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Stranger Than Science.

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Incredible but true events that have baffled mankind since the day they happened.

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Narrated by Frank Edward.

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For half a century science has been recording strange radio beams from elsewhere in the universe.

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Are they signals from outer space?

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I'll have the full report for you in just a moment.

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Radio signals from outer space are not new, but they are just as mystifying today as they were when Marconi first picked them up more than 50 years ago.

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The father of wireless was conducting some experiments on his yacht in the Mediterranean when he detected signals which he regarded as code, meaningless to him.

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He instructed one of his coworkers to make a public statement on the matter at a scientific and business banquet in New York.

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Marconi's remarkable telegram was read, it created some headlines, and then was quietly dropped.

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Nikola Tesla, the famed Yugoslav electrical wizard, also reported receiving cryptic code signals which were most numerous and strong when the aerial was turned toward the planet Mars.

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Like Marconi, Tesla had no qualms about making a public report on his findings.

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If Mars was trying to reach us, these scientists felt that we should know about it.

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In 1924, engineers for RCA admitted that they too had picked up these mysterious chatterings, which did not fit the patterns of any known code,

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but which bore the earmarks of being intelligently conceived.

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The signals were recorded by RCA, discussed, then filed and forgotten.

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But they were suddenly recalled by a remarkable experience which befell the scientists in the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington.

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Scarcely more than a year after the RCA incident, the Naval Research experts were testing the Jenkins process while recording wireless signals on photographic film.

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Out of the ether came a weird chirping that made no sense in terms of intelligible code.

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But when the film was developed, the scientists were astounded at the results.

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Instead of recording as intermittent dots and dashes, the weird code had arrived in such a fashion that it was recorded in the form of faces,

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crude caricatures to be sure, but faces beyond the doubt.

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In 1926, the United States government financed a project which was designed to contact Mars by radio if possible.

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Scientists from Johns Hopkins University, aided by radio experts from both the Navy and the Signal Corps, selected a spot in Nebraska.

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There they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars constructing a powerful transmitter and delicate receiving steps.

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For two weeks they sent radio signals in the direction of Mars and waited hopefully for some indication that they had been heard.

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The net result, according to the official statement, was inconclusive.

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Thirty years later, great observatories all over the world were installing costly radio telescopes,

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huge metallic dishes that can be focused on individual planets.

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On June 4, 1956, the Naval Observatory in Washington announced that it had succeeded in making what it called the first radio contact with Venus,

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a contact which led them to believe that Venus had a surface temperature about equal to that of boiling water.

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Ohio State University reported that its radio astronomer, Dr. John Krauss, had used their radio telescope to receive two types of signals,

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including the Class II signals, which, said the university, have many of the characteristics of a terrestrial radio transmitting station.

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These signals, which Dr. Krauss said resembled radio telegraphy in many ways,

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were received only when the giant radio telescope at the university was trained precisely on Venus.

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One of the strangest, and perhaps one of the most significant of these bizarre broadcast incidents,

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occurred in England in 1953, when many television viewers were startled to see on their screens the station identification card

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and call letters of television station KLEE in Houston, Texas.

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The signals came in strongly throughout a large portion of the British Isles during two consecutive days,

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and many viewers recorded the freak broadcast by photographing the picture on their television sets.

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Notified of the unusual reception, the British broadcast engineers had no difficulty picking up the same signal.

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Now freak long-range television pickups are rather more common than most viewers realize,

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and the British authorities attached no unusual significance to the reception of KLEE until they contacted the Texas station.

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Then they got a real shock.

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KLEE went off the air in 1950.

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The successor to KLEE notified the British that no KLEE identification card had been televised at any time since 1950,

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three years before the picture was picked up in Britain.

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The officials in Britain ruled out the possibility that it could have been a pointless practical joke,

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which would have cost at least $100,000 to perpetrate.

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Where did the signal come from?

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Why was it being only to the British Isles?

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The chief engineer for the British Broadcasting Company said,

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Our investigation leaves us with but one possibility, however incredible,

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that these signals were transmitted to us purposefully and intelligently from a source and for a purpose presently unknown.