by Sarah Scoles
When the SETI Institute and UC Berkeley first began constructing that scaled-down ATA in 2004, Hat Creek bustled with young engineers. They and Hat Creek Construction put together the bits, pieces, bolts, and pedestals that would become the first telescope dedicated to finding aliens. In a gigantic tent, two people could assemble a whole antenna from parts in four days. That tent still sits onsite today, lifeless now but still filled with the kind of heavy machinery you’re not supposed to operate when impaired.
At night, the team crowded into the one-story houses and dorms hidden among the observatory’s trees. They stayed up late around the Olympic-sized pool table, leaning against the pearly inlays and calculating the precise angle necessary to make each shot. Spectators watched from an orange vinyl couch that might be an Eames; no one is quite sure. A media tower of old VHS tapes still stands in the lounge like a monument to social times past: Back to the Future (plus sequel), the Alien trilogy, and, of course, Contact, their cardboard covers now blanched and soft around the edges.
In 2007, after seven years of work, the SETI Institute and UC Berkeley sent out a birth announcement: all those rural California sleepovers had yielded telescopic offspring. Allen agreed to support the array’s operation for another two years to get them started. Following the dedication and with a kick-in from the air force, which is always interested in tracking and downlinking from satellites, the ATA watched the sky constantly, simultaneously doing regular astronomy (magnetic fields, black holes, star formation) and SETI (alien civilizations, unimaginable beings, cosmic evolution), and searching for satellites for the government during its off time.
And then, in 2011, outward forces began squeezing the Hat Creek Radio Observatory, and those inside couldn’t muster the resources to combat it. This was the great recession, and UC Berkeley had a billion-dollar budget shortfall. To save money, the University of California system opted to shutter Hat Creek Observatory, a scientific outpost they’d operated for 60 years. “If we had built out the array to 350 antennas or some huge number, it would have been a spectacular telescope for astronomy and for SETI,” says Berkeley’s Werthimer. The UC system may have hung on to that resource. But it wasn’t worth the expense, the way it was.
And so, suddenly, scientists and engineers who’d invested their careers in the ATA—and the previous telescopes housed at Hat Creek, like the 85-foot telescope and the BIMA array—were suddenly estranged from it. “There were a lot of people at Berkeley who had put a huge amount of their life into the telescope,” says Werthimer, noting that one scientist failed to achieve tenure because the university cut itself off from Hat Creek.
The NSF, which had operated other telescopes at Hat Creek, said the array was too small for them to take over. It wasn’t world-class at its scaled-down size. And so, one last time, Tarter and the Berkeley team went to Paul Allen. Maybe he would build out those missing antennas, transforming it Cinderella-style into a telescope the NSF would be proud to splash on brochures. But instead, Allen said, “What would happen if we left you alone for three or four years?”—not providing funding or support and seeing what the SETI team could accomplish on their own.
“And that’s where we left it,” Tarter says. “I send him updates. He hasn’t written back.”
In addition to dealing with Allen’s refusal and the Berkeley breakup’s fallout, she was also dealing with an actual breakup itself. “We had a miserable divorce,” she says of the dissolution of the ATA team. “And like any miserable divorce, it was acrimonious as hell. ‘It’s your fault.’ ‘No, it’s your fault.’ ‘I own this widget; you own that nut.’” One night, some Berkeley engineers removed a rack of computers. They still have it. Of course, they say it was theirs to begin with, there being two sides to every story, even in science.
Still, Werthimer says hard feelings don’t separate the two groups. After all, this was fundamentally an institutional separation, not an individual one. Tarter and Welch still come over to Werthimer’s house often—for dinner, for dancing—and Tarter attends the Berkeley SETI group’s weekly meeting. Welch still has an emeritus appointment at the university’s Radio Astronomy Lab.
But without Berkeley, the SETI Institute now owned a telescope they couldn’t afford to operate, like impoverished yacht owners whose boats sit at the dock all day, and they did not have the federal permits necessary to operate the site, which is on land in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest. They padlocked the gate, dead-bolted the doors, and went back to the Bay Area. The array hibernated.
