WOW! (6EQUJ5) Vol.2 – An extraterrestrial Space Message to Earth

WOW!

(6EQUJ5) Volume 2

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An extraterrestrial space message From: Sandy Christ

To: Earth

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* “Wow!“ wrote Jerry R. Ehman on the side of a computer printout when he stumbled upon an anomaly in the data he reviewed. The intensity of the signal mirrored in the sequence „6EQUJ5“ was circled with a red pen. Named after this incident – the „Wow!“-Signal came to be.

Until this day, humankind is still unsure about the origin of this unusually strong radio signal.

But the hypothesis that this signal had an extraterrestrial background is still the leading possible explanation.

The interstellar space message you are holding in this very moment is „Wow!“ (6EQUJ5) Volume 2.

The second endeavour in reaching out to humankind *

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Riso printed in Gold and Violet on GF Smith Colorplan Ebony, 135g/m2 University of the Arts London, Central Saint Martins MA Graphic Communication Design 2022 Written, Designed & Illustrated

by Sandy Christ

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This message contains:

* Chapter 1: Message from a perfect World...

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* Chaper 2: On a Transmission...

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* Chapter 3: B-Side

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* Epilogue: An A-Side without a B-Side...

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* Postcard: Return to Sender...

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* Prologue: Warm salutations earthling,...

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Space Message Content…

Content Prologue Chapter 1 ...

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Warm salutations earthling,…

Prologue Chapter 1 Chapter 2 ...

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More Information on page 48

Warm salutations earthling, this interstellar space message travelled 27 lightyears (9.46 trillion km x 27) to reach you. Not because it came from a galaxy on the other side of the milky way, but because it took me 27 earth years to remember who I really was.

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After receiving the Golden Record, I decided to make my way to earth in 1995. (*) Unfortunately, while approaching the blue planet I had an accident with my space unit and lost my memory. Waking up in this very foreign environment I spent decades trying to mirror my surroundings, blending in, matching what I saw in my immediate surroundings. The humans around me, images on devices, printed matter — everything detected by my senses influenced the way I shaped myself, thinking I was human all along.

I perceived my environment as an instruction manual — How to be human? How to fit in?

But what if you are handed the wrong manual for your “device”? Some parts might be reprogrammed, some might be altered, some might even break. I felt like I could never become what I saw around me.

As I already mentioned, it took me 27 earth years to realise that I am alien. “How?”, are you asking? Well, I created this space message to tell you all about my journey.

This extraterrestrial space signal is for everyone who ever felt alien or for those who haven’t yet realised their extraterrestrial qualities.

Yours, *Sandy*

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Message from a perfect World...

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 ...

Chapter 1: Message from a perfect World...

When I saw this foreign device float towards my home planet on my radar, I immediately had a feeling that this is going to profoundly change my life. Jo’D*hw launched an apparatus we had prepared for cases exactly like this.

We didn’t know what it was yet, but we were sure it was something from a place beyond our imaginations. We captured it and brought it back for us to examine.

Mounted on the device we found this shiny, round-looking thing. It seemed like someone left some inscriptions. We couldn’t identify what the information could potentially hold yet, but Jo’D*hw suggested I should wait for Üe4-ld9 to help me decode it.

After Üe4-ld9 arrived I couldn’t be more patient, and we immediately got to work. And indeed, with Üe4-ld9’s help we quickly made progress and got onto something.

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Message from a perfect World...

It looked like the bottom right diagram was a key for some of the other diagrams. During our examination we also discovered that the shiny object with the inscriptions on it is just some sort of shell protecting something inside it.

Slowly, we lifted the cover.

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 ...

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Message from a perfect World...

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 ...

Inside we found another shiny object.

Same size, but thinner and full of circular ridges. The inscriptions on the outside shell suddenly made more sense to us. We didn’t fully understand them yet but with Üe4-ld9’s and my burning curiosity it felt like we were quickly making progress.

We tirelessly worked on solving this puzzle.

Until suddenly everything just fell into place and we both looked at each other knowing we did it.

The inscriptions were telling us what to do with the thin disc and the additional equipment we found inside the shell. A very small, pointy piece attached to an arm should be placed onto the side of the disc. The dashes and lines around the circle on the shell indicated some sort of timecode. We were following the instructions.

Nothing happened at first.

Then some strange static was coming from the disc. We jumped.

And then we heard it. Sounds, noises, something that sounded like signals trying to communicate with us. Some of the sounds were very similar to things I’ve heard before but felt very different and foreign. We used the SoniPac™ to transcribe the sounds ...

