The touch of ages having wrought
An echo and a glimpse of what he thought
A phantom or a legend until then;
(The Man Against the Sky - Edwin Arlington Robinson)
The probe had been waiting for twelve thousand years. Even longer than that, counting the long journey from Epsilon Bootis. Of course, the probe didn't reckon in years, nor did it call its home "Epsilon Bootis." That's what the people of the blue planet called it. The probe's name for its home couldn't be written in any of the languages of the blue planet or Earth as it was called by its inhabitants.
The probe's makers had placed it at a special point in this planet & moon system, sixty degrees ahead of the Earth's moon in its orbit around the host planet. This was a place of stillness, of equilibrium of the gravity of the two bodies, a place where the centripetal force of orbit exactly cancelled the gravity of the two large bodies so that the probe remained always equidistant from them. The people of Earth called such a point the L4 Lagrange point after one of their scientists, the Italian-French mathematician Josef Lagrange, who mathematically proved their existence.
The Earth had moved around its star twelve thousand times since the probe's makers had passed through this system and discovered the budding intelligence on the surface of the blue planet. They placed the probe here and put it to sleep, to wait for the beings of the planet to develop technologically. If the people of the Earth ever developed the ability to use narrow band electromagnetic signals for communication, the probe's sensors would detect the signals and its circuits would awaken once again.
That day came in the year 1927 as denoted by the timekeeping methods of the inhabitants of the blue planet. The Earthlings had finally developed a device for wireless communication using electromagnetic waves. They called it "radio." When the first narrow band transmissions from the planet touched the sensors of the probe, it flared into life and began carrying out its programmed tasks. First it began recording the transmissions from the planet, and then it began sending a signal towards Epsilon Bootis. A few seconds later, it echoed the recorded transmission back to the inhabitants of Earth, combined with a coded message. This was the probe's way of saying, "Here I am! Here!" Once the probe had verified that it had gotten the attention of the earthlings, then it would transmit to them a prerecorded message from its makers…
Is this scenario fiction?
In 1928, Jorgen Hals, a radio engineer in Bygodo, Oslo, Norway, wrote to physicist Carl Stormer:
At the end of the summer of 1927 I repeatedly heard signals from the Dutch short-wave transmitting station PCJJ at Eindhoven. At the same time as I heard these I also heard echoes. I heard the usual echo which goes round the Earth with an interval of about 1/7th of a second as well as a weaker echo about three seconds after the principal echo had gone. When the principal signal was especially strong, I suppose the amplitude for the last echo three seconds later, lay between 1/10 and 1/20 of the principal signal in strength. From where this echo comes I cannot say for the present, I can only confirm that I really heard it.
Over the next seven years, this phenomenon was noticed again and again, and scientists were unable to explain it to their satisfaction. It was as if someone were recording our radio signals and then sending them back to us a few seconds later. They knew that the earth's ionosphere reflected radio waves back to the earth's surface, and they knew that signals could bounce off the moon and come back. But both of these echoes come back at specific time intervals. The longer-delayed reflection from the moon takes a maximum of 2.7 seconds to bounce back. These signals were taking between three and fifteen seconds to return. That's too long for the moon to be reflecting them, and too soon for the nearest planet to be reflecting them. These echoes were given the name long-delay echoes.
There was to be no real solution proposed for almost thirty years. In 1973, Professor Ronald Bracewell of Stanford University and astronomer Duncan Lunan of Scotland theorized that the 1927 signals might have come from an alien probe in orbit around the sun or the Earth. The 1927 signals seemed to have come from one of the Lagrange points in the moon's orbit. Lunan decided to graph the time delays of the 1927 signals on an XY graph, and he found to his surprise that the plotted points formed a slightly distorted picture of the constellation Bootis as seen from earth, with emphasis on a star known as Epsilon Bootis. Checking further, he found that the distorted picture was precisely the way the constellation would have appeared over 12,000 years ago. Perhaps, he theorized, a probe had been placed here 12,000 years ago by beings from Epsilon Bootis!
In 1974 A. T. Lawton and S. J. Newton proposed a hypothetical natural explanation for long-distance echoes involving reflection of radio waves by the ionosphere and other natural objects. However, the matter of long-distance echoes is far from closed.
Duncan Lunan's Epsilon Bootis idea was shot down by other problems:
However Epsilon Bootis, the star I had suggested as the origin of the hypothetical probe, proved to be twice as far away as most catalogues stated: it was too massive and therefore too short-lived to have sustained intelligent life on any planets. In any case, when more accurate records from the 1920s were unearthed, several of my crucial star map interpretations were proved invalid.
The possibility of an alien probe at one of the Lagrange points still exists. Perhaps such a probe is there, and perhaps it has already sent a signal to its makers as did the lunar monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, alerting an alien race that we have developed technologically…
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