Today in the history of astronomy, a major SETI project is conducting its first research.
Frank Drake (second from left) stands in front of the 300-foot telescope at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia, which is featured prominently in his SETI research. Credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
In 1958, a newly minted Harvard Ph.D. named Frank Drake Came to Green Bank. Usually they looked for specific radio astronomy targets – the Van Allen belts around the Earth, or the surface temperature of Venus, or the radiation belts of Jupiter. But on April 8, 1960, Drake and his colleagues instead tuned to two nearby stars, Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani. Their goal was simple: they were hunting aliens in the hopes of hearing radio communications originating from intelligent extraterrestrials.
UFOs were popular then, but Drake’s research was legitimate, being one of the first dedicated scientific searches for aliens. Drake was inspired by Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison, who the previous year had co-written a Nature The provocatively titled paper “The Discovery of Interstellar Communications.” It remains a fundamental SETI text.
Much to Drake’s surprise, his team actually heard something in those first few experiments. Unfortunately, it remained only a high altitude aircraft. Project Ozma, as the research was called (after L. Frank Baum’s fictional Emperor of Oz), was both the first SETI experiment and the first SETI false alarm. “We had failed to detect a genuine alien signal, it was true, but we had succeeded in demonstrating that the search was possible and even reasonable,” Drake wrote in his book. Is anyone outside? (Co-written with Dava Sobel).
