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One Year: Elvis, the Pledge, and Extraterrestrials
00:54:54
Three stories from a single day in August 1977.
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- [00:00]
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- [00:32]
Josh Levin
Hey Slow Burn listeners, thanks for all your great feedback on our new show, One Year. We really appreciate it. We're gonna drop a few more episodes in this feed while the Slow Burn team is hard at work on season six coming out this fall. But the best way to follow One Year is in its own feed in your podcast app. You'll get all of our episodes as soon as they come out, plus bonus content you can't get anywhere else. Just search one year from Slate on any podcast app. At 12:28am on Aug. 16, 1977, a man from Indiana snapped a photo of Elvis Presley with a Kodak Instamatic camera. That picture shows Elvis at the front gate of Graceland, heading back home after a late night dentist appointment. He's driving a black luxury car, a Stutz Blackhawk 3. Elvis's right hand is on the steering wheel and he's holding up his left as though he's giving a casual wave. He's wearing dark sunglasses and it looks like he might be smiling, but it's hard to tell. As far as anyone knows, it's the last image ever taken of Elvis Presley alive. Elvis Presley, the King of rock and Roll, is dead at the age of 42. He sold millions of records, more than anyone in the music industry except the Beatles.
- [01:55]
Narrator/Commentator
What we're left with is a life.
- [01:56]
Ian Calder
That was the stuff of fables. I think it'll be the greatest thing.
- [02:00]
Josh Levin
Ever remembered that came out of America. On the afternoon of August 16th, Ian Calder convened an emergency meeting at his office in Lantana, Florida.
- [02:13]
Ian Calder
We wouldn't have dreamed if he was still alive, running a major front page story in the office.
- [02:18]
Josh Levin
Calder was the editor of the National Enquirer. It was on him to decide how to cover the King's death.
- [02:25]
Ian Calder
He had gone downhill. He had got fat. He was not a major star at that particular point. Now that changed big time when he died. You didn't have to be any kind of brilliant person to know that this was the biggest thing. I decided I've got to send in.
- [02:42]
Josh Levin
The troops for this caulder needed to get a whole bunch of reporters to Memphis, Tennessee, and he needed to do it very quickly.
- [02:51]
Ian Calder
We rented the jet plane, put about six different people on the jet plane with $50,000 in cash and said, let's just do it.
- [03:01]
Josh Levin
How do you get $50,000?
- [03:03]
Ian Calder
I called up my money guy, my treasurer, and said, get me $50,000. He went to the bank and picked it up. We sent another 50,000 later.
- [03:16]
Josh Levin
That money was the Enquirer's not so secret weapon. The reporters that Ian Calder sent to Memphis were going to buy up as many scoops as possible. Under traditional journalistic ethics, paying for information is forbidden. The New York Times wouldn't do it, and neither would the Memphis Commercial Appeal. But the National Enquirer had absolutely no qualms.
- [03:40]
Ian Calder
And what happened was that the local papers, who really didn't like us, started making that a big story. They want to give money away. They're trying to bribe people and stuff like this. That's true. We did have money, and we did bribe people. We just did it legitimately.
- [03:55]
Josh Levin
The Enquirer and its huge pile of cash ripped through Memphis like a tabloid tornado. After Elvis's death, Calder and his team broke every rule of journalistic propriety. And when their work was done, they'd made newsstand history. Elvis's death on August 16, 1977, captivated the nation. But it wasn't the only thing that happened that day. On this season of One Year, we're looking at the most consequential and most fascinating moments of 1977. And in this week's episode, I'm going to tell three stories from a single day in August. One is about a mysterious signal from outer space. Another is about a high school sophomore who became an American pariah. But first, the National Enquirer's quest for the ultimate celebrity scoop. Foreign. I'm Josh Levine, and this is one year, 1977. Ian Calder started working for newspapers in Scotland when he was 16 years old. The media scene in the UK was extremely competitive, and Calder would do anything to win.
- [05:41]
Ian Calder
If some little kid had drowned in a canal, you would go in and you'd interview the parents, and I learned how to cry on cue. But then you'd ask for photographs. We need a photograph of the little boy. And you try and pick up every single picture in the house so that when the other papers went there, there'd be a desert. Now, if you were second, that was a problem. You had to fight your way because the other guy would do the same thing.
- [06:09]
Josh Levin
Calder got hired by The Enquirer in 1964. In those days, the American tabloid distinguished itself by publishing gore, including a photo of a police officer carrying a severed head. But by the 70s, the Enquirer had cleaned itself up and become a supermarket staple. Calder's newspaper ran stories on government waste, fad diets, and every kind of celebrity scandal. In 1977, it had a weekly circulation of 5 million and an editorial staff full of hard charging, mischievous British expats.
- [06:44]
Tony Brenna
It was the only place in the world where you had an unlimited budget. Basically, if you wanted to sit beside a celebrity on the Concorde, you could do it.
- [06:54]
Josh Levin
That's Tony Brenna. He was a roving editor for the.
- [06:57]
Tony Brenna
Enquirer, which led me to the Philippines, Japan, Moscow. Pretty nice gig, actually.
- [07:05]
Josh Levin
When Elvis Presley died, Brenna got on that private jet from Florida to Tennessee. In the days that followed, the Enquirer sent more and more reinforcements and took over an entire floor of a Holiday.
