Kenneth Kellermann

Charbonneau:

This is Rebecca Charbonneau interviewing Ken Kellerman on April 6, 2020 in Charlottesville, Virginia. Ken, would you please state your name and spell it please?

Kellermann:

Ken Kellermann, K-E-L-L-E-R-M-A-N-N.

Charbonneau:

Excellent.

Kellermann:

First name, Kenneth, K-E-N-N-E-T-H.

Charbonneau:

Perfect. So, to begin, could you tell me a little bit about your role in the early development of VLBI, very long baseline interferometry?

Kellermann:

Well, it began in 1965. I was studying radio source spectra, where the shape of the spectra indicated they were self-absorbed, which meant they had to be very small. At the same time, I was also working on radio source variability. Again, only very small sources can vary, vary a lot, say in a week's time, meaning it can't be much more than a light week across. Of course, at cosmological distances this means a very small angular size. You want to have a 1,000th of a second of arc or less.

Conventional interferometry that time was restricted to about a second of arc using interferometers that were either connected by cable or radio link. And Marshall Cohen, at that time, was at Cornell. He and I realized that we could extend the interferometer baselines to essentially unlimited distances by recording the data on magnetic tape and then bringing the tapes together and correlating them. To do this required the recordings to be synchronized in time better than a microsecond, which meant using atomic clocks to time to recordings.

And in order to get sufficient sensitivity it meant having a high speed, large bandwidth tape recorder, and both of those became commercially available about the mid-1960s. I think a lot of people understood this. But Marshall Cohen and I just sort of, over an informal discussion at an AAS meeting in summer of 1965 in Ann Arbor, Michigan over a few pitchers of beer, we thought we could do this. But we had no idea, really, how to actually do it in detail. And after that, Barry Clark, a colleague at NRAO, who went to graduate school with me at Caltech, joined us and Dave Jauncey from Australia, who was a postdoc that'd just come to Cornell.

It took several years before the first observations. I should mention how easy it was to get the funding at that time. Nowadays you'd have to write proposals, have committees, and review committees and so on. And at that time, the NRAO director had the sufficient discretionary funds available that he essentially agreed, after a five-minute discussion, to fund it, which was important to get. It saved a year or so, but it still took a couple of years to get all the equipment working.

Charbonneau:

So, just to pause you for a quick second, I want to clarify something. You mentioned that the technology was being developed right around that time around the mid-1960s. So, you think yours and Marshall Collins' realization that VLBI could be used as a technique to solve some of the problems you were having was a type of simultaneous invention, meaning that because the technology was there, many people had that realization?

Kellermann:

Well, first of all, it wasn't just the technology; it was that they were commercially available. You could buy commercial atomic clocks. A hydrogen maser was the best thing. They were very expensive and not commercially available. But you could buy a rubidium clock from Hewlett Packard, which wasn’t so big, you know, 24 inches by 6 inches by 6 inches or something that you can carry around. It costs about $10,000. And the tape recorders that were used on the computers at the time would be sufficient to record the data. So, it's just a matter of, you know, hooking it all up and getting it working.

So yeah, I think, well, certainly in Canada, a group in Canada was doing the same thing, at the same time. And it was a bit of... well, there was a friendly competition. We would talk on the telephone every week. How are you doing? How are you doing? In the end, we both had results within a week or two of each other. And it's still debated who’s first because, what determines success? We were the first to do it on a very short scale, baseline. They were the first to do it on a very long baseline. They were the first to do it on something that was astrophysically significant. As opposed to technically, but anyway, so yeah, and I think also at Jodrell Bank they were working on it, and when you get back [to England], there are some people there you should talk to.

They just didn't have access to the commercial equipment that we did. I think they knew all about it, but they just didn't have the resources. Yeah, this was still only 20 years after the end of the second World War. They didn't have the funds, the resources that we did; they pioneered a lot of the long baseline interferometry. But that was a brute force. I mean, with their own skill, and, you know, not buying things, they were building things. In fact, they tried to build a hydrogen maser because they couldn't afford to buy one, and that never got to working successfully. But yes, Richard Schilizzi can put you in touch with the people there.

Charbonneau:

Okay, that's good to know.

Kellermann:

Anyway, back to where we were! Yes, the first successful experiments were in the spring of 1967. Our first successful experiment was using a modest baseline between Green Bank and Maryland Point. And then things really exploded after that. That was in May 1967, or in June or July, and this is all documented, you can find it…

Charbonneau:

...once the archives open up again.

