Project Ozma launches, hoping to detect extraterrestrial life

On April 12, 1960, according to New York Times reporting, astronomer Frank Drake launches Project Ozma, the first modern experiment to search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) by aiming to detect radio signals from deep space.

A recent Harvard Ph.D., Drake was working at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia, where he was assigned to design a project for the observatory’s new, 85-foot diameter radio telescope. He chose to use the enormous dish to search for evidence of alien civilizations.

Drake pointed the telescope—dubbed “the cosmic ear” by The New York Times—at Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani, two sunlike stars about 11 light-years away that he thought might host habitable planets. He tuned the telescope’s to 1420 MHz, the frequency emitted by neutral hydrogen, reasoning that any advanced civilization would recognize it as a universal standard and might use it as a “hailing frequency.”

Over 150 hours of observation between April and July 1960, Drake detected no extraterrestrial messages. The only signal came from a passing aircraft—possibly a secret high-altitude U-2 spy plane. Still, “it was a paradigm-shifting endeavor, successful for its audacity, if not its discoveries,” wrote SETI researcher H. Paul Shuch in his 2011 book Searching for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. The experiment, which Drake named after L. Frank Baum’s 1917 book The Lost Princess of Oz, only cost about $2,000 for equipment.

At the time, SETI was considered fringe science. Yet Project Ozma proved influential. In 1961, Drake convened a a small, secret meeting of scientists—including Carl Sagan—to discuss the “extraterrestrial question.” At this meeting, the Ozma astronomer introduced the Drake Equation, a framework for estimating “the number of detectable, intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy.”

Although Ozma found no evidence of extraterrestrial life, it launched a new field of scientific inquiry. NASA funded SETI-related experiments from the 1960s through the late 20th century before Congress ended support in 1992, concerned about wasteful “Martian hunting.” The nonprofit SETI Institute, founded in 1984, continues the search today, backed in part by private donors. Drake admitted that, when he first began his work, he had “hoped that, in fact, there were radio-transmitting civilizations around almost every star.” Despite decades of silence, the search he began continues.