Dad pulls a scroll of paper from one of the dozens of crumpling boxes stacked in a chilly warehouse near Santa Cruz, Calif. He gently unrolls it, and a familiar reddish ink pattern appears on the delicate grid.

“Ah,” he says. “This is Ozma.”

His fingertip traces the inky magenta line, and he squints at the faded, penciled-in numbers inscribed near the line’s peaks and valleys. “Is that your handwriting?” I ask. It doesn’t look anything like his. “Nope,” he answers. “It must be the telescope operator’s.”

The scroll my father, Frank Drake, is holding is more than a half-century old. It’s part of the data he collected during an experiment known as Project Ozma. Named after a character in L. Frank