Kellermann:

The journals I mean.

Charbonneau:

Oh, right. That's right.

Kellermann:

There was another group that was thinking about it at the same time, but from a really different scientific direction. Bernie Burke at MIT and several other people, but particularly Jim Moran, did a lot of development of their work. They were doing conventional connected element interferometry to study interstellar OH masers.

They're extremely variable, even more so than the quasars that I was working on. And so, they were interested in extending the baseline also. So, in July, I think it was, we joined together on the observations between Green Bank and Haystack, both the quasars that we were doing and they did the OH masers. And then later in the summer, we extended the baseline to California. That was at 18 centimeter—the, you know, the shorter the wavelength, the increased resolution. Which is done by either going with a longer baseline or a shorter wavelength. So, we started out at 50 centimeters. OH masers are at 18 centimeters, so we did the quasar work for convenience at 18 cm. We continued to work at 18 centimeters, and then extended the baselines to California, at University of California Berkeley.

Now this is an interesting story. We wanted to go to 6 centimeters. And so, we could easily change the receivers in Green Bank, but the people in Berkeley; they were a small group, and they only changed receivers once or twice a year or something like that. And they didn't want to change receivers for our convenience to do this experiment. This would have been in the fall of 1967. While we were stewing about this, Hein Hvatum…

Charbonneau:

Yeah. Would you mind spelling that for the sake of the interview?

Kellermann:

Oh, it's H-E-I-N. Hvatum, H-V-A-T-U-M, who was the Associate Director of NRAO for technical administration or something like that. He was in charge of electronics and computing. He was Swedish. Excuse me. He was Norwegian, but had studied in Sweden under Olef Rydbeck, who was a well-known radio physicist. A very domineering personality. And he showed up in NRAO to visit Hein. But this story is a good example of the kind of person Rydbeck was. He's brilliant and friendly, but kind of domineering. And he showed up to Hein’s house by taxi and went to the door. And this is right here in Charlottesville, right around the corner from where I live, and he went to Hein's door and told Hein that he didn't have any American money, he had just arrived, didn't have any American money, so Hein went out to pay the taxi driver. But Rydbeck didn't tell him that he wasn't coming from the airport, the Charlottesville airport or train station, he was coming from Washington [DC]. Anyway, he had come to Charlottesville to ask Hein how they could get into VLBI. In Sweden.

Charbonneau:

Right.

Kellermann:

And Hein said well, we were planning to do an experiment at six centimeters this winter. How about we send all the equipment to Sweden and we'll do it [there]. And he agreed. Coincidentally, I was scheduled to be married in December of that year in the Netherlands.

Charbonneau:

That's right.

Kellermann:

And then after that, I went to Sweden to do this experiment. And so that quickly extended the baseline into intercontinental distances. And around that spring we did experiments between California and Australia.

Charbonneau:

So, before you go on, I just want to quickly double back and ask, you mentioned friendly competition with the Canadians. Was there ever at this point, in the 60s, with collaborative efforts with the Canadians, a formal collaborative effort rather than the informal phone chats comparing notes?

Kellermann:

No.

Charbonneau:

Okay. So why collaborate with Australia and Sweden? Not Canada?

Kellermann:

The simple answer is that the equipment that they built in Canada to do the recording was different from ours. They weren't compatible. I don't know if you remember but, probably before your day, there were incompatible television systems. Europe, the US, had a different television system.

Charbonneau:

There's incompatible hairdryers now, I have to have an American and a British hairdryer. So, I understand the basic concept.

Kellermann:

And I guess both of us were somewhat chauvinistic about using the other’s equipment because our equipment was better.

Charbonneau:

Sure.

Kellermann:

A more complex interpretation is the Canadian group were all, almost all, somewhat more senior. They all came into radio astronomy and VLBI on the technical side; they had almost all been involved in radar during the war or after the war. So, they were driven by the technical challenges rather than the astrophysical ones.

Charbonneau:

That tended to be the case for quite a few countries, right? And the same was in Britain, correct?

Kellermann:

Well, you know, people like Ryle and Lovell quickly got into the astronomy yes, you know, they quickly got into the astrophysics.

Charbonneau:

Okay.

Kellermann:

And same thing with John Bolton in Australia, because at that time, he could sit down for a few months and learn all the past work.

Charbonneau:

Maybe that's what's happening now, right?