But as with the ends of so many marriages, a new relationship was waiting in the wings. In the years just prior, the SETI Institute had contracted with SRI International, a scientific nonprofit organization, to see if the ATA could dip into “space situational awareness”—jargon for “what’s in orbit around Earth and where.” SRI developed a plan to retrofit part of the telescope’s computing system with super secure firewalls. Then, clients like the Air Force, always curious about the whereabouts of satellites, could use the ATA as a tracking station. SRI agreed to upgrade from “contractor” to operator, with ownership of the former Berkeley assets at the Hat Creek facilities.
If an organization decides to close a telescope, they are legally obligated the return the land to its natural state. It’s a process that often costs more than just continuing to run the telescope for years and years. The University of California knew their checkbook would be more balanced if they didn’t close but instead sold the Hat Creek Observatory—even for cheap—to someone else. SRI purchased the facilities for $1.
The SETI Institute kept custody of the telescopes and computers for which they had fundraised so hard, and SRI began the proceedings to obtain a use permit from the United States Forest Service. But these negotiations took a while. And time—as it is wont to do—marched onward, as the telescope remained idle.
After a few months of back-and-forth, paperwork troubles, and continuing hibernation, Tarter drove the five hours upstate to visit Hat Creek and make sure teenagers weren’t spray-painting the observatory’s walls or hacking through the drywall. When she arrived, she found the desert grass growing high, creeping up on the control room. Her dream had been right in front of her: a telescope just for SETI. A real shot at finding out just how alone we aren’t, or are. And now it was strangled in weeds.
Even a few months later, after SRI got its paperwork in order, getting the telescope cleaned up and back on its feet required cash. So Tarter and the SETI Institute’s development officer, Karen Randall, concocted a resurrection plan. They would crowdfund it, asking the masses—so fond of Battlestar Galactica and alien apocalypse movies—to rouse the ATA.
Crowdfunding was a new idea in 2011, the days long before you could put “I want to make a potato salad” on Kickstarter and earn $60,000. Randall developed a website, called SETIStars, just for this project. And over the course of 40 days, the crowd donated $250,000.
Tarter scrolled through the thousands of comments people had left with their donations. “‘I’m doing this in the name of my two-year-old daughter because this is her future,’” says one. It felt like the thronging spectators at the 25th mile of a marathon. Jodie Foster signed it, saying, “I’m a SETIStar because, just like Ellie Arroway, the ATA is ‘good to go’ and we need to return it to the task of searching newly discovered planetary worlds for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. In Carl Sagan’s book/movie Contact a radio signal from a distant star system ends humanity’s cosmic isolation and changes our world. The Allen Telescope Array could turn science fiction into science fact, but only if it is actively searching the skies. I support the effort to bring the array out of hibernation.” So did Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders: “It is absolutely irresponsible of the human race not to be searching for evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence.”
This money allowed them to unlock the gates, mow the grass, and get back to work. And that’s exactly what they did—with fanfare. The Kepler telescope team, largely based at Ames Research Center, who
had launched a planet-finding telescope into space two years earlier, was set to release its second catalog of new worlds—2,326 planets beyond the solar system, more than 20 times as many as scientists knew of before. NASA’s Bill Borucki invited Tarter to point her resurrected telescope at the most promising of those worlds, and share in the buzz of press coverage.
“Jill and the SETI program have played a very important role in the Kepler mission for a very long time,” says Bill Borucki, a scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center and the head of the Kepler mission. He worked on the design for decades before anyone believed it would work—that the planets were out there and that our technology could find them. In some ways, the search for planets mirrors the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, but sped up, and with some conclusion. And the two mutually benefit each other: the more Earth-ish planets scientists find, the more likely people are to be pro-SETI. The more pro-SETI people are, the more likely they are to support planet hunts. Both sides know that.
“It was always considered that as soon as we obtained data for planets in the habitable zone,” where temperatures stay warm enough for water to be liquid, says Borucki, “that the SETI telescope would obtain data to see if there were any radio signals that would indicate intelligent beings.”
