A message sent into the dark
The group’s attempt to contact extraterrestrials used radio waves: electromagnetic signals that travel through space at the speed of light. Unlike a spoken message aimed at someone nearby, a radio transmission can keep moving long after it leaves its sender. But it also spreads out, becoming weaker as it goes. A signal sent into deep space is therefore less like a letter with a known address than a flare cast into an immense darkness.
That distinction matters. A transmission can be deliberately aimed toward a point in the sky, but unless its senders know where a receiver is—and when it might be listening—they cannot ensure that it reaches anyone. Even if another civilization detected it, the signal would need to be recognized as artificial and understood.
Where mysticism met radio
For an esoteric group, broadcasting toward space could make a spiritual hope feel concrete: a belief in contact with other intelligences became an act of transmission, using technology associated with communication on Earth. The radio waves supplied a physical gesture; the hope that someone beyond Earth might answer belonged to the group’s wider worldview.
Welles’s reported role was financial rather than technical. Funding could help an organization pursue an ambitious project, but it could not solve the central problem of interstellar communication: a signal can be sent without any assurance that it will be received. The attempt is striking precisely because it joined a very practical instrument—the radio transmitter—to a question no transmitter could answer on its own: whether anyone was out there to hear it.
