A new documentary follows the 30-year cosmic quest by US space enthusiast John Shepherd. What drove him to beam messages and music, from Can to Coltrane, into space?
In the mid-1960s, when he was a boy living in rural Michigan, John Shepherd began thinking of ways to make contact with alien life forms. “It was round about the time that a show called The Outer Limits was on television,” he recalls. “I remember being fascinated by the idea of somehow building my own scientific instruments to explore the mysterious phenomenon that is extraterrestrial life.”
In 1972, from the living room of his grandparent’s house, he began chasing his dream by broadcasting a series of electronic tone pulses “towards the stars”. So began an extraordinary 30-year journey he called Project STRAT (Special Telemetry Research and Tracking). It would soon take over his life, and the lives of his grandparents, who found themselves living amid an expanding array of what he calls “beautiful and unusual instruments”, including dual-channel oscillators, cathode-ray tubes, giant screens to monitor incoming signals and a low frequency transmitter sending signals millions of miles into deep space.
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