- [07:18]
Tony Brenna
Inn, turn it into a newsroom. Printers and fax machines and phones, and we had about 30 reporters and stringers there.
- [07:32]
Josh Levin
In August 1977, it felt like the whole world had descended on Memphis.
- [07:37]
Tony Brenna
It was as if the King of England had died. It was insane.
- [07:43]
Elvis Presley Fan / Mourners
The thousands of morning Presley fans who had converged on Memphis came from all over the nation.
- [07:48]
Josh Levin
I just can't believe you, dad. It's terrible. I don't know Elvis personally, but I've seen a lot of his shows and I feel like he's a friend to me.
- [07:55]
Elvis Presley Fan / Mourners
It's just unreal right now.
- [07:57]
Deborah Lipp
I just can't believe it.
- [07:58]
Elvis Presley Fan / Mourners
I'm just numb.
- [07:59]
Josh Levin
How many days all of those people wanted to pay their respects to the King of Rock and Roll. And they wanted something to remember Elvis by, something they could hold on to.
- [08:11]
Elvis Presley Fan / Mourners
How's business going with these T shirts?
- [08:13]
Josh Levin
It's going great. It really is.
- [08:15]
Elvis Presley Fan / Mourners
I think Elvis would have probably liked it, you know, and he probably does.
- [08:19]
Josh Levin
You know, I think his spirit, his, you know, consciousness probably is around. The Enquirer's money could buy the stories that Elvis fans were desperate to read. Who was with him when he died? What did his final hours look like? What were the family secrets that hadn't yet been revealed? All that cash could also buy exclusivity for the Enquirer, which came out only once a week. Signing sources to exclusive contracts was essential, the only chance they had to beat the daily papers. And so it was a huge coup when the tabloids struck a deal with the paramedics that carried Elvis out of Graceland. They told the Enquirer that Elvis's face and neck were blue and that it took five people to lift him onto a stretcher. And they said that Elvis's father cried over the body. Recognizing the value of what they had, the Enquirer put the paramedics on a plane to Florida, where the competition couldn't find them. The Inquirer also bought up Elvis's girlfriend, Ginger Alden. Alden was in bed with Elvis on the morning of August 16th. That afternoon, she found his body slumped in front of the toilet.
- [09:34]
Tony Brenna
That was the big get. We thought nobody could beat that because we had her entire exclusive story.
- [09:42]
Josh Levin
Ginger Alden's first person account was going to sell a lot of newspapers. But the Inquirer's owner, Generoso Pope Jr. Demanded something more. Pope believed he understood what readers were looking for, even if they didn't know it themselves. Ian called her again.
- [10:00]
Ian Calder
The major thing was you got to get a photo of Elvis in his coffin. That was like going to be the piece de resistance. How could people who loved Elvis not want to keep that as a souvenir?
- [10:15]
Josh Levin
There are a bunch of competing accounts of how the National Enquirer went about getting that photo, but those stories all start in the same place. The public viewing of Elvis's body on August 17, 1977.
- [10:28]
Elvis Presley Fan / Mourners
Those who did get in entered a small anteroom which was almost filled with a copper casket. He was dressed in a white tuxedo, wearing a simple silver tie. Many of the people, as they came out were crying.
- [10:42]
Josh Levin
Tens of thousands of mourners passed through Graceland to get a glimpse of the open casket. But cameras were strictly forbidden, and Elvis's bodyguards were ready to enforce that order.
- [10:54]
Tony Brenna
They suspected that the tabloid press might try and do something crazy like this. So they were right.
- [11:04]
Josh Levin
Even with those bodyguards standing watch, the Inquirer did try to sneak in some photographers. One editor later claimed they went so far as sending in people dressed as nuns. But in the end, he said, everyone just chickened out. By this point, it was clear they were going to need another way in. Their best hope was to get some help from the inside. The Inquirer's photographers waited outside Graceland looking for family members walking out the gate. When they spotted one, they trailed him to his next destination.
- [11:38]
Ian Calder
The guy goes into a bar and then goes into the restroom, doing whatever he does there, and our guy silos up beside him and says, hi, I'm from the Enquirer. You're one of Elvis's people? He said, yeah, I'm his second cousin, or whatever he was. He Said, how would you like to make a few thousand dollars? And the guy said, tell me about it.
- [12:03]
Josh Levin
When that cousin heard the assignment, he said he'd give it a try. The Inquirer gave him a $300 Minox spy camera with its range set to five feet. The cousin managed to snap four images. The Inquirer then whisked him and the camera down to its Florida headquarters on yet another private jet. This was precious cargo, and the tabloid wanted to develop the photos in a secure location.
- [12:31]
Ian Calder
We then took it over to the dark room. Well, I'm waiting on the phone, and our photo editor, he calls me, first picture. I said, how is it? He said, the guy had the camera in the wrong direction. He took a picture himself. Oh, my God. A few minutes later, he comes, oh, second one. Terrible. He put it up in the air and took a picture of the lights above. Elvis. Oh, my God, we're only two left. The third time he said, fantastic. It was almost like a professional picture. And the fourth was exactly the same.
