The SETI signal that wasn’t
During the summer of 1997, scientists with the SETI Institute detected an exceptionally narrow radio signal from space that bore the hallmarks of an alien transmission.
The signal, collected by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s 140-foot antenna, was “millions of times more spectrally compact than a TV broadcast,” according to Seth Shostak, a team member at the time and the current senior astronomer at the SETI Institute. The scientists were super excited, because they confirmed the signal as coming from space (and not from a local source). “In years of trying, we had found no other signal that had been so promising,” he wrote in a 2016 article for Air & Space. “Could this be the real deal?”
Disappointingly, it turned out to be a telemetry signal from the SOHO solar research satellite operated by NASA and ESA.
