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Some of these signals were so strong they seemed to be originating only a mile or two from the receiver, and they drowned out all other signals. The only identifiable thing about these enig- matic messages was the repetitive transmission of the letter v. Marconi reported that stations of his company on both sides of the Atlantic picked up these pirate signals even before World War I. la 1921 Marconi stated flatly that he believed that the signals were coming from another civilization from somewhere in space. By the time 1924 rolled around signals from Mars were a popular theme in the Sunday supplements, and when the orbit of Mars brought it close to the earth in 1924, a well organized programme was set up to intercept any possible transmission. Most of the major radio stations and ham rigs around the world deliberately fell silent and listened. Dr David Todd, head astronomer at Amherst College, set up a gadget known as the Jenkins Radio-Camera at a naval observatory. (Jenkins was a pioneer TV experimenter.) Mars crept closer, and everyone waited. On August 24, 1924 (note the date), amateur, military, and government radio stations closed down their transmitters. They were not disappointed. Freak signals of unidentifiable origin were reported by awed listeners all over the world. Dr Todd's apparatus whirred and clattered, and a long strip of photographic tape poured out of it. When the tape was developed, it displayed 'a fairly regular arrangement oi dots and dashes along one side,' according to The New York Times, ‘but on the other side at almost evenly spaced intervals are curiously jumbled groups, each taking the form of a crudely drawn human face.* This amazing experiment hit the headlines everywhere, and hundreds of amateur radio operators submitted reports of what they themselves had picked up. Since there were very few commercial stations at the time and most amateurs were operating crude, homemade equipment with very limited capabilities, we have another mystery here. Those freak signals had to be exceptionally strong. There was no possibility of a worldwide hoax, yet it did seem that the signals had to be of ter re strial origin. But from where and by whom ? These signals continued to be received throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Dr Hugh Mansfield Robinson conducted one set of experiments with a set of high-powered receivers in 1921. He received intelligent signals on the thirty-thousand-meter wave-length and Ernest B. Rogers, the engineer in charge of the test, 'felt compelled to state that they were of extraterrestrial origin, as there were no sending instruments of that power on Earth.* An amateur radio astronomer named Grote Reber reported receiving strong dot-and-dash signals from space in 1939. He had built a thirty-foot dish antenna in Wheaton, Illinois {just outside of Chicago), and said he often listened to the signals for eight hours at a time. They seemed to come a 1 Radio astronomy was then in its infancy and signals were being detected from both Venus and Jupiter. But these appeared to be statidike natural phenomena covering a wide part of the band. Professor Hermann Oberth, the German rocket pioneer, worked with radio telescopes and The Jenkins device was technically incapable of producing drawings. from one specific spot in the sky.