SETI seemed to have an actual future, and two promising new marriages.
While the Kepler SETI search, and every search before and after, has shown nothing, Borucki emphasizes—as nearly all scientists do—that while “50 years of SETI” seems long to humans, we’ve only just gotten started. It’s not time to give up yet.
“Wait a thousand years or so,” he says, searching for signals the whole time. “Then rethink it.”
The ATA, in 2017, still has only those 42 dishes, which are sprinkled across Hat Creek Valley as if an angry giant turned a box of them upside down. This spread, which looks random, is carefully calculated to give the telescope the sharpest view. The antennas straddle Forest Service land and a ranch owned by the Bidwell family. A line of trees should separate the array from the ranch, so Debbie Bidwell doesn’t have to look into the 42 antenna eyes all day. But the functional landscaping has been erected and subsequently eaten—twice. The predator remains a mystery (the easy joke would be to blame aliens). But regardless of the herbivore’s species, the Bidwells will have to endure the view for now.
The antennas do stand in jarring technological contrast to the remote land around them. They’re an hour and a half from Redding, the closest city, which is not much of a city-city but a place known for rodeos and trail-running competitions. In the town of Hat Creek, a café decorated with landscapes painted onto sawblades sells double-venti-sized milkshakes. A few miles down the road, a gas station displays at least 75 pictures of people holding it-was-this-big trout and sells a wine called Redneck Red.
The region is about five hours northeast of the Bay Area—a long, hot trek up Interstate 5, the mercury often rising above 100°F, with only yellow grass to break up the view of olive orchards. But after you veer off the highway, you enter volcano country. In the distance loom snow-capped destroyers of worlds, some still capable of blowing their tops. Mounts Shasta and Lassen, which erupted just 100 years ago, lord over the scene most visibly. The surrounding landscape ascends to more than 4,000 feet in elevation as you drive past pine tree after pine tree (punctuated by burnt pine after burnt pine) toward Hat Creek Valley. Brush rises from the fine dirt like it just landed there, while at the base of the nearest ridge, lava rubble actually did just land there. It cooled and formed a pile of pocked rock that stops just short of the Bidwell ranch. It would look like the remains of an abandoned construction site, if anyone built structures out of igneous rock. Off the ridge above the rubble, hang gliders sometimes jump and cruise, UFOs until the air sets them down in the valley.
The March 2014 morning after the stargazing adventure, Tarter emerges from her dorm room at 7:30 dressed for the day, bronze turtle earrings in place as always. She pours a cup of decaf coffee and stands sipping at the window in the communal kitchen, which is filled with mismatched mugs and a collection of cooking sauces left behind by engineers. Nothing is visible outside the window except the roundabout driveway. In it sits the Camry Tarter is renting until her own Saab is fixed. She rinses the mug, sets it next to the sink, and ventures out into the UV light.
She drives the quarter mile from the dorm to the main control building, winding along a one-and-a-half-lane road that doesn’t afford a view until you’re right in front of the telescope. The building is low, T-shaped.
“Oh, Susie planted irises,” Tarter says as she walks inside, referring to Susie Jorgensen, the site manager.
I ask if Susie planted them herself.
“Yes,” Tarter says. “There is no one else.”
Although the site once housed a dozen staff, whose dogs kept the place lively, the observatory now has no permanent astronomers. We are the only ones here, human or canine. She walks past the window-walled computer server room and into the lobby, where sample tourist T-shirts and mugs rest beneath a turned-off TV. In a more bustling time, tourists received guided tours. Now, they push the Play button for the introductory DVD themselves. Above the scene hangs a sign showing the array of antennas: 30 DOWN, 320 TO GO, it proclaims.
Over the “30,” someone has stuck a Post-it note that says “42.”