- [13:13]
Josh Levin
Those pictures show the right side of Elvis Presley's face in profile. His hair is jet black and his eyes and lips are closed. He looks a good bit younger than in that photo taken just after midnight on August 16, the one that shows him driving back from the dentist's office in the coffin. He seems serene and unbothered. The September 6, 1977 issue of the National Enquirer featured six pages of exclusive Elvis material. There was that interview with the paramedics and the tell all from his girlfriend, Ginger Alden. There was also a story about Elvis's bizarre behavior in the months before he died, that he kicked his karate partners in the groin, talked to his own reflection, and hired someone to sing the high notes he could no longer hit. But grocery shoppers and newsstand browsers didn't need to flip inside to see the piece de resistance. It was right there on the front, the last picture. Tony Brenna and Ian Calder say the establishment media did not respect the Enquirer's journalistic triumph.
- [14:25]
Tony Brenna
This is disgraceful. This is disgusting stuff. You know, I mean, those sort of comments.
- [14:30]
Ian Calder
I got a call from the ap, Associated Press, and they wanted a story on how terrible it was that we would run a picture of Elvis Nees coffin. I said, well, let me tell you, I said, elvis was the King. You know, if anybody who's an Elvis fan didn't want that picture, I said, our readers demanded that we do the picture. And we were the only ones that could do it.
- [14:55]
Josh Levin
Elvis Presley's cousin got $18,000 for those photographs, the equivalent of $81,000 today. For the Enquirer, it was a great investment. The September 6, 1977 issue sold nearly 6.7 million copies, almost a million more than the tabloid's previous all time record.
- [15:16]
Ian Calder
And that's absolutely a sellout. I mean, that was every copy we printed. There was a story, I don't know if I believe it or not, where a couple of armed bandits came in to hold up a supermarket. But they didn't take money. They took all the copies of the Elvis story and photographed.
- [15:33]
Josh Levin
I don't know if I believe that story either. Those sales figures, however, were very real. The Enquirer's owner, Generoso Pope Jr. Was extremely pleased. But Pope didn't get everything he wanted.
- [15:50]
Tony Brenna
I actually got thrown out of Memphis by the police, escorted to the airport because of Pope's desire to see Alvis organs on scales in the mortuary. We tried to buy up some mortuary attendants and to try and get them to photograph. He would never have published these pictures. He just wanted to see them.
- [16:13]
Josh Levin
Wait. He just wanted them for his personal collection of organ photos.
- [16:18]
Tony Brenna
He wanted to see Elvis's liver and Elvis's heart. And I don't know why he wanted to see it, but he did. He was a very quirky guy.
- [16:29]
Josh Levin
And you said, okay, I'll try to get that for you.
- [16:32]
Tony Brenna
I said, well, I, you know, did what I was asked to do, and it was almost like being a paid assassin. If you want.
- [16:49]
Josh Levin
You can buy the Elvis coffin issue of the National Enquirer on ebay for about $20. There's another, less tightly cropped version of the famous coffin photo inside the paper. On page 23, the caption says, at peace. Up next, a high school student in New Jersey takes a stand by refusing to stand up.
- [17:21]
Deborah Lipp
You can challenge America itself as long as you leave the flag alone. The minute you mess with that, you are the worst kind of person in many people's eyes.
- [17:34]
Josh Levin
On August 16, 1977, she got her day in court. That's coming up after the break.
- [18:03]
Deborah Lipp
I was the kid that. This is one of my favorites. I got them to allow girls to wear pants to school.
- [18:15]
Josh Levin
That's Deborah Lipp. She was born in 1961 and grew up in northern New Jersey. Her sartorial rebellion came in elementary school.
- [18:25]
Deborah Lipp
Girls were supposed to wear skirts, and I just wasn't having it. So I would just go to school in my pants. And the other girls started to notice that I was not getting in trouble. And within a few weeks all the girls were wearing pants to school. I got backed into a corner. This was not something I felt I should be doing, so I didn't do it.
- [18:48]
Josh Levin
Lip calls herself a loudmouth, and she says her childhood wasn't a peaceful and contented one.
- [18:55]
Deborah Lipp
I was very combative. I was angry a lot, moody, smarter than everybody, absolutely convinced that the fact that I was smart made me exempt from many of life's rules. I definitely made the decision when I was 12 that Judaism was not feminist, and therefore I did not wish to be bat mitzvah. And so I refused to go through with that.
- [19:27]
Josh Levin
In 1975, Lipp moved to Massachusetts to live with her dad. For the next year and a half, she went to what she describes as a hippie school.
- [19:37]
Deborah Lipp
It was great. The entire school was run one person, one vote. You decide what classes you're going to. You put together your own educational curriculum. You can decide. Never go to class at all. So I didn't attend a lot of classes, but I knew Robert's Rules of Order.
- [19:59]
Josh Levin
Lip's dream education didn't last. In early 1977, her dad got a job back in New Jersey. Lip enrolled in public school in Mountain Lakes, a small, hilly suburb 30 miles outside New York City. She was in 10th grade.
- [20:15]
Deborah Lipp
I was in peak angry rebellion. I was new in town, in a small town where everybody had gone to kindergarten. There, my social life was, you know, basically a disaster. But. And then I had to have this Pledge of Allegiance.
- [20:31]
Josh Levin
I pledge allegiance to the flag of.
- [20:34]
Deborah Lipp
The United States of America and to the republic for which it stands.
