The search for extraterrestrial intelligence relied on radio astronomy, a subdiscipline that examines the radio part of the electromagnetic spectrum—light whose wavelength is too long to be visible to human eyes. The field was founded by the physicist and radio engineer Karl Jansky, who, in 1933, was working at Bell Labs when he began searching for the source of static that was disrupting telephone conversations. He located it in an unexpected place: the middle of the Milky Way.
Jansky’s work marked the beginning of the serious scientific study of radio waves in outer space. But the field did not become a research priority in the United States until the Second World War, when it was highly valued for its usefulness in jamming radar systems. The Cold War was a boom time for radio astronomers, whose huge telescopes were prized for their ability to monitor enemy communications and track missiles. Flush with funds, the discipline advanced rapidly. This was the beginning of a long entanglement between astronomy, the military-industrial complex, and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
Radio astronomy was still a nascent technology, however, and the continued scarcity of high-tech instruments prompted surprising episodes of international coöperation. In 1957, the U.S.S.R. launched Sputnik, the first human-made satellite to orbit Earth. Only one radar facility in the West, the Jodrell Bank Observatory in England, had a telescope with a steerable parabolic dish large enough to track the rocket that had launched the satellite. This was a source of great alarm to the U.S., since the launch rocket resembled an intercontinental ballistic missile with enough power to carry a hydrogen bomb. As the Earth turned and the rocket moved out of Jodrell Bank’s view, the U.S. could not take up the baton—and neither could the Soviets, who soon asked for help finding their own rocket. For years, the British observatory was in the strange position of monitoring both American and Soviet missile launches and space missions.
In 1963, the physicist Bernard Lovell, who had developed Jodrell’s immense telescope, was invited on a visit to the U.S.S.R.’s new radio-astronomy facility in Crimea. Lovell had helped confirm a Soviet triumph by locating Sputnik’s rocket, and now he was a celebrity in the Soviet Union. His scientific curiosity must have been intense: he was to become the first Westerner to visit the new observatory and gauge the extent of Soviet advances in radio astronomy. As British intelligence made clear, he was also expected to report back on what he saw to MI6.