Tarter turns on the DVD, a slide show and B-roll combination, produced and narrated by an intern. It’s obsessive in its detail, describing the site’s history like Wikipedia would. They would like to redo the video, she says, to produce something slick and flashy. But such a production sits on the back burner, way behind those 308 other things that need to be done. The credits roll, and she switches the TV off and heads down a narrow hallway, wallpapered with the kind of laminated 3 × 4-foot scientific posters astronomers make to hang for show-and-tell at conferences. They’re text-heavy, with weighty titles like “Real-time Imaging” and “Launching the Galactic Center Transient Survey.”
Past them is the control room, an open space with a mostly empty L-shaped desk. A whiteboard is filled with equations, their bright green and blue variables slanting slightly upward as you look from left to right. Just outside lies a doormat decorated with an iconic Close Encounters–style alien. WELCOME ALL SPECIES, it proclaims. Out from the doormat, someone has painted tiny green footprints on the sidewalk. They point the way from one interpretive kiosk to the next, so that the 2,000 annual visitors can guide themselves on tours of the site.
Tarter steps out onto the footprints, walking to the antennas, which shine like enamel in the sun. A pictorial sign warns of rattlesnakes. Tarter takes a magic-seeming baton from her jacket pocket and waves it in front of one antenna’s support pole.
“Magnetic wand,” she says.
It disables the dish so it will hold and not suddenly turn toward a star on the other side of the sky, smacking anyone in the head. The designers were considerate of cow crania, too: the dishes never aim lower than 18 degrees, leaving just enough space between the dish and the support pole for a bovine face to fit.
Each dish measures 20 feet across. It acts like a mirror for radio waves, reflecting them in the same way that your bathroom mirror reflects visible light. When radio waves stream down from space and hit the dish, it bounces them toward a second, smaller “mirror.” This one bounces them again, to a detecting system. Here, the radio waves begin to turn into something humans can sense and understand, much like a car’s audio system turns radio broadcasts into ballads. The smaller second dish protrudes from the bottom lip of the main one, stuck out on support poles like a chin. A metal shroud covers the lower space between the two, and a Sunbrella covering straps over the top.
Sailors are familiar with Sunbrella because their sail bags, chairs, and booze-cache covers are made of it. It keeps water out but lets radio waves through, much like a skylight does visible light. Tarter points to a thick seam of Sunbrella threaded through a slit in a pipe, which keeps the fab
ric closed and flush against the main dish, a technique learned from her sewing years. This is a keder welt, something sailors use to raise sails up a mast.
She stands on tiptoe and struggles to undo a latch on the metal shroud, trying to get into the antennas’ insides. It’s a rubber hook and eye designed to hold truck hoods closed. This sort of MacGyvering—which seems like it resulted from tipsy late-night Amazon shopping—appears all over the telescope. The array is a maker scope in that way, similar to the do-it-yourself creations popular in tech-nerd circles: homemade Geiger counters, coffeepots that brew when you flip a light switch in your room.
“Come on,” she says, still trying to open the trapdoor. “Come. On.”
But the latch remains just out of reach. Eventually, she retreats to the brush, where she roots around until she finds a stick. Holding it aloft like a trophy, she extends it toward the antenna and coaxes the rubber loose. The trapdoor swings open so fast it seems like a jack-in-the-box should pop out.
“Aha,” she says.
It is a Stone Age triumph, a reaffirmation that humans can augment their abilities with tools, like sticks or telescopes. She pokes her head inside the antenna and looks around as if orienting herself. Next to her, a pyramid-shaped piece of metal protrudes from the main dish, peak pointing outward. Tapered rods—like those TV antennas people used to place on their roofs—adhere to each of its four sides. At the pointy end, they’re half an inch long, but they get bigger as they progress down from the pyramid’s peak. It looks like a death ray.
But it’s not a death ray. Instead of blasting rays, it detects them. The ATA picks up signals 10 to 100 times higher than those your radio receives, from about 1 to 10 gigahertz (imagine a station called WMFE 1000.3). Each different-sized rod picks up, essentially, a different cosmic “radio station.” Your FM car radio is sensitive to radio waves with frequencies of 87.5 megahertz to 108.0 megahertz. “One of the problems in SETI is you don’t know what frequency ET might be broadcasting on,” explains Werthimer, “so you want to look at as many channels as you can.”