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Life Signs, Pulsar

Mud Pots

Tractor, Riveter

Horse, Cart Crickets, Frogs

Volcanoes, Earthquakes, Thunder

Music of Spheres

Sheep, Blacksmith, Saw

F-111, Saturn Liftoff

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Tame Dog

Kiss, Mother & Child

Morse, Ships

Wild Dog

Wind, Rain, Surf

Birds, Hyena, Elephant Footsteps, Heartbeat, Laughter

Chimpanzee

Tractor, Bus, Car

Fire, Speech

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Train

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Message from a perfect World...

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We discovered there was a backside to the disc which we also immediately listened to.

Although it seemed like we already cracked the mystery, there were more diagrams. But since we already got the hang of it, we managed to solve the other ones quite quickly.

Turned out there was some additional content on the flat disc. Not sonic. But visual.

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 ...

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It took a while to decode every single visual on the disc. But eventually, we finally had this overwhelming collection in front of us. We couldn’t believe what we saw.

A mesmerizing world, a different planet, a different species. But the most shocking observation we made was – physically, there wasn’t much difference between them and us. We looked very similar, uncannily similar. The world we saw seemed perfect.

Something, we in this world were always striving for but could never quite achieve. Everyone there seems to live in unity and peace.

The discovery of this device carrying this disc never left my mind. I made it my purpose in life, and I wanted to know more. After some time, we found out that the shell also indicated the exact location where it came from. I became obsessed with studying every single detail of it. This world I just saw exists in the same universe and I was desperately longing to visit it.

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Message from a perfect World...

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 ...

On a Transmission

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Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Epilogue ...

Chapter 2: On a Transmission…

I hear Jo’D*hw’s voice vibrating through the unit.

I simultaneously felt very anxious and excited. I took a quick last glance at my TeliPac™ and noticed a slight glitch in the upper right corner. But then my surroundings quickly seemed to fade.

I woke up to a piercingly loud beeping sound. I felt uncomfortably hot and very disoriented. The unit went over 20/8-32°° and it seemed like the coordinates on the TeliPac™ were slightly off. I looked outside and saw that the unit surfaced further away than it should have. I began to slightly worry.

I had no other option than to launch the GencyAid™.

I guess it was too late when it reached its full potential. But the last thing I can remember was the unit shaking vigorously and filling up with thick grey smoke.

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B-Side

Chapter 3 Epilogue Postcard ...

Chapter 3: B-Side

I didn’t know where I was or who I was. My physical body had changed – it shrank. But at the time I didn’t have any recollection of what had happened or why I was here.

The only thing I was sure about was my mother and father. It was pure instinct that I knew that these people were somehow attached to me.

Otherwise, everything around me was new to me.

The sound of my mother singing in the kitchen, the smell of Jollof Rice with fried Plantain and Maultaschensuppe and the feel of my terry-clothed hippopotamus plushie. Like a sponge I soaked up every impression possible. I had this inner urge to copy my surroundings to learn what is essential to survive in the place I was at. And since I didn’t know who I was, everything around me served as a role model to find my own self.

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B-Side

I remember my mother braiding my hair every Sunday. Almost like a ritual – every week a different hairstyle. Cornrows, single braids with colourful beads on the ends, sometimes a mix of both. I would sit for hours. She always said I can’t wear my hair any other way. It would get dirty and knotted too quickly, she said. Sometimes on special occasions I would get to wear it half up half down. But the other kids wore their hair open all the time.

Always surrounded by straight hair I wanted to be the same. Straight hair for me meant fitting in, looking put together and neat, being like everyone else. But being preconditioned to not fit in and not understanding that didn’t make it easy. Still, I desperately wanted to have one of those palm trees everyone had in kindergarten.

Chapter 3 Epilogue Postcard ...

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Fig. 1

Fig. 2

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Fig. 3

B-Side

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How to make a palm: Ingredients: Very straight hair that is shorter than shoulder length, a brush, a hair band, some hair clips in case of flyaways (not a must).

Step one: Gently brush the hair.

Step two: Part the hair. Starting from one ear to the other ear so you end up with two sections, one on top of the head and one on the back.

Step three: Hold the top section of the hair and brush down the back section using either the brush or the comb.

Step Four: Hold the top section of the hair and brush the hair upwards using either the brush or the comb.

Step Five: Make sure the hair lays flat to the head. Use a hair band to secure the hair on the very top of the head. Loop the band around the hair two to three times.

Voilá a palm!