Kellermann:

But the Canadian system, I think I'm being fair in saying this, never really worked reliably. And so the astrophysics, the astronomy, results were somewhat marginal.

Charbonneau:

You did say, however, that their first successful experiment had significant astrophysical results. Can you elaborate on that?

Kellermann:

Yeah, that was on 3C273. And it was a baseline between Algonquin Park, Eastern Canada, near Ottawa, and on the West Coast. Well, Penticton, I think. 3000-kilometer baseline. So, this was the first interferometer fringes at such a higher resolution. So that's why it was scientifically important—it shows that the sources were really small and that the theory that we assumed all along, the things that had driven us to go to these baselines, was correct. These sources really were small. So, they were the first to demonstrate that; we were a little bit later.

Charbonneau:

Could you... oh sorry, continue.

Kellermann:

Yeah. But no, there were never any collaborative experiments. They did bring their equipment, I think if I remember correctly, to Owens Valley, to run an experiment, you know, on their own without us. And then finally, Jodrell Bank did build yet another incompatible system that they brought recording equipment to Canada, but that also didn't work well. It never made any real impact.

Charbonneau:

For the sake of the interview, could you explain why you weren't sure? If the sources were actually as small as they turned out to be?

Kellermann:

I think we were sure. But the theory and experiment don't always go together. And there's a strong history in radio astronomy, where they did not agree, but not so in this case, it confirmed what we expected.

Charbonneau:

Okay. Just wanted to clarify that. So, moving on a bit, as you're aware, the first group of people to propose a VLBI as a technique in a scientific paper, was the group from the Soviet Union, right? Sholomitskii, Matveenko, and Kardashev. Do you want to talk a little bit about your familiarity with that paper and whether or not it had any sort of impact on...

Kellermann:

Sure. If we sort of go roundabout. Once we had finished our experiments with Sweden; well, we didn't really finish with Sweden, that continued. But then once you go from Green Bank to Sweden, or actually we had California as well. That's a significant fraction of the diameter of the Earth. And so, the only way to further increase the resolution was to go to a shorter wavelength. And at that time, the only antennas outside the United States capable of working at shorter wavelengths were in the Soviet Union. Both Marshall Cohen and I had previously met Victor Vitkevich from the Sternberg Institute. I met him during my trip there, in 1965 after I finished my postdoc in Australia. I spent two weeks in the Soviet Union on the way back to the United States.

Charbonneau:

I'm gonna ask you more about that later.

Kellermann:

We can come back. And so, I won't say more about that now, but anyway I met Vitkevich. Marshall Cohen and I got sidetracked earlier. Well, I was driven to interest in higher resolution, because of the quasars and active galactic nuclei, time variability and spectra. Marshall Cohen was working on interplanetary scintillations, that's like the twinkling of stars. But it's due to the ionized interplanetary media, and particularly when a source passes close to the sun, it twinkles in the solar corona. And it's a way of studying the solar corona. Don't put your hand near your face. [ed. This interview was during the COVID pandemic.]

Charbonneau:

I know, I've just washed them. I've just washed them.

Kellermann:

Anyway. So, Cohen is interested in the solar corona and scintillations. He had met Vitkevich in... 1959. I'm not sure of that, it was the at IAU meeting that was held in Moscow. I think it was 1959. [ed. It was 1958]

Charbonneau:

Yeah. Either way it's easy to verify.

Kellermann:

Yeah. And so, we just wrote Vitkevich a letter... Oh, you know, “a VLBI experiment between the US and the USSR, what do you think about that?” We didn't hear from him for six months. Meanwhile, we've done nothing. I mean, we just wrote this letter. I can't remember whether I discussed it with the director of NRAO or not, but we certainly didn't discuss it with the government or anything. And then after six months, we got a telegram potentially approving experiments. “Yes, yes. We want to do this, we'll send two of our experts to the United States to discuss the possibilities and everything.” We were kind of shocked. This is 1968, I guess, in the middle of the Cold War. And so, we had to start from scratch to get permission to do this experiment. The hang ups were, as I said in the beginning, the technology is the Hewlett Packard rubidium, atomic rubidium clocks. And the high-speed tape recorders were state of the art equipment that was not sold in the Soviet Union. And export was restricted.

Charbonneau:

How did you get around that?

