The ‘Orpheus’ Signal: A Lost Soviet-Era Deep Space Transmission

In the clandestine world of Cold War radio astronomy, the pursuit of extraterrestrial intelligence was an unofficial, but intense, competition. One of the most intriguing, and ultimately baffling, projects was the Soviet Union’s ‘Orpheus’ program, which, from its deep-space listening post in Siberia, claimed to have received a signal of impossible origin.

The story, pieced together from a single declassified file (File G.29.C/D.21, dated 1974), begins with the detection of a repeating, non-random radio pulse from the direction of the Sextans Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxy. The signal was unlike any known astrophysical phenomenon. Its primary feature was a repeating sequence of three distinct, non-consecutive prime numbers—41, 71, and 101—which modulated the carrier frequency. This triplet sequence, when converted to binary and then to a simple alphanumeric cipher, spelled out a single, repeating word: “ECHO”.

The most astonishing part of the report is the detailed description of a secondary, more complex transmission received on June 14, 1976. This secondary signal, a series of complex pulses, was allegedly translated using a sophisticated computer model at the Glavnaya Observatoriya in St. Petersburg. The message, transcribed into a cryptic, poetic form, read: “The light is in the ocean, the ocean is in the heart. Find the seventh star.“

Project Orpheus was suddenly and inexplicably terminated just one month later on July 15, 1976, and all public records of its existence were expunged. The researchers involved were reassigned, and the program’s director, Dr. Anatoly Chernenko, was placed under house arrest and later committed to a psychiatric facility, where he reportedly spent his final years muttering the phrase “It was not a star, but a whisper.“

This narrative, which exists solely as an unverified footnote in a single, uncatalogued intelligence document, is a potent example of Cold War-era misinformation or, perhaps, a chillingly plausible account of a contact that was deemed too dangerous to acknowledge.