- [20:42]
Josh Levin
The Pledge of Allegiance has been around since the early 1890s, and it began as a marketing gimmick. Frances Bellamy, who worked for a magazine called Youth's Companion, wrote the pledge as part of a push to sell American flags to public schools. Bellamy was a former Baptist preacher, and he believed that true Americanism was being threatened by mass immigration. He once wrote that the people must guard more jealously even than their liberties, the quality of their blood. The pledge was quickly adopted in classrooms across America up until World War II. Students recited it with their right arms outstretched in a stiff salute. That got changed to a hand over the heart because the original gesture resembled the Nazis. Sieg heil. Another change came in 1954 when Congress added the words under God to distinguish the United States values from those of godless communism. One nation under God, indivisible.
- [21:47]
Deborah Lipp
I just knew that that was not something that I believed in. I am very conscious of the way that religious liberty in this country is one of the core freedoms that we have. And most of the people who want to say under God believe that this is a Christian nation, and it is not.
- [22:10]
Josh Levin
The Pledge of Allegiance hadn't been a thing at Deborah Lipp's hippie school in Massachusetts, but at Mountain Lakes High School in New Jersey, standing up to say the pledge was an everyday homeroom ritual, one that Lip refused to go along with.
- [22:25]
Deborah Lipp
So the minute I was seated during the Pledge of Allegiance, there were people cursing at me. Other students, there were people muttering under their breath, and they're pointing at me. They're being disruptive. I'm not the one being disruptive. And the teacher was doing nothing.
- [22:44]
Josh Levin
It went on like this for a couple of months. Deborah Lipp continued to stay seated, and her classmates continued to grumble. And then in May 1977, she got a new homeroom teacher.
- [22:57]
Deborah Lipp
I was sitting. The rest of the class was standing. The teacher was standing in front of the room with her hand over her heart and with her other hand going, like, making. Hissing at me and motioning to get up.
- [23:10]
Josh Levin
When the kids are muttering under their breath. When the teacher is making that hissing sound, does that make you feel more, like, adamant that if you're trying to get me to do it, I'm going to sit that much more firmly in my seat?
- [23:25]
Deborah Lipp
Oh, yeah. Like, who doesn't react that way when they are told, here is the one thing you must not do?
- [23:32]
Josh Levin
Deborah Lipp's teacher, she was adamant, too.
- [23:36]
Deborah Lipp
The next morning, I got to school a few minutes early, and she grabbed me outside the classroom and said, you can either stand or you can be expelled. So I went to the principal, and he pulled out a little handbook of the legal rights of students in the state of New Jersey. And I was shocked.
- [24:05]
Josh Levin
In 1943, the United States Supreme Court ruled that public schools could not force students to salute the American flag and say the Pledge of Allegiance. But a New Jersey state law required students like Deborah Lipp to always show full respect to the flag by standing at attention.
- [24:22]
Deborah Lipp
To stand at attention for the Pledge of Allegiance is, in fact, participating. And I knew I had the right. I absolutely understood that sitting was a form of speech. I was unable to articulate this in these words when I was 16, but the thoughts were definitely these, that the way to be a loyal American to me is not to make a pledge of loyalty. The way to be an American is to be fundamentally a revolutionary, to fight for what's right, to use our constitutionally provided protections, to advocate for free speech and freedom of religion and freedom of the press and an oath of loyalty is the opposite of that.
- [25:13]
Josh Levin
Threatened by her teacher and principal, Lip had to make a choice.
- [25:18]
Deborah Lipp
I mean, one of the thoughts that went through my head is I could just be late every day for school until I graduated so as to miss the pledge. I mean, I didn't know what to do. And I got home from school that afternoon and found the ACLU in the phone book, and they took my case.
- [25:39]
Josh Levin
Within a couple of weeks, a New Jersey judge issued a temporary restraining order barring lips high school from punishing her.
- [25:46]
Deborah Lipp
I remember turning to my stepmother and saying, I guess this is going to show up in the Citizen, which was the local weekly giveaway. Like I had no idea what was about to happen. Somebody picked it up and it went very quickly from local to the New York Times. Then it was everywhere.
- [26:09]
Josh Levin
In that Times article, Lip called the New Jersey law absolutely absurd. She said, if I'm only free to stand and not sit during the pledge, then I'm not free at all. The story also included a photo of the teenager. She was wearing glasses and a striped halter dress and she was standing in front of an American flag. Once Lip's story hit the papers, she got some supportive phone calls. Strangers praising her quest for justice and telling her she was brave. One of those well wishers would later become her first husband.
- [26:44]
Deborah Lipp
I remember distinctly that I was cleaning up a huge mess that the dogs had made. So I was just eager to take a phone call, you know, and he had seen my picture in the Times. So he called and he congratulated me and then he chatted me up and then he flirted with me and then he asked me out on a date. And our first date was the 4th of July, which was great as it turned out, because there was a rally against me in my hometown, but I wasn't home for it.
- [27:13]
Josh Levin
The veterans of Foreign Wars, Disabled American Veterans, Catholic war veterans, they were all united against her in the year after the flag waving frenzy of the bicentennial. That July 4 rally reflected the mainstream consensus in Deborah Lipp's community. Someone even made bumper stickers that said, she ship the lips to Siberia.
