Stage Packaged
Genre documentary
The inside story of how a small team of radio astronomers discovered what may be the first confirmed repeating signal of non-terrestrial origin — and decided to say nothing for fourteen months.
In September 2021, a research team at the Parkes Observatory in New South Wales detected a repeating narrowband signal at a frequency that could not be explained by known astrophysical phenomena. After fourteen months of internal verification, failed replication attempts, and a classified briefing to two government agencies, the team published a paper describing the signal as "anomalous but not conclusively extraterrestrial." The press ignored it. THE WEIGHT OF THE SIGNAL reconstructs those fourteen months through interviews with all six team members — and with the two government officials who were briefed. It does not claim to know what the signal is. It is a film about what happens inside a small group of people who might be holding the most important information in human history, and who are not sure.
Director Sarah Oyelaran
Producer Ben Carver
Writer Sarah Oyelaran