Wow! A first encounter or a space fluke?

“Wow!” That’s what the astronomer monitoring the data wrote in the margin of the record of the event.

In the late 1970s, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence hit the jackpot. Or did it?

Just before midnight on April 15, 1977, the University of Ohio’s radio telescope, the “Big Ear”, recorded a remarkable 72-second signal.

“It had all the characteristics one would anticipate from a signal produced by a deep space transmitter”, senior astronomer Seth Shostak, of the SETI project, later wrote.

Scientists tried to find it again, this possible message from distant life forms. They knew the coordinates and the frequency of the signal. But despite repeated attempts, all they could find over the years has been … silence … enduring silence.

It was hard to believe that mankind might have just had its first encounter with intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. If so, why did it stop?

A number of alternative explanations have been put forward in the years since the event. In April 2016, a new theory was proposed.

Astrophysicist Antonio Paris of St. Petersburg College in Florida told The Guardian he thought he had solved the puzzle, and he was seeking crowdfunding for the equipment needed to research his idea.

“It’s a cold case,” he said. “So I went to various databases to find culprits or suspects that were at this crime scene at the time.”

Paris said he found two suspicious-looking comets were passing through the general area when the signal was detected, and it may have been nothing more than the radio fingerprint of hydrogen that one or the other was spewing into space.

That’s plausible. Comets can give off hydrogen, and these two were in the general area. What’s more, the Big Ear was at the time tuned in to the same frequency as that produced by hydrogen.

Except, the Big Ear was programmed to routinely conduct two sweeps of scan areas at a 70-second interval, and the signal appeared in only one of them. Comets aren’t so fast that one could be detected in a sector of space and be gone 70 seconds later, the university radio telescope’s then-chief astronomer Robert Dixon said, according to Shostak.

Moreover, Shostak said, SETI has often conducted scans in the vicinity of comets and never gotten results like the Wow! signal.

So here we are today, and the 41st anniversary of what may have been a momentous occasion in the history of mankind has again passed all but unnoticed, aside from scant newspaper articles.

But we are a little closer to answering the question, “Are we alone?”

The thinking is life would need a planet to live on, and since 1988, we’ve discovered there are more than just nine. At last count, it’s 3,758.

It’s now believed most stars have planetary systems, and there are an estimated 100 billion stars in the Milky Way alone.

As celebrity astrophysicist (imagine that!) Neil deGrasse Tyson recently put it, “To declare that Earth must be the only planet in the cosmos with life would be inexcusably egocentric of us.”