- [27:36]
Deborah Lipp
They were passionately vitriolic. And the level of nastiness and just craziness to this day blows my mind. I had a five year old sister who was not allowed to play with the five year old across the street because she was a Lip. What was the five year old gonna do? My parents, they were kind of horrified. Politically, they agreed with me, but they did not want this to be happening. They did not want the attention. They did not want any of it. I asked if we could have an unlisted phone number because the hate calls would not stop. And they said, well, all of our friends have this number that would inconvenience us. So in addition to keeping a listed phone number, I was required to be the one who answered all phone calls so that if it was hate speech, I was the one receiving was brutal. You're a communist, go live in Russia. String of unintelligible curses, bomb threats, and anti Semitism. That, that would be the highlight.
- [28:54]
Josh Levin
On August 16, 1977, Deborah Lipp traveled to a federal district court in Newark, New Jersey. She went with her attorney and her boyfriend, the guy she'd met over the phone. Her parents chose not to attend.
- [29:08]
Deborah Lipp
I was completely confident, and my lawyer was also 100% confident. The judge's name was Curtis Meaner, and he was very Norman Rockwell looking guy. He ruled in court that day. I mean, we were not in court for even a half an hour.
- [29:25]
Josh Levin
Judge Curtis Meaner declared the New Jersey State law unconstitutional. He said that it illegally compelled symbolic speech in violation of the First Amendment. And he said that Deborah Lipp wouldn't cause any disruption by sitting down so long as she didn't whistle, drum or tap dance.
- [29:46]
Deborah Lipp
I felt great. I felt vindicated. I felt patriotic. I do remember that my case was decided the day that Elvis died. So my picture and Elvis's picture were on the front page of every paper in the US you don't forget a thing like that.
- [30:04]
Josh Levin
Not long after the judge ruled in her favor, Deborah Lipp went back to Mountain Lakes High School for her junior year.
- [30:10]
Deborah Lipp
A lot of people hated me, but the teachers gave me a wide berth because they knew that if they messed with me, I would fight them. And I became kind of a little bit of a leader among the alternative people and the hippies, which was very few in that very conservative town. I had a voice.
- [30:31]
Josh Levin
Deborah Lipp is 60 years old now. She's a practicing Wiccan and lectures on paganism and the occult. She's also the author of the ultimate James Bond fanbook.
- [30:42]
Deborah Lipp
I'm kind of an interesting person, and most of the other things I've done have not been political. But I look back at this case and I am proud that I did it. And I still believe that what I did was patriotic. Some of it was traumatic. I got some skittishness that took me a fairly long period of time to get past in terms of not wanting to be exposed like that again. If I'm in a public place today and everybody stands for the Pledge of Allegiance, I actually do stand because my tolerance for being attacked by crowds has gone down as I've aged. I fight for things all the time. I remain a troublemaker, but I learned the hard way that making a spectacle of myself isn't an easy thing to live with.
- [31:35]
Josh Levin
Lip's victory changed the law in New Jersey, but the Pledge of Allegiance is still highly contested terrain. The Supreme Court has never ruled on whether it's constitutional to require students to stand at attention during the Pledge. All these decades later, children nationwide are fighting the same fight Deborah Lipp did in 1977.
- [31:57]
Elvis Presley Fan / Mourners
The state of Texas is supporting a Houston area school that expelled a student after she refused to stand for the flag during the US Pledge of Allegation.
- [32:03]
Josh Levin
An 11 year old Polk county student arrested at school after refusing to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance.
- [32:08]
Plan B Advertiser
I couldn't have you just asked me to get up.
- [32:09]
Josh Levin
I mean, I still would have said.
- [32:11]
Jamie Greene
No, but it's better than snatching me out of the chair.
- [32:15]
Josh Levin
Is that frustrating to you to see these stories still in the world?
- [32:19]
Deborah Lipp
It's enormously frustrating. I have made it a point every time there's been a case since then to sit down and write a supportive letter. My daughter's high school teacher contacted me because she wanted me to know that my daughter was sitting during the Pledge of Allegiance and that she wanted me to give permission for that. And I said, by law, you cannot ask for my permission. She has the absolute right to do that, regardless of my opinion. And the teacher responded, okay, I just wanted to make sure she had your permission. It horrifies me that teachers are not taught that students have civil rights. I weep for a country that doesn't cherish its own freedoms to the extent that I am the villain in somebody else's story. They don't know what it is to be an American.
- [33:22]
Josh Levin
Up next, just before midnight on August 15, 1977, an unexplained transmission arrives from outer space.
- [33:33]
Narrator/Commentator
I think there is a strong possibility that it was a signal from extraterrestrial civilization.
- [33:44]
Josh Levin
We'll be right back. The first season of the television series In Search of aired in 1976 and 77. It featured episodes on the Bermuda Triangle, the Mummy's Curse, and Bigfoot.
- [34:08]
Elvis Presley Fan / Mourners
He's been seen many times in the rugged mountains and deep woods of the Pacific Northwest. The encounters have not always been peaceful.
- [34:17]
Josh Levin
In episode 12, host Leonard Nimoy took on the biggest question of them all.
- [34:23]
Elvis Presley Fan / Mourners
The stars and galaxies beckon us to ask, are we alone? We listen for the answer.
- [34:36]
Josh Levin
The episode was titled A Call from Space. It focused on a group of scientists who believed that giant ultra sensitive instruments might help them tune into the frequencies of other worlds. One of them was an astronomer at Ohio State University. His name was John Kraus.