Kellermann:

NRAO was a private organization, run by AUI. We weren't government employees, there was no restriction on us going to the Soviet Union. None of us were involved in any classified work, so there's no restrictions on what we could talk about or tell them about NRAO. But we had to get an export license for the equipment. And so, we applied for the export license. We had a visit. I remember this very distinctly. We had a visit from two people from the Defense Intelligence Agency. They came to Green Bank and asked us a lot of questions about what we're doing. At this time, VLBI was a new concept in radio astronomy. It was clear to me from the depths of their questions and the details that they were asking about, not only did they completely understand what we were doing, but they had probably independently developed the technology, the technique, themselves.

Charbonneau:

Why do you think that and for what purpose?

Kellermann:

So, their concern was not only sending this equipment to Russia, or the Soviet Union, but a by-product of VLBI is not only information about cosmic radio sources, which are of no military or defense value, but a by-product is you can determine the accurate baseline between the two antennas.

By accurate, we are talking about a few centimeters. Nowadays, it's millimeters. But that time, it was one or two centimeters. And they explained to us, so you do the experiment, and you know, the distance between the 140-foot telescope in Green Bank and the telescope in Crimea, to a few centimeters. Anybody can go into a map store in the United States, buy a map, which shows you the distance between Green Bank and the Pentagon, the White House or whatever, in Washington, and knowing that, calculate the distance, with very high accuracy, between Russia, Crimea, and... by the way, the antenna we were going to use was in Crimea. Whereas the reverse was not true. I could not go into; we could not go into a shop in Moscow and buy an accurate map of the Soviet Union. In fact, at that time, even the tourist maps of Moscow that were given to us were distorted. That is, you know, the streets were laid out correctly, but they were distorted, so you couldn't tell how far, you know, with high accuracy. And they explained to us that the whole, I shouldn't say secret, but the whole business of keeping things secret. But he says, you can't keep these things secret. They're going to find out anyway. But the whole business of classification was to make it difficult for the other guys. So, it costs them money and effort and resources.

And so they asked us, “Are other Russians going to come to Green Bank to analyze the data?” And we said, yes. And then he said, “well, is it possible that you can distort the output, so that you don't lose any of your astronomical information, that you distort the geodetic information?” And that's, in fact, easy to do because the geodetic information is in the fringe rate, how fast the fringes go, and you can easily change that by fiddling with the local oscillators in the telescope. And they knew that, the fact that they asked that question. They understood that.

Charbonneau:

Yeah.

Kellermann:

And we said… Barry and I looked at each other. And we said, yes, it's technically possible, but we're not going to do that. Either we do the experiment, openly, or we won't do it.

Charbonneau:

What was your rationale behind that answer? Wasn't there a risk?

Kellermann:

I mean, we offered to cooperate with the Russians and do the experiment and it didn't seem appropriate to start playing games, you know, and they would see this. I mean, they could see that the data has been distorted. So, we didn't know. And they thought about it and said “Well, yeah, probably isn't that important anyway.” And again, they recognized that we were using rubidium clocks, which are not as accurate as hydrogen masers. You know, I can't remember the baseline accuracy, so it was a few centimeters. Whereas using masers, it's a few millimeters. I did ask, sarcastically, I think, “does it really make any difference if a hundred megaton bomb blasts a few centimeters away, or 10 meters away?” And they sort of suggested that it does, for a hardened missile site.

Charbonneau:

I guess if there's also a small distortion, if you're trying to map the United States, a small distortion can end up having big ramifications as you continue to map outwards, right?

Kellermann:

No, I don't think that's important. I think they just decided that... well, first of all, the satellite era was coming. And they knew that better than we did. And so, you get all that same information from satellites. So, in the end they decided they wouldn't oppose us getting an export license. But the NSF did tell us to, you know, we weren't government employees, we weren't restricted in any way, but this was government equipment that we were taking. And they said that one of us had to be with the equipment at all times. And for that first experiment, we went with John Payne, who is an all-purpose engineer at NRAO, he can do anything that is necessary. We had to do RF work, digital work, and the test equipment in Russia was really primitive. So, John had to do everything himself. So, it was just the two of us and my wife.

Charbonneau:

Do you think that, sorry to interrupt you, but do you think that there was any reason why the DOD might have actually, once their concerns were out of the way, wanted you to go? When I've spoken to your Russian peers, some of them gave me the idea that when they were there, they were told to kind of look at things right, and then perhaps relay that information when they came back? Do you think that there was any sort of analogous situation in the West? Or in the US specifically?

Kellermann:

It was different. Only certain people that, you know, in the Soviet Union could travel to the U.S.

