by Sarah Scoles
Not a whole lot, besides this alien thing, was going on in the rural area around the telescope. The Parkes antenna rises from the farmland about 15 miles from the town of Parkes, surrounded by a baseball-field-like arc of golden grass. A diagonal road shoots from what would be the catcher’s mound. And all around the field, more fields—these full of crops—grow in perfect, intelligently designed squares.
Tarter’s entourage overwhelmed the observatory’s infrastructure. Even bunked like college freshmen, the engineers couldn’t all fit in the observatory’s dorms. Some of them boarded in motel rooms in the town of Parkes, an 1870s gold-rush hamlet. But Australian drinking culture—and specifically a pub crawl orchestrated by the welcoming town officials—threatened to derail their tight schedule. One desperate young engineer showed at the observatory late the morning after, having prescribed himself a run from town (20 miles) as the best possible cure for his hangover. This was T-minus one month until Phoenix took flight.
Nothing was ready. After collecting the MRF from Sydney Harbor and hauling it overland to the telescope, they had to reassemble it. And, even more difficult, they had to get a second telescope—one called Mopra, 144 miles away in Coonabarabran—running as the host for a follow-up detection device (FUDD), meant to confirm that the signal came from space and not local electronics.
The scientists planned to have one FUDD at the main telescope, to analyze the signal intensely while the telescope continued on to a different part of the sky.
The scientists planned to observe simultaneously with the Parkes and Mopra telescopes, looking at the same star system at the same time. The Phoenix computer at Parkes identified candidate signals and compared them with a database of known human interference. The FUDDs at both sides then looked back at any viable candidates. And the ones that persisted at Parkes were compared against the data sitting in the Mopra FUDD’s memory. A signal truly coming from the sky (and not from, say, a nearby airport) would look different at the two locations because of their different locations on the planet.
Tarter had planned to run Mopra remotely, from her perch in Parkes, but the “remotely operable” feature of the Mopra system wasn’t working yet. Tarter and the team scrambled, working around the clock to bring that system, and the rest of their gear, online. It often fell to Tarter to phone the head engineer at Mopra in the middle of the night, and she cringed when his wife answered the phone in a sleep-thick voice.
Over the course of that month, Tarter did her best to turn Parkes into a place her people would want to live, or at least wouldn’t leave. She rented a U-Haul, went to “this thing called Ikea,” and bought DIY particle-board desks and assemble-it-yourself office chairs. She bought a candelabra to adorn consoles and a coatrack for their hard hats from a thrift store. Armed with a can of spray paint, she covered them in gold. She made filled glass containers with candy and made thrice-weekly runs to town for Coke and Tim Tams for the young engineers. It was, in a way, a home.
The coral-pink trailer Parkes gave them to use as an office had a sign: JILL’S ROADHOUSE. HOME SPECIALTY: DEEP-FRIED PHOENIX IN TARTER SAUCE. Some called it Jill’s Palace. Those who did were mostly men, but most everyone was. The Australian men loved to make blonde jokes of dubious taste, with sexual innuendoes as punchlines. Tarter, sick of this, stared at them blankly after one joke’s delivery. She blinked, willing vacuity into her eyes. “I don’t get that one,” she said. “Please explain it to me.” They never told another blonde joke around her again.
While there, Tarter did meet some exceptional women, like Carol Oliver, who became the voice of SETI in Australia, and Bobbie Vaile, an astronomer who had worked with Frank Drake to develop an astrobiology curriculum for her university. For Vaile’s birthday, they celebrated by eating a cake iced with a Pinocchio-nosed alien. But Vaile, they soon learned, had a brain tumor. Treatable, perhaps. Time would tell, as it always does eventually. Vaile was 15 years Tarter’s junior, and the idea that an illness in someone so much younger than she could bring a life and a promising career to a halt rattled her. She tried to stay hopeful.
Tarter also befriended the Australian women who ran the Parkes dorm, some of them nearly as broad as they were tall. Every week, these women went to the town’s RSL and Services Club, a gathering place for current and former military, and line-danced to songs like “All My Ex’s Live in Texas.” Tarter joined them one night and marveled at the precision with which they executed the intricate steps. None of them had Texan exes, but it was perhaps true that the things they loved and longed for lived far away.