- [34:54]
Elvis Presley Fan / Mourners
I think one of the exciting things about all this work is that those of us who are involved are like pioneers. We are exploring the universe. It's a pioneering venture to find out what is out there and perhaps who is out there.
- [35:17]
Josh Levin
Krause designed and built a man massive radio telescope near the city of Delaware, Ohio. And starting in 1973, he used that telescope to do something unprecedented. He launched the first ever long term systematic SETI project. He was searching for extraterrestrial intelligence.
- [35:36]
Elvis Presley Fan / Mourners
The probability of life developing elsewhere is hard to determine definitely, but I don't think, I think it is zero. And if it is not zero, then I think we have a chance.
- [35:50]
Josh Levin
Krauss telescope was nicknamed Big Ear.
- [35:53]
Elvis Presley Fan / Mourners
Well, it's just simply a big antenna, an enormous antenna. This flat reflector is about one acre in size. It's movable, and that's what reflects the incoming waves into the parabola.
- [36:08]
Josh Levin
Big Ear had been set up to detect, detect narrowband radio signals.
- [36:13]
Elvis Presley Fan / Mourners
That is the kind of signal that travels furthest. And we would suspect that any civilization out there would use signals of that type.
- [36:24]
Josh Levin
The telescope scanned the skies 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Krauss colleague Bob Dickson was in charge of the search.
- [36:33]
Bob Dickson
Once we had everything running, we'd re aim the telescope to a dual place in the sky every few days and the computer would process all the data every 12 seconds.
- [36:45]
Josh Levin
An IBM mainframe calculated the strength of the radio signal the telescope was detecting. The signal to noise ratio got recorded using a single character. Either a digit from 1 to 9 or for anything stronger, a letter from A to Z. Every four or so days, a technician gathered the latest readings. He'd then bring those reports to a volunteer named Jerry Eamon.
- [37:10]
Narrator/Commentator
Let me see, I've got a sheet here, so we're almost up to 400 pages, so we used a lot of paper.
- [37:20]
Josh Levin
Eamon didn't find much to get excited about. The signals Big Ear was getting weren't particularly strong, and there was no indication that they were coming from far off worlds. A grandiose quest to communicate with extraterrestrials had turned into a dull routine. It seemed like that call from space might never come. Nevertheless, Jerry Eamon kept up with the tedious work of Poring over those printouts. Sometime around August 19, 1977, he sat down in his kitchen and began his usual ritual.
- [37:55]
Narrator/Commentator
I was just sitting at the table looking at the printouts.
- [37:59]
Josh Levin
He looked at one sheet of paper, then another. As usual, he didn't notice anything remarkable. And then suddenly he saw it.
- [38:09]
Narrator/Commentator
It was just a few pages in. It took me maybe 10 seconds after seeing it. And I just, without thinking, just wrote the word wow exclamation point with my red pen.
- [38:24]
Josh Levin
Something had come into Big ear's receiver. On August 15, 1977, at around 11:16pm Eastern Time, on Jerry Eamon's sheet of paper, that signal appeared as a peculiar string of letters and numbers.
- [38:39]
Narrator/Commentator
I saw the sequence 6equj4 5 in channel 2.
- [38:46]
Josh Levin
That sequence wasn't a secret code. It was a measure of signal strength over time.
- [38:52]
Narrator/Commentator
Six goes up to E, which goes up to Q, which goes up to U and then back down to J and then back down to 5. The strongest signal I had ever seen on the computer printouts.
- [39:06]
Josh Levin
6 EQ UJ5 meant that the radio signal got stronger and stronger. Peeking at the letter U then got weaker until after 72 seconds, it disappeared.
- [39:19]
Narrator/Commentator
I looked at that sequence and realized, looks like I've got an antenna pattern here.
- [39:26]
Josh Levin
That pattern suggested the signal itself was coming from a fixed position. In other words, it wasn't getting stronger and weaker because it was moving around in the sky. It was like a flashlight was shining down from space and the telescope spotted the beam for a brief moment as the earth rotated past it. Eamon had never seen anything like 6 EQ UJ5. He thought it might be a broadcast from another world, a message from aliens. Can you explain why you wrote wow in the margin?
- [40:05]
Narrator/Commentator
Well, I'm actually surprised to hear that question. Most people who speak English know what the word wow means.
- [40:15]
Josh Levin
I think that it means that you're surprised.
- [40:19]
Narrator/Commentator
Yeah, surprise. Something's unusual or interesting.
- [40:25]
Josh Levin
Are you the kind of guy who says wow a lot in day to day life?
- [40:31]
Narrator/Commentator
No, not really. If I see video of the Grand Canyon, I'm thinking wow or animals that are behaving in an interesting fashion.
- [40:45]
Josh Levin
After Jerry Eamon scribbled wow on that sheet of paper, he called his colleagues John Kraus and Bob Dixon. Here's Dixon.
- [40:53]
Bob Dickson
He said, well, we've found something here. You know, you probably should look at this. And we all got together for a meeting at the observatory and we excitedly discussed this and tried to think of something that could have made this happen accidentally.
