The Robert H. Gray Archives 

Robert H. Gray (1948 - 2021) was an independent SETI astronomer who occupied a unique place in the history of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Beginning his involvement in the field in 1977 with his first paper, Gray would eventually become the world’s leading expert on the Wow! Signal. For decades, he pursued follow-up observations, historical investigations, and scientific analyses of the famous signal long after most researchers had moved on. Yet Gray’s importance to SETI history goes far beyond the Wow! Signal itself.

On January 1st, 1983, Gray had built the first documented dedicated amateur SETI observatory. At a time when SETI research was still largely confined to universities and government-funded observatories, Gray independently designed and operated his own observing systems from home. In many ways, he became the first amateur SETI astronomer.

What makes Gray especially remarkable is that he eventually blurred the line between amateur and professional astronomy. Although he remained an independent astronomer throughout his career, he conducted observations with professional radio telescopes, published in professional scientific journals, and presented his work at scientific conferences. His career demonstrated that serious SETI research could emerge outside traditional institutions.

Gray’s work also inspired, or at least paralleled, a small but important wave of early amateur SETI experimenters during the personal computer revolution of the early 1980s. People like James Brown, Karl Lind, and Robert W. Stephen soon developed their own SETI observatories using home-built electronics, personal computers, FFT analysis, and large satellite-TV dishes. For the first time, SETI was becoming accessible beyond major research institutions. These early independent observers helped lay the foundations of what is today recognized as citizen science and amateur SETI research.

In this sense, Gray followed a tradition established decades earlier by Grote Reber, widely regarded as the first radio astronomer. In the 1930s, after Karl Jansky discovered radio waves coming from space, Reber independently built the world’s first dedicated radio telescope in his backyard in Illinois. At the time, radio astronomy did not yet exist as a formal scientific discipline, and Reber’s work was carried out largely outside academia. Nevertheless, his homemade telescope laid the foundations of modern radio astronomy.

A few decades later, after Reber, Frank Drake transformed the search for extraterrestrial intelligence into a scientific field through his work at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO). Drake became the first professional SETI astronomer in 1960, proving that the search for extraterrestrial civilizations could be approached as a real observational science rather than mere speculation.

Coincidentally, both Reber's and Gray's work came from Illinois — Reber from Wheaton and Gray from Chicago — not very far from each other geographically, although their pioneering work was separated by nearly half a century. In many ways, Robert H. Gray became for amateur SETI what Grote Reber had been for amateur radio astronomy: proof that independent researchers working outside major institutions could still make meaningful contributions at the frontier of science.