BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.

This story starts in a shabby brick hut next to a disused railway.

It's November 1967 and a young researcher is working alone.

She's wearing a thick coat and her toes are freezing, but she's forcing

herself to concentrate, checking through metres and metres of graph paper as it's pushed steadily

out of a printer. It's the output from a huge antenna turned to the sky, a giant ear listening

for cosmic whispers. The antenna has taken two years to build, and now it's time to listen.

She spots an odd-looking squiggle on the graph, and then another. It's probably just the usual

interference, she thinks, perhaps a car starting up in the distance or a lawnmower. But wait,

these squiggles look familiar.

Maybe she's seen something like this before.

Best to investigate, she decides, just in case.

It's taken her years of work to get here,

in an environment not exactly welcoming to women.

She doesn't want to mess up to embarrass herself.

And the signal is bizarre.

Could it even be some kind of alien communication?

What unfolds from that moment is a discovery that would shake the world of astronomy.

I'm Hannah Fry, a mathematician who studies patterns in human behaviour,

and from BBC Radio 4, this is Uncharted.

Tales of Data and Discovery.

Just a few years earlier in 1963,

...