasn’t alone, and I was actively searching. Could discovery really be this easy?”
After the moment of collective elation, the team got to work to verify the possible signal, testing their equipment and moving the telescope away from the star to test its direction. Immediately, they saw the noise disappear, and for a moment, hope rose even higher—that seemed to indicate the signal indeed had come from Epsilon Eridani. But when they moved the telescope back, the room fell silent, and stayed that way. “We couldn’t tell if it had come from the star, or if it was some kind of terrestrial interference that just happened to quit the moment we moved the telescope,” Drake recalled.
Though the team still had questions, word spread that Ozma had heard a signal. Press calls poured in, hoping for more information, but Drake waved them away, solely focused on the work in front of him. Each day, the telescope was tuned on Epsilon Eridani as soon as the start broke the horizon, and before long, a new tool was added—an ordinary antenna that would pick up normal terrestrial interference was set out the window and tied to its own recorder to double-check any other incoming signals. The days settled into a quiet routine; it became, Drake later said, almost boring, until, on the fifth day, the signal returned, same as before, pulsing eight times a second—this time, though, the ordinary antenna picked it up, too, meaning that the source was on Earth. The team was crestfallen. They’d stumbled upon nothing more significant than a plane passing overhead, though as they calculated the height and speed of the detected plane, they realized the aircraft must be flying at a stratospheric altitude literally unheard of at the time.