On February 1, the Phoenix was scheduled to lift itself out of those ashes, shake itself off, and fly off to grab aliens in its talons. The team planned to point both the Parkes and Mopra telescopes at Pioneer 10 as the first test, as usual. The spacecraft was billions of miles away, a tiny metal box of circuits in space, pinging away at nothing. They hadn’t seen its gray diagonal signal since Arecibo. Before that, during HRMS, they’d seen it every day.
The morning of the test, prior to the arrival of the press and dignitaries, was less ceremonious than the Columbus Day beginning of the HRMS project. The neighboring farmer had started to fertilize his fields, and the winds had carried the smell to the observatory. A staff member was dispatched to get the farmer off his tractor and invite him to lunch.
The team was slightly out of the spotlight. Even if they thought they were doing grand things, they now understood that there might be value in keeping that to themselves. They hovered over the five CRT monitors and CPUs that displayed their data and controlled the instruments. Tarter told the telescope to slew to Pioneer’s position, and they all held their breaths as they waited for a signal to rise up from the static.
Tarter thought of all the Tim Tams they may have eaten in vain, and how much they missed their families and friends, and how maybe this would just end like every other SETI project and . . .
. . . and then Pioneer slashed across the screen. The FUDD at Mopra confirmed. They had found evidence of themselves, of all of us.
Most of the engineers returned home, but Tarter and the scientists stayed at Parkes for six months, babysitting the algorithms and correcting anything that was needed. Tarter often worked the late shift, a period that has always suited her, at least based on the time stamps of her emails. Every midnight, she walked 1.5 kilometers from the dorm to the telescope and sat under it till dawn. “I got so attuned to country living and the pace of life,” she says. “I started my shift under this beautiful sky and hardly ever saw any people.”
When, after months of that slow-strolling existence, she had to travel to the town of Dubbo with its 40,000 inhabitants to buy a transformer, she felt like a recluse. “I thought, ‘Who are all these people? Get away! You’re too close.’”
After Phoenix’s successful Australian deployment, Hewlett, Packard, and Moore all pledged $1 million more each for five years. A science trust fund.
Just after her sojourn Down Under, Tarter traveled to Star Island, New Hampshire, in July 1995 to attend a conference on the links between science and religion. Tarter didn’t really see any. “Somebody twisted my arm or leg or something,” she says.
Star Island is part of the Isles of Shoals, a chain of landmasses six miles from the East Coast, bleeding across the border between Maine and New Hampshire. Star Island is one of the largest at 46 acres. Small rocks ring the island, looking from the air like a dusting of snow, and all the buildings are perfectly manicured New England white Colonials. One night of the conference, Tarter sat on the dock with a Buddhist monk who told her that he always dressed in his robes for flights because the airline was more likely to upgrade him. Free drinks, more legroom, and fashion seemed like worldly concerns for a man of the cloth. But she liked his honesty. They watched the sunset together, the kind of sunset that makes you feel lucky to be an Earthling. That moment may have been forgotten if the next few days hadn’t cast it into what artists would call “sharp relief,” etching it deeply in contrast to what cam
e after.
When she left the island to meet Welch and his daughter in New Hampshire, she spent a night alone in a Massachusetts hotel room. And out of nowhere, she felt a sharp pain in her armpit, like a letter opener shoved deep into the muscle. Her skin seemed to clutch inward toward the feeling—or, perhaps, toward a thing. A growth.
She called her doctor back in California. The phone rang and rang. He had left town for a few days, the receptionist said, and would call back soon. Tarter shoved the pain aft in her mind and packed for the next leg of the journey. She tried not to think of the word cancer. But trying not to think of something is humans’ worst skill. We can build skyscrapers, write sonnets, bend silicon to our will, and search for aliens—but we can’t not think of something.
When the doctor finally called back, he said, “Don’t worry. Cancer doesn’t usually show up as a sharp pain.”
