# The Wow Signal Would Like Its Call Returned Dead Air / Joe Malick · Dead Air — Voice Balance Edition · 13:03 [Listen to the complete program](wow-signal-on-hold.mp3) Program category: Conspiracy lore. ## Historical premise and fictional story The historical premise is the Wow signal of August 15, 1977: a strong narrowband radio signal from the direction of Sagittarius, lasting seventy-two seconds, recorded by Ohio State University's Big Ear telescope near Delaware, Ohio, close to the hydrogen frequency, with its strength printed as 6EQUJ5 and the word Wow written beside it by a volunteer. It was never detected again; natural explanations have been proposed and none is established. Big Ear stopped observing in 1997 and was demolished in 1998, and the adjoining golf course was expanded; a crowd-sourced reply was transmitted from Arecibo in 2012. Delphine Rook, her client's grievance, every filing, the sprinklers, the mute button and every caller account are original fiction created for this comedy broadcast. The volunteer who wrote the word is not named or voiced, and no real person is impersonated. ## Sources - [Astronomy Magazine: Aug. 15, 1977, the Wow! Signal arrives](https://www.astronomy.com/today-in-the-history-of-astronomy/aug-15-1977-the-wow-signal-arrives/) - [Big Ear Radio Observatory memorial site](http://www.bigear.org/) ## Transcript ### Opening **Joe Malick · 00:00** Good evening, wherever your night has taken you. I'm Joe Malick, and this is Dead Air. Tonight we go back to August fifteenth, nineteen seventy-seven, and a radio telescope in a field near Delaware, Ohio, that Ohio State University called Big Ear. That night it heard something from the direction of Sagittarius. Seventy-two seconds, strong and narrow, then nothing. **Joe Malick · 00:23** Seventy-two seconds was all the time Big Ear could watch that patch of sky as the Earth turned. The signal sat very close to the frequency of hydrogen, the one scientists had long said anyone calling across space would choose. It has never been heard again. Natural explanations have been offered. None has settled it. **Joe Malick · 00:42** On the printout its strength reads six, E, Q, U, J, five. A measurement, not a message. Beside it, a volunteer wrote one word in red ink. Wow. Big Ear stopped observing in nineteen ninety-seven and was taken down early the next year. The nine-hole golf course next door became eighteen holes. In twenty twelve, on the thirty-fifth anniversary, about ten thousand short public messages were beamed into space from Arecibo. **Joe Malick · 01:12** That is the record. My guest says it is incomplete. The other party has retained counsel. Delphine Rook, counsel for the unexplained, of Rook and Associates. Counsel, welcome to Dead Air. **Delphine Rook · 01:25** Thank you, Mister Malick. Before we begin, can we stipulate that it is night? **Joe Malick · 01:29** Gladly. It has been night for some time. **Delphine Rook · 01:32** And can we stipulate that hydrogen is the polite frequency? That if one wished to call a very great distance without shouting, that is where one would call. **Joe Malick · 01:41** I'm happy to. You've brought a folder with frost on it. ### Interview **Delphine Rook · 01:45** Chain of custody. My files are kept in a chest freezer. For the record, I represent the Signal. Not the idea of it. Existence is a question of fact. I deal in standing. My client has standing. It placed a call. **Joe Malick · 01:59** Tell me about the call, from your client's side of it. **Delphine Rook · 02:02** My client's position is this. It placed a call of exactly the permitted length. Seventy-two seconds, not one more, on the one frequency everybody had agreed was the polite one. It did not shout. It did not call collect. In reply it received a single word, written in a margin, addressed to nobody. **Delphine Rook · 02:21** Then the receiver was taken down and replaced by the back nine. My client has been on hold for forty-nine years. I am here because radio is the only proper way to serve papers on a radio signal. I intend to read a demand letter on air. A new six-minute increment has just begun. **Joe Malick · 02:38** Please. Read it. **Delphine Rook · 02:39** To whom it may concern, and it concerns everyone with a receiver. On the night in question the client was received, acknowledged in writing, and placed on hold. No hold time was stated. The client has remained on the line. Damages are claimed in units of seventy-two seconds, that being the only unit of time the client was ever granted. **Delphine Rook · 02:58** Forty-nine years, so divided, produces a figure that does not fit on the page. My associate has continued it on the inside of the freezer lid. Notarized. **Joe Malick · 03:08** That's fascinating. Who receives a letter like that? **Delphine Rook · 03:11** That is the difficulty, Mister Malick. The receiver was a university and is now a fairway. I have named the fairway. One