Charbonneau:

Yeah, that was a big issue we discussed a lot. Yeah.

Kellermann:

And they had to have a reputation for being cooperative. People like Shklovsky, as you know, were not in that category.

Charbonneau:

Yes.

Kellermann:

Most of the people that we worked with were students of Shklovsky and were not allowed to go travel to the west. Matvyenko, who was the main person from the Soviet side that we worked with, was a member of the Communist Party. I know that during the time we were in Crimea, we saw this a few times, he'd get a group of technicians and what not, in the conference room and talk to them for an hour or so about the glories of the Soviet Union and things like that. So, he was a trusted party member. And there's no question in my mind. He was a friend, too. But there's no question in my mind that when he went back, as you said, he was probably asked beforehand to look for this or look for this and that, and then to report when he came back. And if he didn't do that, he wouldn't have been allowed to go again.

Charbonneau:

I think that was the case for a lot of these collaborative programs. When I was speaking with Malcolm [Longair] and his early exchange programs, I started digging more into the history of how these exchange programs came to be, and a lot of them came with the caveat that there was an understanding, even in the West, like, in Britain, for example, that you kind of get an idea of what the intellectual or technical property was, and then relayed that to the government when you returned.

Kellermann:

So I should make clear, at that time, the US National Academy of Sciences had an exchange program with the Soviet Union, just like the one that you're referring to, but we were not part of that. We were not part of any official exchange program. I said it once, and I repeat, the government was not involved at all, other than they owned the equipment, and we had to get permission to get the export license. We were not part of any formal exchange program. It was really, you know, the scientists, the scientists, the activity. I think that was somewhat unique, especially involving the exchange of expensive state-of-the-art technology. There were lots of exchange visits. Some radio astronomers from the US actually did participate in the Academy exchange program with Ron Bracewell and George Swenson. I think you've seen their report.

Charbonneau:

Yeah.

Kellermann:

Yeah. And so that was part of the of the Academy exchange. So, in no way were we asked. And I went many times, not just that first time in '68. But many times after that, in no way with possibly one exception, which I'll come back to, were we ever asked beforehand, to look at anything or report anything. But every time after I came back, I got a visit from one or two people, but one person in particular, who was from an unnamed organization. He said he worked for the government. If you ever see a government ID card with no agency affiliation, it is probably from the CIA.

Charbonneau:

Yeah, okay.

Kellermann:

And he asked lots of questions.

Charbonneau:

Yeah. What nature?

Kellermann:

So, there were two natures. One was technical, ”did you see this antenna or that antenna? What'd you think of it? How does it compare with ours? Is it good?” I felt it perfectly appropriate to answer those questions. Because that was my professional opinion. It was open information and everything. I believe that's not really what they wanted to know.

Charbonneau:

What do you think they were hoping to know?

Kellermann:

Well, he might've casually said did Shklovsky have a car. What was his apartment like? I can confess now that even though I knew the answer to those questions, I just said, “I don't know.”

Charbonneau:

[Laughing] We've got you now Ken, the NSA is listening right now. You're going to jail.

Kellermann:

They can't keep us from doing the experiments.

Charbonneau:

Sure. No, of course not.

Kellermann:

But I think that's what they were really after. Who they might get to defect. And I know that Jesse Greenstein, I guess during that ‘59 IAU, was asked to feel out Shklovsky about coming to the US.

Charbonneau:

Yeah, that happened a few times. That happened with Bernard Lovell's trip too, prior to this, in '63. Have you read Bernard Lovell's memorandum?

Kellermann:

Yes and no. I just had a big argument, not argument, discussion with Schilizzi about this. Can we come back to that?

Charbonneau:

Yes. Yeah. I will do, will do.

Kellermann:

Actually, once I did have to ask those guys for a favor. My wife wasn't a US citizen, she was a Dutch citizen. And so she was a resident alien, she had no green card. But at that time, if a resident alien went to the Soviet Union, they had to have a re-entry permit to be allowed back into the United States. And on one of these trips... and this was before the internet, you know, you fill out a form and send it to the federal building in Pittsburgh and it would come back in a week with the re-entry permit. But on one occasion, it didn't come back, I mean, it wasn't approved. It didn't say no, but they didn't say yes.

Charbonneau:

Right.