- [41:10]
Josh Levin
The team at Big Ear wasn't going to jump to the conclusion that they'd found a sign of intelligent life while the rest of the world was mourning Elvis Presley. They ran through all the most plausible explanations for 6 eq UJ 5. They consulted Star catalogs to see if the signal might have come from a sun like object. But they didn't find anything in that area of the sky. There weren't any space probes in the vicinity either. And because the signal tracked the pattern of the telescope so precisely, it didn't seem possible that it was just interference. They reset the telescope to scan that same region again, but the signal never reappeared. All they had was one tantalizing clue. The astronomers at Big Ear started calling it the wow. Signal.
- [42:02]
Bob Dickson
Was it an intentional broadcast, just sort of casting a signal out into space, or was it part of some space communication? Is it. Maybe there was another civilization, had a spacecraft and they were communicating with it and it just happened to be in our direction at a particular time and then never again.
- [42:21]
Jamie Greene
There's no doubt, no major doubt that it is a technological signal. The question is just did it come from Earth or did it come from elsewhere?
- [42:29]
Josh Levin
Jamie Green is the associate editor of Future Tense, a partnership between Slate New America and Arizona State University. I asked her to lay out the evidence that the signal might be a sign of extraterrestrial life.
- [42:42]
Jamie Greene
I think the biggest indication that it's extraterrestrial is that it's a very narrow signal. The telescope was recording at 50 different channels, basically, and this is only on one of them. And natural sources, while they may be loud on one channel, make more noise sort of on adjacent channels. Nature doesn't make such clean signals. There was nothing that we know of human made out in that direction. So it's like we picked up a dial tone that someone was shooting from far out there.
- [43:13]
Josh Levin
But there's a good chance the wow. Signal actually came from closer to home.
- [43:17]
Jamie Greene
The most plausible explanation is that it was some sort of terrestrial earthly technology bouncing off of something. And the telescope was so rudimentary that we just weren't able to figure it out.
- [43:30]
Josh Levin
And there's no way for us to possibly.
- [43:32]
Jamie Greene
There's no way to figure it out now.
- [43:33]
Josh Levin
It's just gonna be this enticing thing forever.
- [43:36]
Jamie Greene
All of the information that we have is that one spike of a signal. There was something there. It got loud, it got quiet because we panned away from it. That's all we know. There's no data from the telescope other than that that we could dig into or process or squeeze for more information in 1977.
- [43:58]
Josh Levin
The Great beyond loomed incredibly large in the popular imagination. The two highest grossing movies at the American box office were Star wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. But the astronomers at Big Ear weren't looking to capitalize on all that outer space hype. They were serious scientists, and they didn't want to be accused of peddling science fiction. And so for a while, they kept their finding to themselves. Bob Dickson did reference the wow. Signal obliquely in a short documentary broadcast in early 1979.
- [44:34]
Elvis Presley Fan / Mourners
Dr. Dixon, have we received signals? Have you received signals that we simply can't explain? There's one really particular that we've thought a lot about. It clearly came from outside the Earth. We feel, there's no question about that. Very strong. But it was only there once.
- [44:54]
Josh Levin
John Krauss finally published an article about the wow. Signal in the summer of 79. His conclusion, it could have been a signal from an extraterrestrial civilization. But until it comes back again, we can only wait and wonder.
- [45:13]
Jamie Greene
No one has ever been able to figure out what it was. And it's the biggest unsolved SETI candidate signal mystery that we have.
- [45:24]
Josh Levin
Jamie Greene is writing a book about how we imagine alien life beyond Earth in science and science fiction. So we went through a thought experiment. What would it mean in the grand scheme of things if the wow. Signal did come from extraterrestrials?
- [45:41]
Jamie Greene
I think if there is a second instance of complex life, of technologically advanced life in the galaxy, there's probably a lot of it. I think a lot of scientists would agree that either life is unique or it is abundant.
- [46:01]
Josh Levin
That's interesting. So it's either one or a lot?
- [46:05]
Jamie Greene
I think so, yeah. I think once you could know that life has evolved more than once, to me, that's the ball game. That means that it's probably everywhere. And odds are mathematically that if there's another technological civilization, they would probably be more advanced than us. And so once they've sent us this little dial tone saying, hello, we're here, this little beacon, are there conversations to be had? Is there a back and forth?
- [46:39]
Josh Levin
In Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the scientists figure out how to communicate with the alien's mothership. Seems they're trying to teach us a basic tonal vocabulary. It's the first day of school, fellas. Even if the wow. Signal was a message from aliens, it almost certainly wasn't a close encounter.
- [46:58]
Jamie Greene
Depending on how far away they are, that could be a response time of centuries.
- [47:03]
Josh Levin
Yeah, I mean, that's a really interesting thing. To think about is if they're so far away that it's just not really possible to have a conversation, then what is the point?
- [47:14]
Jamie Greene
And even if we could get a back and forth, would we be able to actually communicate if they don't send us a Rosetta Stone? All we know might be that they're out there.
- [47:25]
Josh Levin
Why would a civilization send us a signal in the first place?
- [47:31]
Jamie Greene
So the idealistic theory is that they want to welcome us into the galactic community, that they. The really idealistic version is that they see that we are struggling, whether that's with climate change or war or poverty, and they, being so advanced, have solved these problems, and so they're gonna send us the solution. They might just be curious. They might be scientists. You know, maybe they just want to know who's out there. There are also the more cynical views of this, that they want to find us so that they can come murder us and steal our water or whatever. But it's a lot of energy to expend just to murder someone. But I guess it's also a lot of energy to expend just to give someone a long distance hug.
