Recently recovered FarShores file
Did an Australian radio amateur (Ham) nearly 74 years ago receive intelligent signals from the planet Mars?
It was the night of August 22, 1924 when radio was still a youngster and the airwaves were not so overburdened with signals as they are today. When tuning was often carried out with the aid of a cat's whisker and antennae were lengths of wire 50 metres or more.
Mars was a mystery made all the more so by recent reports from astronomer Percival Lowell, of Lowell Observatory, Arizona that the famous "canals" were the work of a superior engineering intelligence on that planet.
The young Australian, known only as 'Jerry' possessed a genius for radio construction and his results from an assembled collection of tubes, valves, coils, wires and batteries, found him regularly tuning in to radio stations as far away as Berlin, Rome, London and the Far East. It was a hobby that was to produce spectacular results on a cold cloudless night in the southern hemisphere.
He had chosen this particular evening well. For it was at this time that Mars was to be at its closest point to Earth for the remainder of the 20th century. The receiver he had been working on was something new. Instead of the regular shortwave bands, the frequencies this radio could tune to were much higher. Very much higher in fact and beyond the current use of terrestrial stations.
As the set gently hummed and the valves grew brighter and brighter, his fingers began to turn the great dials. A spatter of static and whining disturbances came through the enormous speaker. He stopped tuning and held his breath as a code-like noise broke through over the background hash. One long stroke, then a pause. Then two strokes and a pause and again two strokes. Now followed a long pause that was ended by three strokes. This was repeated three times. Then came four repeated four times. A silence followed. After some moments the pattern began again, repeating itself as it did before.
It was all so clear to the Australian listener. Four is calling! Four is calling to Three! Mars is the fourth planet and Earth the third. He sat for hours that night, listening as the code kept repeating over and over again. Oh, how he had wished that as well as a receiver he had built a transmitter with which to respond to those mysterious airborne signals. Did they indeed come from the planet Mars? Perhaps the year 2000 will tell us, as the planet moves ever closer once more.