Kellermann:

And the time was coming up, you know, and we had to leave. I think we were going to visit her family in the Netherlands first. So actually, we were going to leave some weeks before the time we were going to the Soviet Union. And so they, you know, they always do these things at the last minute. And so we're running out of time. And I call my friend at the federal building in Pittsburgh, and next day, she got her re-entry permit..

Charbonneau:

Wish things worked like that still.

Kellermann:

I will say, on one occasion this guy called me in advance of a trip. By the way, my understanding is that if you're questioned after a trip about what you saw, about, you know, business as usual, but if given a list of questions beforehand, that makes you a spy. There's a significant difference.

Charbonneau:

Yeah.

Kellermann:

And on one occasion, before I went, he calls me and says he'd like to bring his boss down to Green Bank to talk to me. Said okay, it was during the summertime, he arrived at seven o'clock at night, or eight o'clock or something like that. And I said, all right. Come to my house. Oh, no, no, they don't want my wife to know... Don't tell anybody. Alright, I'll meet you in my office. Can I come in? He gives me a piece of paper with about 10 instructions. It was the kind of thing that you'd find on the first page of a tourist guide to Russia. Don't drink the water. Don't eat the food. Don't trade money in the black market.

Charbonneau:

You have one of those in the archives from your '71 conference trip.

Kellermann:

I do?

Charbonneau:

You do, yeah!

Kellermann:

Okay.

Charbonneau:

It's also says like, don't bring pornography.

Kellermann:

Don't get involved with the Russian women.

Charbonneau:

Right.

Kellermann:

I looked at it. I gave it back to him. And he said thank you, and they left. So, I don't know whether... it was August. Maybe they just wanted to get out of Pittsburgh, you know, hot summer, to come to the mountains? Or when the boss took one look at me. And thought “definitely don't use this guy.”

Charbonneau:

Yeah.

Kellermann:

But no, I think they were interested in personal information about who they can approach and so on. I never felt obliged to give him anything like that. I certainly wasn't going to tell, you know, the hospitality I had in people's homes or apartments. I certainly wasn't going to compromise that.

Charbonneau:

Of course. What about, since we're on the topic, what about on the other side of things. You mentioned, running into trouble in regard to intelligence on the Soviet side of things, especially one that jumps out in my memory is in The Observer. I'm sorry, not The Observer, in the But It Was Fun copy of your story from The Observer from 1970. You added in an epilogue at the end where you wrote that you suspected that when you were taken to... I think it was Yalta or somewhere in Armenia perhaps? Yeah.

Kellermann:

As I said, John Payne and I were told that we had to be with the equipment at all times.

Charbonneau:

Right.

Kellermann:

We were staying at a hotel in Yalta, which is, I don't remember... 30 miles or so from the observatory where we went back to sleep each night... To be certain that the equipment was working we did a test experiment to start with recorded data on a few sources. And sent the tapes back to the US to make sure everything was working. And it was two weeks before the next experiment, and they took us on a tour of the Soviet Union. We went to Armenia, which is semi-professional. I mean, there's an observatory there. We also went to Tashkent, this ancient city, which is really exotic and interesting, and that was pure tourism. We went to... did I say Tashkent?

Charbonneau:

In the epilogue?

Kellermann:

No, what I just said now, they took us to…

Charbonneau:

Oh yeah, Tashkent, you did say.

Kellermann:

No, that's wrong. Samarkand – really exotic..

Charbonneau:

Oh, okay.

Kellermann:

Yeah, Tashkent was where we flew to, there was an observatory there and everything; we sort of gave a talk there. But that was just an excuse. Our purpose was to go to Samarkand, which was, you know, an ancient city, it was a few 100 kilometer drive or something from Tashkent, really exotic. And we went to Armenia. The whole trip was 10 days or two weeks. Before I left, we were working with a young student, Leonid Kogen, who had accompanied me on several trips, back and forth to Leningrad, when we were having trouble getting our clocks synchronized. And we were concerned that if the clock stops running, you know, you lose the time and that was really important, for the experiment.

Charbonneau:

Right.

Kellermann:

And so I instructed him to be very careful, and make sure that... his background was more technical than astrophysical, so he was perfectly capable of doing this, to make sure that the batteries, they stay charged, and the clock ran okay and whatnot under the penalty of the threat of Siberia, or something, he had to keep the clock going.