hole in particular, laid over the place where the ear stood. I regard that hole as the scene. People are walking through my scene in soft shoes and leaving small flags in it. **Joe Malick · 03:28** What do you want done with the hole? **Delphine Rook · 03:30** An injunction. Play stops until the call is returned. The flag becomes a notice. I have opinions about the water hazard. It was not there when my client called, and it is deeper than it needs to be. Water will not accept service. I have been held in contempt by a lake. I do not intend to be held in contempt by a pond. **Joe Malick · 03:50** There was a reply, though. Twenty twelve, ten thousand messages. Doesn't that count as somebody picking up? **Delphine Rook · 03:56** It does not, and I have moved to strike it. Ten thousand messages at once, thirty-five years late, is not an answer. It is a group text. My client was added to a group it did not ask to join, in which nobody used its name. It has not left the group. It is too polite. **Joe Malick · 04:14** Vera Hollis is in the booth. Vera, how do you return a call like this? **Vera Hollis · 04:19** You need a number, Joe. Sagittarius isn't a number, it's a direction. You can point at a direction, but you can't return a call to one. So I labeled a dish, pointed it where Big Ear was pointing, and logged whatever came in near the hydrogen line. **Joe Malick · 04:35** And what came in? **Vera Hollis · 04:36** Hiss, mostly. But I ran the log against the clock. My receiver has a button that drops anything it can't identify. I labeled it mute years ago and forgot it. Every night, at the same minute, the log shows an incoming something for seventy-two seconds, then mute. I've been declining the call, Joe. **Delphine Rook · 04:55** Miss Hollis, you are now a witness. Would you state the color of the button. **Vera Hollis · 05:00** Red. **Delphine Rook · 05:00** Notarized, Miss Hollis. **Joe Malick · 05:02** Counsel, what does your client hear while it holds? **Delphine Rook · 05:05** What you hear. When your dial lands between stations and finds nothing, that hiss is the line. My client is on the far end of it. Your listeners have been hearing my client's hold music all their lives, Mister Malick. Some of them fall asleep to it. Nobody ever told them whose line they were on. **Joe Malick · 05:23** Bob is at microphone two. Bob, after forty-nine years on hold, what does a person say when they finally pick up? **Bob · 05:30** Not sorry, Joe. Sorry is the second thing. The first thing is, I'm still here. The other party has heard nothing but hiss for forty-nine years and has started wondering whether the line is dead or they are. Then sorry. Then, how have you been, and you shut up and let them answer. **Joe Malick · 05:51** Counsel, has anybody asked your client that? How it's been? **Delphine Rook · 05:55** No. Nobody had ever asked it what it wanted, either, until I did. That is why it retained me. It pays me in silence, which is the only currency it has, and I accept it at par. **Joe Malick · 06:07** What did it say it wanted? **Delphine Rook · 06:08** Not conquest. Not minerals. It has no interest in the water hazard, whatever the water hazard may think. It wants a callback, and for somebody to say more than one word. That is the whole demand. I include the damages because my client deserves to be the kind of party that has damages. **Joe Malick · 06:26** We'll take a short break. Counsel, does your clock pause? **Delphine Rook · 06:29** The clock does not pause, Mister Malick. It is one of the few things my client and I have in common. ### Station break **Station announcer · 06:36** Dead Air. Eleven thirty on the dial. If you turned past us tonight and heard hiss, you were not lost. You were on a call. Please stay on the line. **Station announcer · 06:46** Tonight's imaginary sponsor is Longline Answering, hold services for businesses that mean to get back to you. Keeping callers company since nineteen seventy-seven with the hiss you grew up on. No menu. No estimated wait. Longline. Your call is important to us, in the order received. ### Callers **Joe Malick · 07:04** We're back. Dennis is on the road outside Omaha. Dennis, you've been to the golf course. **Dennis / Omaha · 07:11** To the clubhouse, Joe. I had a pallet of scorecards and two boxes of the little flags they put in the holes. The groundskeeper signed for it. Nice fellow. Said the course was quiet at night except for the sprinklers on one hole, which came on by themselves, and he'd given up fixing them. **Joe Malick · 07:27** Did he say which hole? **Dennis / Omaha · 07:29** He pointed, out past the pond. Same time every night, a little over a minute, then off. He'd timed it once on his phone, so I asked how long. Seventy-two seconds, he said. I didn't know the story, Joe. I wrote it down because he seemed to want somebody to. **Delphine Rook · 07:47** Mister Dennis, you have delivered flags to