Gray first heard of the Wow! signal a few years after its detection, and was fascinated by its potential implications. He contacted the Ohio team, visited Big Ear, and had long conversations with Jerry Ehman, as well as with Bob Dixon, who was the director of the SETI project, and John Kraus, the telescope’s designer. The discussions convinced him that the Wow! was not a hoax or a case of terrestrial interference, and most likely originated from the stars. But he also learned that apart from the Big Ear team’s own sporadic efforts no one else had actually tried to find it again.

Gray was surprised. Given the momentous nature of what the Wow! signal could reveal, he expected astronomers to be clamoring for a chance to study it. But this was clearly not the case. The reason, he came to realize, is that observing time on the world’s great radio telescopes is a rare and much sought-after commodity. Once scientists secure a few hours or days on one of those great dishes, they understandably use every minute of it to pursue their own research projects. They simply have no time for romantic pursuits like a search for aliens.

But as an outsider, Gray was not burdened with the usual pressures of academic life. He didn’t have to worry about publication counts, grant applications, or review committees, and was free to pursue what he saw as the most important question of all: Are we alone? Not willing to wait for the professionals to get around to it, he came to a decision: He would search for the Wow! signal on his own.

In the first part of The Elusive Wow Gray tells the story of his 22-year quest for the Wow! signal. His first idea was to build his own radio-telescope from scratch, and point it to the celestial coordinates where the signal originated. This was not as far-fetched as it sounds: Gray had considerable experience with electronics, having built radios as a teenager. He calculated that even a relatively small dish would be sensitive enough to detect a signal as strong as the one received at Big Ear, and besides, no one else was looking! If there was a regular signal emanating from the locale of the Wow!, Gray reasoned, he might catch it.

Building the radio-telescope turned out to be more challenging than Gray had expected. At a swap meet for ham radio operators he found a 12-foot dish that had belonged to a communications tower, and a steerable mounting from a World War II-era radar set. He hauled the big loads at night to avoid the police, and then rolled the dish on its side to his home in Chicago. He tried to build a receiver and spectrometer by himself but in the end had state-of-the-art equipment donated by private companies and university labs. Beginning in 1983 and for the next fifteen years Gray’s compact radio observatory operated regularly, and sometimes continuously for months at a time. It did everything that he asked of it, but it did not find a trace of the elusive Wow!