Data from 1977 was hard to parse, given the lack of modern computer systems, but volunteers from the Big Ear Observatory in Delaware, Ohio, where the original signal was collected, preserved the records after the observatory was shut down in 1998 and turned into a golf course. Using modern computing technology, the volunteers ran over 75,000 pages of original data through an optical character recognition routine, with visual help from human validators, allowing in-depth computational analysis of the original signal for the first time.

This more detailed analysis led to slight changes in three of the signal’s main characteristics.

...the signal was likely astronomical in origin, though the most likely explanation still isn’t extraterrestrials. The most likely culprit is a HI cloud - clouds of neutral atomic hydrogen floating in space that have been known to produce narrow-band signals that look similar to the “Wow!” Signal, but never on anything approaching the power levels seen that one time in 1977.