Chapter 3 Epilogue Postcard ...

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Fig. 4

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Chapter 3 Epilogue Postcard ...

B-Side

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A.

Since I couldn’t do much about actually getting straight hair around that time, I had to find a workaround. How can I come close to achieving my goal? How can I achieve the feeling of having straight hair?

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B.

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Chapter 3 Epilogue Postcard ...

B-Side

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Eventually I started going to middle school. My mom always said when I start going to middle school, I can finally do my hair on my own. It was something I was really looking forward to because for the first time I could wear my hair open like all the others around me.

Something I didn’t count in though was that I didn’t know anything about how to care for my hair. No one knew how to handle curly hair.

I didn’t know which products to buy, so I just went with whatever my friends were using and what advertisements were recommending at that time. My type of hair wasn’t seen anywhere on screens, in magazines or on my friends. I just believed that my hair was wrong, and I would have to change it to fit in. The products promised to transform my hair from frizzy, unruly, wild and unhealthy into neat, pretty and healthy hair.

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2.

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A.

B.

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I got so frustrated with my long “frizzy” hair I started to always wear a low ponytail.

At the time shorter hair seemed to become fashionable and many of my friends in school followed the trend. I booked an appointment with a hairdresser. I thought that shorter hair meant not just following the current trend, but it would also be easier to care for.

The hairdresser asked me five times if I really wanted to cut my hair this short. She told me that my hair wouldn’t look like the pictures of short haired models I showed her. I didn’t want to believe her and still wanted her to cut it.

She straightened them for me too. I felt relieved.

But also like I betrayed someone.

Until my hair grew back the straightening iron became my trusted companion.

Because what else would you do if every image and person surrounding you showed you that this is the way to go if you want to look “pretty”. I was left with damaged, unhealthy but straight hair.

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B-Side

Chapter 3 Epilogue Postcard ...

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Chapter 3 Epilogue Postcard ...

B-Side

ir & a H TY Skin!

T E PR FECT ) PER inutes (In m

While I had short hair someone had mistaken me for a boy. I never really wore any make-up, nor did I dress overly girly and never thought anything of it. I never felt comfortable with presenting myself in a very feminine way growing up but being mistaken for a boy and being surrounded by very girly teenagers on magazines did make me question my own femininity.

If I don’t wear make-up, a low neckline blouse, a short skirt and cute heeled sandals does that make me less of a girl? Also, who didn’t want to be like Gabriela in High School Musical at that time?

On top of that I wasn’t really the smallest girl around and my feet were too big to find anything fitting in the girl’s section. So, trainers from the men’s section it was.

Being tall, having big feet and being a generally very sporty girl wasn’t really what I was seeing in films, series and magazines. To be girly you have to be petit, have small feet, perfect glowing skin, a hairless body and straight hair. At least that was what my surroundings told me.

LO O PRE K NO TTY W!

MG Get O hile w Hair ep! le you s sly) u o (seri

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PRET TY M quic k CO akeup & N Boos ters! FIDENC E

Clear Smo Skin oth All O

ver

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Slowly my obsession with getting rid of my body hair started. I would spend hours shaving my legs, armpits and bikini area and then shaving all over again two days later. During summer I probably spent (probably still am) more time in the bathroom than outside. Not just was that horribly time consuming but also my skin didn’t like the constant stress I put it under. Cuts and ingrown hair resulted in hyperpigmentation and inflammation. But the main thing was – the hair was gone and I kind of matched the countless bare legs of women in Venus advertisements in magazines and on TV. Next up was my facial hair. To achieve a thin arched eyebrow, they had to be plucked regularly. Anything that was bushy and close to a monobrow was made fun of or seen as scruffy and manly. Same as with a peach fuzz moustache and sideburns. My then Frida Khalo-style eyebrows became close to non-existent around that time.

The more I grew, the more my body hair grew too, the more I would try to find ways to get rid of that hair. I spent my teenage years fighting the nature of my own body without realising that my body wasn’t the real problem in this scenario. Decades of being brainwashed (probably still am) into believing that I was the problem and not finding anything familiar in my environment slowly nibbled away my confidence, self-esteem and self-awareness.

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B-Side

No TV show, no magazine, no cartoon, no book would mirror something I could identify myself with. Even if someone who kind of looked like me was portrayed, they would usually get a straight hair- and a stereotypical-storyline- treatment. Narratives of People of Colour would never be the one of a successful main character.

More like the less successful sidekick or villain, leaving me feeling like I could never achieve “main character status”.