- [48:20]
Josh Levin
So let's imagine an alternate timeline here where the wow. Signal comes in and for whatever reason, we're able to confirm with some degree of certainty that it's extraterrestrial signal. In 1977, how do you think the world we live in now would be different, if at all?
- [48:41]
Jamie Greene
I would think that there would have been a big push to send a message back. I think that it would have been diplomatically very interesting. You know, who gets to decide what the message is like, who gets to speak for Earth. A very idealistic view of this would be that it would have inspired some more global unity, maybe ended the Cold War a little earlier. Maybe it would have exacerbated the Cold War and made everyone more freaked out about aliens coming to kill us. There's so many people and animals all across the planet that don't really enter into our daily sphere of concern. So what happens when there are more people millions of miles away? How does that change your daily life? I don't know.
- [49:27]
Josh Levin
And I think. I mean, one thing that you're kind of circling around is that one reason to do this kind of search is that it tells us something about ourselves.
- [49:37]
Jamie Greene
It's a mirror. The way that we imagine aliens tells us a lot about what we think is even more intrinsic than human nature. You know, what is biological nature? Do we assume that becoming more advanced, becoming more intelligent means developing technology? We had radio Technology because of the military, because of conflict, because of war. Do we assume that war is universal? Do we assume that war is something to be transcended and that aliens are gonna give us a little boost? The way that we imagine aliens is ways of trying out different futures for humanity.
- [50:23]
Josh Levin
Big Ear's search for extraterrestrial intelligence went on for 22 years. The telescope never found anything like the wow. Signal again. But 6 EQ UJ5 hasn't been forgotten by scientists who are still looking for extraterrestrial life or by purveyors of science fiction.
- [50:40]
Deborah Lipp
The wow.
- [50:41]
Plan B Advertiser
Signal.
- [50:42]
Josh Levin
In August 1977, my buddy Jerry Amen found a transmission on the printout like this. He was so excited, he wrote wow in the margins. What was there? A signal 30 times stronger than galactic background. The wow. Signal is the best evidence of Extraterrestrial Intelligence. In 1998, four years after that X Files episode aired, Big Ear got demolished to make way for a golf course. The astronomer who designed the telescope, John Krauss, died in 2004.
- [51:14]
Elvis Presley Fan / Mourners
Someday, this call from space may come. It's hard to say when it will. The signal that we're looking for might be found within a day, but it might be weeks, years. But it will have profound significance to man.
- [51:32]
Josh Levin
Bob Dickson, who ran Big Ear's search for extraterrestrial intelligence, thinks it's very likely that there are other civilizations out there.
- [51:41]
Bob Dickson
Our galaxy even is so vast, with so many millions of stars and planets, it's hard to think of all the other galaxies there are in the universe. It just doesn't seem likely that life evolved only on this particular planet.
- [51:57]
Jamie Greene
This is a really, really hard question. Earth is a really good planet to live on. The sun is a particularly calm star. We are lucky to be here. But there's this principle that's just called the Copernican principle. It's like a rule of thumb. You should never assume that we are central, that we are special, that we are any of that. So I think. I don't know, I want it to be. I want there to be lots of other people out there.
- [52:26]
Josh Levin
You have a rooting interest here?
- [52:28]
Jamie Greene
Yeah, don't you? I mean, wouldn't that be better?
- [52:47]
Josh Levin
Slate plus members can hear more about the culture of 1977 and the making of one year in a series of Members Only shows. In tomorrow's episode, you'll hear One Year producer Evan Chung and Chris Mulanfi, the host of the Slate podcast Hit Parade, talking about the music of 1977 from number one hits by Stevie Wonder. Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles to the 1970s library music that you've heard on this show. To listen to Members only episodes of one year, go to slate.com oneyearplus it's only a dollar to join Slate plus for your first month and once you're a member, you'll get all Slate podcasts with no ad, and you'll be supporting our work here at One Year. That's slate.comoneyearplus Next time on One Year 1977 how America and LeVar Burton got swept up in the Roots phenomenon My.
- [53:46]
LifeLock Advertiser
Very first day as a professional actor.
- [53:48]
Josh Levin
Cicely Tyson played my mother. Dr. Maya Angelou played my grandmother. I mean, who was I? I was this 19 year old kid from Sacramento. One Year is produced by me and Evan Chung with editorial direction by Lo and Liu and Gabriel Roth. Madeline Ducharme is One Year's assistant producer. You can send us feedback and ideas and memories from 1977@oneyearlate.com we'd love to hear from you. Our mix engineer is Merritt Jacob. The artwork for One Year is by Jim Cook. Ian Calder wrote a book about his time running the National Enquirer. It's called the Untold Story. And Tony Brenna is the author of an unpublished memoir, Anything for a headline. Thank you to the Library of Congress and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory Archives, and special thanks to Jack Hamilton, George Plaskettis, Bill Smee, Mark Joseph Stern, Caleb Scharf, Jason T. Wright, Sung Park, Katie Rayford, Asha Solucia, Amber Smith, Seth Brown, Rachel Strom, and Chow Tu. Thanks for listening. We'll be back with more from 1977 next week. Low Carb no carb Anti Inflammatory There's a diet for every buzzword at Anytime Fitness. Our coaches use your body scan to help take the guesswork out of eating right so you can forget the fads and stick to the science. Join Anytime Fitness today.
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