A Voice in the Night

SEARCHING FOR OZ

Solomon Martin would probably not have been part of the biggest scientific breakthrough of the twentieth century, and maybe ever, had he not read The War of the Worlds in 1907 when he was in the sixth grade. Radio was in its early stages at the time, the Martians got into his head, and he built his own crystal receiver two years later and aimed it at the red planet. He was of course disappointed by the unrelenting silence. His system, he decided, just wasn’t good enough. He needed something better.

During World War I he served as a communications specialist under Edwin Armstrong. He maintained later that he had contributed ideas to Armstrong that led to the development of the superheterodyne receiver and eventually to FM radio. I can’t say how much of that was true. What I knew about him was simply that he was a decent guy and he never really let go of the idea of establishing radio contact with Martians. And okay, that was only half serious. But while the rest of us were talking about playing for the Philadelphia A’s, he was experimenting with radio waves.

Any chance he might have had for a normal existence probably went away when Emily, his wife of two years, died during the great flu epidemic. After that he devoted his life exclusively to radio technology. And he never really got away from building ever larger antennas in his back yard. But despite its canals, Mars remained silent. Sol became an amateur astronomer while launching the White Star Radio Company, which built and sold quality receivers.

He survived successive jolts during the 1920s. The Milky Way, it turned out, was not the entire universe, but only a miniscule part of a vastly larger system. Then came the news that, despite the popular notion that the universe was immutable and unchangeable, it was in fact changing. It was expanding. And finally, better telescopes revealed that the canals were an illusion. It seemed for a time as if science simply couldn’t be trusted to make up its mind.

The great cosmic question, as Sol explained it to me one summer afternoon in the midst of the Depression, was whether there was intelligent life anywhere else. “I don’t know why that seems so important,” he said. “But somehow it’s the only cosmic issue that really matters.”

A month or so after the attack on Pearl Harbor, he erected a 35-foot radio antenna in back of his home. When he told his neighbors he was listening for alien chatter they smiled politely. One of them asked me if he meant Nazis. Was he working for the OSS?

The antenna was attached to a Zenith console with a tape recorder mounted on top. By then he was tuned in to Alpha Centauri. But there was still only static.

“Finding an artificial radio signal from an extraterrestrial source,” he said, “would constitute the biggest scientific coup since we discovered we’re not the center of the universe.” Sol looked older than he was. He was prematurely gray, wrinkled, with rumpled hair and eyes set too close together. But I could still see the Boy Scout in those features. The kid who took the world seriously, who really did want to find out what was over the next hill. “There’s more to it, of course,” he used to say. “If at some point we detect a signal, we’ll begin to grasp our place in the cosmos. Who are we? What’s going on? The only thing I really care about, Harry, is to live long enough to get some answers.”

“What do you think of your chances?” I asked.

“I’ve no idea. It may not even be possible. Interstellar transmissions might dissipate before they could ever reach Valley Forge.” He smiled and his eyes took on a far-away look. “In a way,” he said, “it’s a kids’ game. Imagine what it would be like to be able to exchange ideas with a sentient being that lives in another place. And has a completely different history. What kind of culture would it have? What would matter most to it? Would it have music? Art? Would it believe in God? What kind of perspective could it provide about us?” He shook his head. I heard him say stuff like that periodically, and I swear there were times I thought he was about to tear up.

So naturally, when Frank Drake began recruiting people in 1960 for Project Ozma, Sol was probably first in line. By then he—and I—were in our seventies.

Ozma got its name, of course, from the fabled princess in L. Frank Baum’s novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. “Obviously,” Sol told me while he was waiting to hear whether he would be brought on board, “Drake thinks it’s a long shot.”

“It probably is,” I said.

“Maybe.” His eyes closed. “The evidence isn’t in yet.”

I was with him on the night when the phone rang and the invitation came through. It was a Thursday, which was our night to play chess. I watched Sol light up and clench a fist and nod a couple of times. At the end he said, “Thank you, Frank,” eased the phone into the cradle, and came back to the game with a triumphant smile. “I’m in the hunt, baby.”

