After reading
The investigation doesn't end here.
The novel is fiction. The themes it touches — and the cases that inspired it — are real and remain documented in this public archive.
Fact, testimony, hypothesis and fiction
This site keeps four things separate that tend to blur together: the documentary record, the account of someone who lived through the episode (testimony), the interpretation of what happened (hypothesis), and the invented story of the novel (fiction). A document records a claim or an occurrence; it does not automatically become fact just by existing.
Real cases that inspired the novel
The Wow! Signal — Big Ear, Ohio
In the early hours of August 15, 1977, the Big Ear radio telescope at Ohio State University recorded a narrowband radio signal far stronger than the background noise of the sky, at a frequency close to the 21 cm line of neutral hydrogen — historically one of the most promising bands for searches of artificial signals. The signal lasted 72 seconds, the exact time it took Earth's rotation to carry the instrument's beam across that point in the sky, and it appeared in only one of the telescope's two receiving channels, as would be expected from a real source rather than terrestrial interference. Days later, while reviewing the printed computer printout, astronomer Jerry Ehman circled the sequence "6EQUJ5" and wrote "Wow!" in the margin — the origin of the name by which the case is known. There has never been a second detection, despite decades of searches aimed at the same region of the sky with more sensitive instruments, and no raw data exists beyond that single printout.
Operation Saucer / Colares
Between October and December 1977, residents of Vigia, Colares and Santo Antônio do Tauá, on Marajó Bay in northern Brazil, reported an unusual sequence of nighttime lights over the region. The Brazilian Air Force responded with a formal two-phase operation, commanded by Brigadier Protásio Lopes de Oliveira and coordinated on the ground by Captain Uyrangê Hollanda, gathering civilian statements, photographs and occurrence forms. Unlike most cases in this archive, here the existence of the investigation itself has never been disputed: the complete documentary fund — 758 items including reports, photos, press clippings, videos and audio produced by the Air Force between 1964 and 1985 — is today digitized and publicly available at Brazil's National Archive. What remains open is the physical origin of the reported phenomena; much of the popular narrative that circulates about the case was built decades later, without relying directly on that archive.