On August 15, 1977, a volunteer astronomer named Jerry Ehman was scanning through printouts of radio data from Ohio State University's Big Ear telescope when he spotted something impossible — a signal 30 times stronger than anything they'd ever recorded from space. He grabbed a red pen and wrote one word in the margin: "Wow!"

For 72 seconds, something powerful and precise broadcast at the exact frequency of hydrogen — the universal channel any advanced civilization would know. Then it vanished. Nearly five decades later, no one has been able to explain it.

In this documentary, we trace the full story of the Wow! Signal — from the Big Ear telescope and the SETI program that made the detection possible, to the decades of follow-up searches, the controversial comet theory, the Fermi Paradox, and what modern science is doing to finally answer the question: is anyone out there?

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0:00 Intro
0:04 The Discovery
1:14 The Big Ear Telescope
3:32 Decoding the Signal
5:22 Ruling Out Earth
7:42 The Global Search
9:38 Natural Explanations
11:53 The Comet Theory
14:45 What If It Was Artificial?
16:57 Why Only Once?
18:52 The Modern Search
20:58 A Statistical Puzzle
22:32 The Fermi Paradox
24:21 Jerry Ehman Today
27:08 SETI's Modern Legacy
29:29 The Bigger Questions
32:48 Looking Forward
34:37 Is Anyone Out There?

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