Chapter 3 Epilogue Postcard ...

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A.

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B.

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An A-Side without a B-Side…

Epilogue Postcard

Epilogue: An A-Side without a B-Side…

Years ago I came across a space documentary about ways humans tried to send messages to space to hopefully reach out to potential extra-terrestrials. I immediately got obsessed with what I saw. A vinyl in a golden case with inscriptions on how to reveal the content on it and where our home planet is.

The case was mounted on the space probes Voyager 1 and 2 that were launched in 1977 to explore the outer planets of our solar system. On the vinyl were images, sounds and music from earth and greetings in 55 different languages.

The images range from silhouettes of a man and a pregnant woman, our planets, our DNA, people demonstrating licking, eating and drinking to a supermarket scene, rush hour traffic, children with a globe and an astronaut in space. Pictures of destruction, war, famine etc. were purposefully left out.

A time-capsule speeding through space carrying a document of a seemingly unified and perfect civilization.

An A-side without a B-side.

After years of bending, squeezing and breaking myself into images I was never meant to fit into I realized that I was the alien. The alien receiving the single-sided vinyls desperately trying to decode them and clashing with the B-side of reality.

The alien who came to earth naively navigating a world not made for them.

Luckily, times have slowly been changing.

With the rise of social media I slowly found my way into my own little bubble. Videos and images of people who looked like me popped up. I was surprised and happy but also shocked to see that I wasn’t alone this whole time. People teaching me how to care for my hair, which products to use and how, what hairstyles are possible (and yes and also showing me that there was indeed makeup available for my skin tone.

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An A-Side without a B-Side…

Epilogue Postcard

And lately more people have been sharing content on body hair, body image, femininity etc. Of course, this is just one side of social media, one that I greatly appreciate and am grateful for. But as we know there is still content that gets banned and content that is altered to fit specific images and continues to damage people’s self-perception.

Growing up surrounded by single-sided stories I’m still in the process of unlearning the black and white thinking that was planted in my mind. It is time to lift the curtains and discover and broadcast the multiplicity of stories that are still hidden. It is important that the lack of representation and diversity are not just taken as superficial tasks that have to be checked off a “current trend” list, but serious problems that have to be tackled at the roots. Who creates the stories that we are surrounded by? And how?

This extra-terrestrial signal is meant to reach anyone who has in any way ever felt alien in this world. My story is just one side of me that I’m sharing to encourage you to share your narratives of feeling alienated by your environment. Being surrounded by stereotypical one-sided stories has a deep effect on how we build our identities and how we perceive ourselves. It also perpetuates bias and prejudice towards certain groups of people.

Me sharing my personal story should be the first domino in unveiling the effects of black and white stories and support an approach of building a world of multiple perspectives. A world that isn’t divided by yes or no, right or wrong, black or white, left or right. But a world that thrives in building empathy for each others stories. As the brilliant Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie once said:

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„(…) When we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.“

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Return to Sender…

Postcard

How to send your personal extraterrestrial space message:

Step 1: Gently detach the postcard on the right side of this double page.

Step 2: Find the question on the back of the postcard.

Step 3: Write about the times you feel/felt alien in this world.

Step 4: Either deliver your space message to me personally or send it to me via Royal Space Mail. Your message might be then shared online alongside this message.

✴ Congrats! You sent out your first space message! ✴

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Wow-Signal SETI Institute: Shostak, Seth Was it ET on the line? Or just a comet?, https://www.seti.org/was-it-et-line-or-just-comet, last access: 04.06.22

p. 6 p. 12 p. 43

Golden Record Humankind launched two space probes in 1977 called “Voyager 1” and “Voyager 2”. They were sent on a journey to document the planets on the outer edges of our solar system.

Mounted on them is the Golden Record. A golden vinyl with greetings in 55 different languages, sounds, music, and images from earth. The curators decided to leave images of war, famine etc. out of the selection.

NASA: The Golden Record; https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/golden-record/, last access: 04.06.22

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Sounds of Earth Access NASA's website to listen to the sounds on the Golden Record.

NASA: Sounds of Earth; https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/goldenrecord/whats-on-the-record/sounds/, last access: 04.06.22

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Images on the Golden Record Access NASA's website to see more of the images that are on the Golden Record.

NASA: Images on the Golden Record; https://voyager.jpl.nasa. gov/golden-record/whats-on-the-record/images/, last access: 04.06.22

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The Danger of a Single Story TED: Ngozi Adichie, Chimamanda; The Danger of a Single Story; https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story, last access: 04.06.22

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