He appointed me to run White Star, Inc., which by then had blossomed into a multimillion dollar operation. Then he was on his way to the Appalachians.

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, during those early years, operated out of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia. The observatory had an 85-foot radio telescope, which would be made available for six hours daily. Sol explained that they would be conducting the search at 1420 MHz, which was the natural emission frequency of neutral hydrogen, making it the most likely transmission frequency.

The area had a population of about a hundred. He rented a two-story cabin and I helped him make the move. At the time the project seemed to me a waste of effort. The media had a lot of fun with it, sometimes playing it seriously because the general public was interested, sometimes just playing it for laughs. I got introduced to Drake, who agreed that the odds for success weren’t encouraging. “But,” he said, “we lose nothing by trying.”

SETI divided its telescope time between its two most likely candidates, Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani. They were both G-type stars, like the sun, and consequently the most likely nearby stars to be home to a living world. They were between ten and twelve light-years away.

My son-in-law Al was interested in the project, so I took him and Ellen, my daughter, to Green Bank on the second weekend. We toured the observatory, and Sol took us out to look at the radio telescope, which on that night was silhouetted against the Moon. Then we went back inside while he explained how they conducted the search. A loudspeaker produced a steady stream of static. “That’s our output,” he said.

“What do you hope to hear?” asked Ellen.

He showed us the tapes that recorded incoming microwaves. ‘We’re looking for a pattern. Something that would suggest an artificial signal.”

“Have you found anything?” asked Al.

“Not yet. But we’ve just started.”

“Anything even suspicious?”

“Not really.”

We stayed at Sol’s place that night, and that’s how I came to be in town when everything happened.

It was the eleventh day of the search, around midnight. Sol was still at the observatory, while we were at his place watching Jack Paar when the phone rang. “Harry.” It was Sol’s voice, and he sounded excited. “Get down here. Right away.”

“You okay, Sol?”

“Yes,” he said. “I think we have a hit.”

“Great,” I said.

“Don’t tell anyone. Not even your kids.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s probably a false alarm. The numbers are all right. But it has to be a false alarm.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Get down here and I’ll show you, okay?”

I wasn’t so sure I wanted to charge over there to find out why the hit wasn’t valid, but he was too excited so I told him okay, I was on my way.

I got there a little after midnight and parked beside his Hudson. It was a beautiful clear evening, a quarter moon sinking into the western mountains, tree branches swaying gently in a warm breeze. The telescope glittered in the starlight. One of the observatory engineers stood at the far end of the lot looking up at the sky through binoculars.

I went inside. Sol and two other people were sitting near the loudspeaker. But I didn’t hear the static I expected. Instead there was a woman’s voice.

“…You get this message. We are aware the odds are not good but we will continue to transmit off and on for an indefinite period. If you do hear this we would be grateful if you would acknowledge.” She paused. Then: “By the way, I should tell you that we love Jack Benny. Please give Mr. Benny our regards.”

I wondered why they were listening to somebody talking about Jack Benny. Sol was sitting there, apparently unaware I’d come in.

“We’ll hope to hear from you,” the woman continued. “Goodbye for now. Let us hope we will be able to say hello again in the near future. In any case, we wish you well.”

I walked over and had to tap his shoulder before he noticed me.

“What’s going on?” I said.

He shook his head, as if to clear it. “Did you hear that, Harry?”

“The woman? Yes. Who is she?”

“As nearly as we can tell, she lives somewhere out around Tau Ceti.”

“Sol, what are you talking about?”

“He’s not kidding,” said one of the others. I found out later one was an engineer, the other an astronomer from the University of West Virginia. They all looked shaken.

“Tell me that again,” I said.

“That,” said Sol, “seems to be an alien transmission.” He was dead serious.

“Not possible,” I said. “That’s somebody in Chicago or someplace.”

His eyes had a look of desperation. “The signal’s not coming from Chicago.”

