National Geographic

In 1977, scientists picked up a 72-second transmission from outer space – known as the “Wow! Signal.” Its origin and intent (if any) was never determined. To promote National Geographic’s series Chasing UFOs, Campfire created “The Wow! Reply.”

The program kicked off with curated celebrity videos featuring constellation-bound messages from writers, artists, filmmakers, musicians and scientists. During the series premiere, fans were invited to tweet their personal “Wow!” reply with a hashtag via Twitter - essentially opening public access to deep-space broadcasting for the first time ever.

On August 15, 2012 – the 35th anniversary of "The Wow! Signal" – the influencer videos and over 20,000 tweets were beamed up from the world’s largest single-aperture telescope, Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, which has famously been featured in films like Contact and GoldenEye.

In addition to account lead on this project, I had the distinct pleasure of working directly with the brilliant scientists at Arecibo to steward this UFO TV show PR stunt with genuine, earnest care. We agreed on the best deep space targets with likeliest potential for habitable planets and techniques to make the message as easy to decode as possible for a hypothetical extra-terrestrial being. I’ll admit it: they did most of the work.

As the son of a sci-fi-loving engineer, it’s got to be one of the trippiest projects I’ve ever worked on.