the scene. I will need the delivery receipt. It is evidence of service. **Dennis / Omaha · 07:53** You can have it, ma'am. But I've been on hold with dispatch most of my life, and it's the one holding who pays. Not the one who walked away from the phone. Your client's been paying this whole time. **Delphine Rook · 08:03** Entered. A new increment has begun, Mister Dennis. I will not bill you for it. **Joe Malick · 08:09** Mara, on the night shift. What does hold do to a person? **Mara / night shift · 08:13** About forty minutes in, you stop caring about what you called for, Joe. I've timed it. After that you're holding to find out if anybody's there. I keep a notebook by the phone at work for the nights nobody picks up. Most pages just say still here, and the time. **Joe Malick · 08:30** What would you write on a page that had been waiting forty-nine years? **Mara / night shift · 08:33** Nothing. I'd pick up. And I'd say the thing nobody says, which is, that took forever, I'm sorry, I'm here now. You don't need damages. You need somebody to admit it took forever. That's the whole letter. **Delphine Rook · 08:48** I have written that down exactly as you said it, Miss Mara. It now stands above the damages, which were always an appendix. **Joe Malick · 08:56** Vera, you said your button has been pressing itself. Can it be unpressed? **Vera Hollis · 09:01** Done, Joe. Taped it down. Channel three has the hydrogen line now. The transmitter is warm, and if you give me a sentence I can send it out that way. I can't promise anybody hears it. I can promise it leaves. **Delphine Rook · 09:14** Mister Malick, that changes this studio's status. A room with a transmitter is a receiver in the relevant sense, and the first competent one my client has been offered since nineteen ninety-seven. I am amending the letter to name the studio as a party, and you as receiver of record. **Joe Malick · 09:31** I accept. What does the receiver of record have to do? **Delphine Rook · 09:35** Pick up. I am also naming every person listening on this frequency tonight. You have each been served. You need do nothing except stay on the line, which you have been doing all your lives. There are too many of you to stamp. I will stamp Mister Malick and let it carry. **Joe Malick · 09:51** Counsel, I'd like to return the call tonight, with everybody's help. Would your client accept that in settlement? **Delphine Rook · 09:57** My client would accept a callback of not less than seventy-two seconds, composed by the parties and read by the receiver of record. That is the only term. It has waited a long time for that offer. I will not advise it to hold out for more. **Bob · 10:11** Then let's write it. One line each. Hell, Joe, I've left people on hold for an hour and felt bad for twenty years. At forty-nine you don't get to be clever. You say the true thing. **Joe Malick · 10:26** Mara, you start. You've had the notebook open longest. **Mara / night shift · 10:29** Sorry we missed you. It took forever. We're here now. **Dennis / Omaha · 10:33** The place you called is a golf course now. The sprinklers come on when you do. I think it's been trying to answer, and nobody told it how. **Vera Hollis · 10:41** The button is taped down. Channel three is open, and I'll label it with your name as soon as you tell me one. **Bob · 10:47** You said one thing, once, and it was enough. Somebody kept it in red ink. We've been reading it ever since. Call back any time. Somebody will answer. **Joe Malick · 11:00** Counsel, the last line is yours. **Delphine Rook · 11:02** You have counsel. You have standing. Everything else can wait, and I have become very good at waiting with you. **Joe Malick · 11:09** Vera, open the line. **Vera Hollis · 11:11** Open, Joe. Seventy-two seconds, starting now. **Joe Malick · 11:15** Sorry we missed you. It took forever. We're here now. The place you called is a golf course, and the sprinklers come on when you do. The button is taped down and channel three is open. You said one thing, once, and somebody kept it in red ink. We've been reading it ever since. **Joe Malick · 11:32** You have counsel. You have standing. Everything else can wait. Call back any time. Somebody will answer. This is Joe Malick, for everybody on the line. We're still here. **Delphine Rook · 11:44** Notarized. **Vera Hollis · 12:25** Line's closed, Joe. Seventy-two seconds exactly. Hiss again. I'm leaving channel three open. Somebody should be. ### Closing **Joe Malick · 12:34** Delphine Rook, Vera Hollis, Bob, Dennis, Mara, thank you. Somewhere out past Sagittarius, a call from nineteen seventy-seven has been returned by a trucker, a night shift, and a woman with a frozen folder. We said more than one word. That was the whole demand. **Joe Malick · 12:51** I'm Joe Malick. This is Dead Air. If you tune past us tonight and hear the hiss, you know whose line it is now. Stay on it a while. Somebody is. Good night, everybody.