“I didn’t mean literally.”

“Harry, we’ve tied in the auxiliary scope. The signal is also not coming from a plane. Winston’s outside now looking for a dirigible.”

“A dirigible?”

“That’s all we’ve got left. It’s either a blimp or an alien.”

“Who speaks English.”

“What do you want me to say, Harry?”

“Where’s Frank? Does he know what’s going on?”

“No. He’s on the road somewhere tonight. Headed for D.C., I think. He’s hoping to get some more funding.”

“Well,” I said, “maybe he should ask Mr. Benny.”

Sol rolled his eyes. “Funny,” he said.

“Look, what’s the reality here? Is there any chance at all it could actually be Tau Whatever?”

“Tau Ceti. I don’t see how. But I can’t see how it’s not, either.”

“All right. If it’s legitimate, they’ve been listening to radio broadcasts and that’s how they picked up the language, right? Is that possible?”

“No,” said one of the engineers. “AM signals barely make it out of the atmosphere. They aren’t going all the way out to a star.”

“That’s not necessarily so,” said Sol. “A fragment might go a long way. An alien civilization might have technology we don’t know about. We might be looking where radios have been around for a thousand years. Maybe a million.”

“How far is Tau Ceti?”

“Twelve light-years.”

“So they’d have been listening to a Benny program that aired in 1936?”

“That’s correct,” said Sol. “Was he on that early?”

“I’m pretty sure he was,” I said. “I remember listening to him through most of the Depression.”

We stared at one another. “I’m beginning to think this is actually happening,” said Sol.

The door opened and the guy I’d seen out looking at the stars came in. He was carrying the binoculars. “Nothing up there,” he said.

The phone rang. One of the engineers picked up, listened, nodded, and put it down. “Kitt Peak confirms, Sol. They’re getting it too. And it does seem to be coming from Tau Ceti.”

I went over to the coffee machine and poured a cup. They were not happy. Sol looked thoroughly depressed. He’d found what he had pursued his entire life, and it was a heartbreaker.

They played it again. From the start: “Greetings, people of Earth,” the woman said. She could easily have been from California or New York. “Welcome to the community. We’ve been enjoying the various shows you send our way. We would like to have a conversation with you, if that can be arranged. We hope you get this message.”

The transmission was about two and a half minutes long. We listened to it a couple more times. Then Sol and I retired to the office assigned to SETI. “What do you think?” he said.

“I guess you have to believe the evidence.”

“This is incredible. Harry, I always wanted to find out who might be out there. With this, I don’t know a damned thing. I feel as if all I did was look into a mirror and see myself looking back.”

“Pity we can’t talk to the lady.” We could, of course, but it would take twenty-four years to get a response.

Sol collapsed into a chair. “What drives me up the wall is that we don’t know a damned thing about them.”

“Sure we do. They have a sense of humor, Sol. Maybe we can forget the philosophical discussions. If they really do like Benny, I think that takes us to the heart of who they are.”

Sol shook his head. “Maybe there are no aliens.”

Frank was ecstatic. He pointed out something in that first message the rest of us had missed. “She says, ‘Welcome to the community.’ Who’s the community, guys?”

Benny played the news for all it was worth, pretending to gloat over it on his TV program. But the surprises weren’t over, of course. SETI became overnight a project inordinately popular with politicians. Funding soared. Radio telescopes around the world turned toward Tau Ceti and every other star within fourteen light-years. That covered the radio era. And it was only a few weeks later that another message was received. From Groombridge 34 in German. It too translated into a greeting.

The Tau Ceti jokes continued front and center on Benny’s show until a male voice from Sirius expressed admiration for Ozzie and Harriet. Benny immediately launched a fake feud with the Nelsons.

That’s all history now. As everyone knows, we’re surrounded by thriving civilizations. We’ve seen a few of our neighbors. And Sol: He’s talking with people who look like felines near Alpha Centauri. They’re on first name terms.

He appears to have been right: They may look different. But in all the ways that matter, there are no aliens.