Part 4

If, during Project Ozma, a signal had been received and a reply sent, it would have been 22 years before we knew whether our answer had been received. A reply to a message from 80 light-years away received by the new radio telescope being built would take 160 years for confirmation.

Living languages are fluid. As new words are coined, others become obsolete. Definitions change with passing years.

King George I of England, upon inspecting Sir Christopher Wren’s masterpiece, St. Paul’s Cathedral, told the famous architect that his creation was “amusing, awful and artificial.” Sir Christopher was delighted with the royal compliments.

Three centuries ago amusing meant amazing, awful meant awe-inspiring, and artificial meant artistic.

With time as dimension in universal communication, we would have to choose our words with care.

The accelerated scientific progress of recent years will doubtless continue, with new ways and means of cosmic communication being developed. Radio astronomy itself is barely three decades old. Revolutionary techniques in interstellar contacts may be just around the corner.

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Has radio communication with alien beings already occurred? This is a startling possibility.

On August 22, 1924, the planet Mars approached to within thirty-four and a half million miles from the earth. Radio broadcasting stations were silenced and scientists listened for a possible message from across space.

At the suggestion of the late Dr. David Todd, professor emeritus of astronomy at Amherst College, the U.S. Government through diplomatic channels requested that all countries with high-power transmitters silence their stations for five minutes every hour from 11:50 p.m. August 21 to 11:50 p.m. August 23.

Station WOR, Newark, N.J., reported receiving a word translated as “Eunza.” Other stations announced receiving strange signals.

Twenty-three years later, in 1947, Gene Darling, an early “ham” operator and General Electric Co. employee in Schenectady, N. Y., said he and an assistant had failed to turn off a test transmitter. “It kept on sending out automatic code signals,” he said, “and fearing criticism, we never told of our mistake.”

But something else happened during this 1924 test period of silence that remains a mystery today.

C. Francis Jenkins, of Washington, D. C., had only recently invented a radio photo message continuous-transmission machine. He was asked by Dr. Todd to take a record of any signals received during the periods of silence.

The recording device was attached to a receiver adjusted to the 6,000 meter wave length. Incoming signals caused flashes of light, which were printed on the film by an instrument passing over its surface from side to side. The film was in a roll, 30 feet long and six inches wide, and it was slowly unwound by clockwork under the instrument and light bulb which responded to transmitted sounds.

When the film was developed, it disclosed a fairly regular arrangement of dots and dashes along one side, but on the other side, at almost evenly spaced intervals, were curiously jumbled groups each taking the form of a man’s face.

Scientists at the radio division of the National Bureau of Standards and military code experts examined the film and admitted it was a freak that they couldn’t explain.

“The film of faces is a permanent record that can be studied,” Dr. Todd said, “and who knows just what these signals may have been?”

There have been other incidents. Marconi, the father of wireless, heard strange signals in 1921. And in 1928 Prof. A. M. Low, famous English scientist, listened to a “mysterious series of dots and dashes.”

Ham radio operators have occasionally reported curious stories. In QST, official organ of the International Amateur Radio Union, July, 1950, issue, Byron Goodman, assistant technical editor of the magazine, tells of a ham receiving strange signals.

Certain unexplainable “echoes” were heard by scientists in 1927, and again in 1928 and 1934 while they were experimenting with the capabilities of radio. The Danish scientist, Hals, and two Scandinavian experimenters, Størmer and Petersen, received echoes from 280,000 to 2,800,000 miles from the earth.

Dr. Arthur C. Clarke reported that in a series of tests in Holland radio echoes of eight seconds delay (corresponding to a reflector at a distance of 744,000 miles) were obtained repeatedly in 1946.

What is the explanation?

Dr. Ronald N. Bracewell, professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University and co-author with J. L. Pawsey of a standard textbook (Radio Astronomy, Oxford University Press, 1955), has a theory. He suggests that some of these echoes may have come from a satellite in orbit around our sun.

If highly advanced beings have achieved space travel, placing a satellite in a solar system would be more practical than beaming radio signals continuously at thousands of stars for thousands of years.

Dr. Bracewell suggests that the experimental broadcasts included trigger signals that caused the satellite to respond with echoes. If the satellite’s reply was repeated by man, the satellite would probably release its store of information.

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If man does make contact with a superior alien civilization, what will happen?