ET, phone back: Alien quest seeks earthling coders • The Register

ET, phone back: Alien quest seeks earthling coders • The Register: "It was the year of Star Wars and Close Encounters, and in the flatlands of Ohio, a man stumbled upon something possibly alien in origin.

On August 17, 1977, Ohio State University astronomer Jerry Ehman was sitting at his kitchen table, pouring over pages of printouts from the SETI Project's Big Ear radio telescope's computers. On these pages were line after line of numbers and letters. A cluster of six characters jumped out at Ehman and he circled them in red ink. Next to that circle he wrote: 'Wow!'."