The trip continued, with just the stab and tug beneath her skin, and the self-soothing of the sentence “It’s nothing; it’s nothing.” When they arrived home two weeks later, she went to the doctor’s office. The waiting room was a purgatory that felt like hell. So did the days that came just after that, before the diagnosis: breast cancer.
The treatment began right away—cut, poison, burn. Surgery, chemotherapy, radiation. The cancer was aggressive, so the treatment rose to match. Appointments listed in her calendar, once back-to-back committee meetings, become Tetris-style medical appointments: surgery, bone scan, CT scan. Entries like “SETI session” are crossed out, replaced with “blood tests at 4” and “chemo at 2.” Still, she worked. “Even during that period, she was kicking everybody’s butt,” says Harp. “Even in chemo, she was still working harder than anybody.”
Her hair fell out in clots. “I looked at myself in the mirror, and I said, ‘I know that face,’” she says. “I looked like the bald baby-picture version of myself.”
One of the other calendar entries from that period was “Barney’s Memorial.” While preparing Thanksgiving dinner, Oliver suffered a massive coronary, dying immediately, just weeks after Tarter had delivered a report on the Australian Project Phoenix campaign to him, Hewlett, Packard, and Moore. At a tribute service years later, Tarter paid homage to her substitute father figure and mentor before an audience of many hundreds crammed into the First Presbyterian Church in Palo Alto, California. She tried not to sugarcoat his larger-than-life personality, while saluting his massive intellect and the kindness he had shown to her by allowing her to stand on his gigantic shoulders. “Since the fourth of August, our cosmos has been ‘out of order,’” she said. “That was the day the cosmos and all of us lost Sir SETI.”
When she describes this time of her life to me at her house in 2015, twenty years after it happened, she veers away from emotions as quickly as she steers toward them, lapsing instead into serious science mode. For instance, when discussing the cancer, she says, “Histologically, the cancer cells were quite distorted. Disturbed and very . . .” She trails off and lifts the photo album page by its corner.
The next set of plastic-sleeved images shows her mother’s house. Betty, a woman with a curled gray coif, the kind you “have done,” sits in an armchair. Tarter has a straight-haired blond wig plopped on her head. She looks a little like one of the Beatles. “I hadn’t told my mother about the disease at all,” she says. “My father had died of cancer, as well as my mother’s sister, my favorite Aunt Helen. It was the big C-word in our family.” Instead, she told her mother that a salon treatment had gone awry. And when her mother asked her to install a ceiling fan, she did it, despite how she could hardly move her left arm after the surgery.
The treatment continued for nine months, from July 1995 to March 1996. She never told her mother. “She may have known,” Tarter says. “She never let on to me. We never had a discussion about it.”
It’s human nature not to want to worry our parents. Despite how we behaved as teenagers, we know that our troubles and behaviors don’t just have merely Newtonian impact on them. The reaction can be much greater than equal. They knew us when we really were bald babies. In some ways, we will always be bald babies to them.
Some families stage political debates at Thanksgiving, know details of each other’s love lives, and actually talk about their feelings. Other families bury their troubles into the house’s foundation. They use neutral tones or reserve the right to remain silent. They switch the topic to genetics when the limbic system gets too active.
Toward the end of Tarter’s cancer treatment, she went back to Parkes. When she arrived, she found that Bobbie Vaile was dying. Vaile’s cancer had grown beneath her skull like it wanted to replace her brain. And that’s the irony of cancer—it bites, clean off, the hand that feeds. Vail knew the jaws soon would clamp down. So did Tarter.
To see someone else dying, and to know the same disease wants to take you, too—it must be like practicing saying goodbye to yourself.
“My hair grew back in curly,” Tarter continues, steering away again. “I assume that the DNA gets altered because of the chemicals, but then it reestablishes itself.”
After returning from Parkes, she threw away the wig and walked around like a newly shorn sheep, little shoots sprouting back up. She got to have another chance. She stuffed down her goodbye, the grief over things she didn’t want to leave, and her idea of what she would leave the world. She went back to acting as if she were immortal.
