How to Tweet to Aliens Tonight

By Natalie Wolchover, Life's Little Mysteries staff writer

How to Tweet to Aliens Tonight

June 29, 2012 Updated Jun 29, 2012 at 3:09 PM PDT

Don't forget to contact aliens this evening.

All Twitter messages composed between 5:00 p.m. PDT Friday (June 29th) and 12:00 a.m. PDT Saturday (June 30th) tagged with the hashtag #ChasingUFOs will be collectively beamed up to space Aug. 15th, toward a spot in the sky from which a possible alien signal originated.

The cosmic tweet is a belated reply to the Wow! signal, a mysterious radio transmission that was detected at the Big Ear radio observatory in Ohio in 1977 coming from the direction of the constellation Sagittarius. At its peak, the 72-second transmission was 30 times more powerful than ambient radiation from deep space, prompting the volunteer astronomer Jerry Ehman to scrawl "Wow!" next to the data on a computer printout, giving the signal its name.

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