The "Wow!" Signal. On August 15, 1977, a radio telescope called Big Ear, at Ohio State University, was searching the sky for a signal from an extaterrestrial intelligence. As Jerry Ehman read the printout of the night's observations, he noticed a surprisingly strong and brief signal. He circled it, and wrote "Wow!" in the margin. The little blip would go down in history as the "Wow! signal." SETI astronomers are fairly confident that this signal did not come from a source on Earth, and that the