A few years later, the C-word came for Tarter’s mother, just as it had for her father. Betty’s cancer sprouted and spread like kudzu. Tarter flew to Florida, dismantled her mother’s life, and sold it to the businesses there that specialize in end-of-life auctions. She took her mother back to Berkeley with her and spent the next three weeks with hospice at the house. When she describes the period, she says only, “Hospice is hard on everybody. It was a sad time. I wasn’t very skilled, and I still chastise myself over my incompetence.”
A few months after Tarter’s mother died, she flew with her mother’s ashes back to Belle Mead, New Jersey. “I buried them next to my dad,” she says. “I didn’t know what else to do. I don’t believe in an afterlife. My mother had been a widow far longer than she had been a wife, and I thought it would be appropriate to have a commemoration in stone of their time together.”
Phoenix had many lives, and began a new one in 1996 when Tarter’s team packed up the gear in the MRF (trailer) and set off for Green Bank. SETI traveled back to its ultimate roots, all the way from Australia to West Virginia, where Drake had done his first experiment in the 1960s. Project Phoenix used the 140-foot telescope, which looks naval on the outside and steampunk on the inside. It has a giant white base that resembles a beached ship, and the arc on which the telescope turns calls to mind a captain’s wheel. But if you climb up the ship’s ladders and open its starboard doors, you’ll find gears and gears and gears, lubricated with great drops of hydraulic oil that make the floor slick. The telescope turns on the world’s largest ball bearing, more than 17 feet across, which shipped to the observatory by railcar, but narrowly—only four inches to spare between its edge and the railroad tunnel into Deer Creek Valley. Pulled from the train station to the observatory on a lowboy, it bottomed out crossing a curved wooden bridge, and had to be hauled off by a tractor, once the bridge had been greased with that slippery hydraulic oil.
The confirmation telescope, which would become home to the second FUDD, lived hundreds of miles away in Woodbury, Georgia. AT&T had donated twin 26-meter dishes to Georgia Tech when it no longer needed them. Tech’s astronomers Paul Steffes and Dave DeBoer agreed to work with Tarter to get one in shape for SETI follow-up. The first order of business: connect it to the outside world. AT&T hadn’t wanted competitors take advantage of their abandoned technology, so they had cut all the cables at ground level.
So together, Project Phoenix and Georgia Tech rebuilt one of the dishes. The first time they tried to move it, the sound of metal on metal slashed across the landscape. The engineers came out of the control ro
om and looked up at the gear that moved the telescope. One of its huge teeth lay on the ground.
“Goddammit,” DeBoer said.
To continue the project and fix the instrument, they stole a gear from the other telescope. The FUDD, now a Frankenstein’s monster, did well its follow-up job—except for a few days in 1997, when they really needed it. Then, the Woodbury telescope lay still and silent, with a dead disk drive after a lightning strike.
In the early hours of June 24, 1997, Tarter paced back and forth along the narrow tile of the Green Bank 140-foot telescope’s control room. On one side of her, the control panels, which look like they belong in a clunky 1970s starship, hummed. On the other side, the Phoenix computers churned a strange signal around their circuits. The telescope had zoomed in on the star YZ Ceti, a dwarf that regularly flared with bright bursts of radiation. But the equipment picked up more than those bursts: it also found a steady signal, arriving at a particular set of frequencies that were equally spaced across the dial. It was just the kind of radio-station-style broadcast from space—from intelligent extraterrestrials—that Tarter dreamed of, and exactly what they had designed their equipment to detect. Such a signal exists (as far as we know) only when someone creates it. Someone could mean either humans or extraterrestrials, though. So before Tarter could break out the Champagne, she needed to make sure the team hadn’t made the less monumental discovery of an airport radar or a North Korean spy satellite. Had the Woodbury telescope been alive, they would have done the usual follow-up, seeing if the signal showed up the same there. Instead, they had to improvise. Tarter roused John Dreher from sleep in the dorm, and together they commanded the telescope to move far away from YZ Ceti, to see if the signal disappeared. It did—that was a good thing, indicating it was really coming from a single spot in the sky. When the telescope was pointed back on the star, the signal reappeared. They repeated this cycle multiple times with the same results. Then, at Dreher’s suggestion, she tilted the telescope just a tiny distance away from the star. The signal stayed just as strong.