And we took our trip, we came back after two weeks, and he said everything was okay. Jump ahead, 20 or 30 years, Leonid was Jewish, he had a son who he was concerned about being drafted into the military. Jewish boys weren't treated very well, plus the whole situation in the Soviet Union, particularly in the final days of the Soviet Union. But after the fall of the Soviet Union, things were really chaotic. He wanted to leave. With his family, had many discussions, whether to go to Israel or to the United States. To jump ahead, he ended up coming to the United States. He was taken care of by several Jewish organizations that did this sort of thing, help them find temporary jobs and whatnot.

He ultimately ended up at NRAO in Socorro with the VLA on the scientific staff. And I say 20/30 years later, he told me once that well, as soon as John Payne and I had left on our trip, the KGB engineers came in and spent the whole week or two going through the equipment. What do you call... reverse engineering! Taking pictures and looking at the wiring diagrams and everything. So, they really did that sort of thing. But it was kind of well known.

Charbonneau:

Sure.

Kellermann:

I remember while we were there... you wouldn't be familiar with the Hasselblad camera?

Charbonneau:

No, I don't believe I am.

Kellermann:

This was the camera of the time. I mean, it was a $1,000 camera, which was a lot of money then.

Charbonneau:

Sure, yeah, a lot now!

Kellermann:

It was made in Sweden, you know, limited number of copies. It was the ultimate camera that no one could own. And so while we were in Crimea, a Russian news reporter came by to take pictures and what not, had quite good English. And he's taking pictures, and I'm looking at him, you know, and he said “I bet you think this is the Hasselblad. No, it’s a copy made in Russia.”

Charbonneau:

I've heard a lot about that. A lot of the mimics.

Kellermann:

Yeah, and you wouldn't be familiar with the early days of radio astronomy. We recorded data on a chart recorder.

Charbonneau:

Right.

Kellermann:

This is a roll of paper that rolls out in a moving roll.

Charbonneau:

Like the 40-foot that I've used in Green Bank.

Kellermann:

Okay, yeah. So, they had one of these in Crimea. I mean, it wasn't where we recorded our data, but the recording of the output of the telescope did tell us how the receiver was working. If it stopped working. This is a Russian recorder, had Russian names on it and whatnot.

Charbonneau:

Yeah.

Kellermann:

And it stopped working. You know, these things are subject to failure.

Charbonneau:

From using the 40-foot one, my God, the thing would get jammed, and so I empathize.

Kellermann:

Anyway the pen stopped writing. And I took it down, took it apart, and fixed it. And when it was all done I realized, how come I know how to fix this? It was exactly the same as the recorder I used as a graduate student in CalTech. I mean it was identical.

Charbonneau:

That's fantastic. That's very interesting.

Kellermann:

At that time, now this was openly done. There was no copyright agreement between the US and the Soviet Union.

Charbonneau:

Right. I've been reading so much about the copyright agreements, we can discuss that later if you're curious, but I've become a bit of an expert on copyright law, as it so happens.

Kellermann:

The only way you could become quite wealthy in Soviet Union, was as an author. And the government did recognize, I guess what we now call intellectual property, the contribution of authors, and they could keep royalties, everything, but they did not pay royalties when they copied books of Western authors. They would translate a lot of books, English books into Russian, or even reprint English books, which they would distribute as a propaganda tool in developing countries, particularly in Africa. I bought some of those books. I mean, it was famous. But you know, Landau and Lifshitz.

Charbonneau:

Right, yes, yes.

Kellermann:

You could buy it in Russia for $2 or something. And so like Bracewell’s book on radio astronomy. When he [Bracewell] went to the Soviet Union, they just presented him with a barrelful or handful of rubles, they recognized his ownership. Sorry, excuse me, they translated his book into Russian.

Charbonneau:

Right, right.

Kellermann:

And normally, nowadays, you have to get permission from the author, and the publisher, and pay some fee and whatnot. They didn't do that. They just went to the translator.

Charbonneau:

Yeah.

Kellermann:

But when Bracewell was there in the Soviet Union, they gave him his royalties, which is a huge amount of rubles, which of course, there wasn't much you could buy there. I think he bought a samovar or something.

Charbonneau:

That's very interesting. I was looking over at the correspondence between Iosif Shklovsky and Carl Sagan, when they were publishing Intelligent Life in the Universe in the US, and one of the big things that slowed it down was when Carl Sagan was getting the book reprinted in the US, they had to spend a lot of time and energy tracking down the illustrations Shklovsky used in his original book, because they had to get permission to print them in the US, whereas Shklovsky could just print whatever he wanted, because there wasn't the issue with copyright. Yeah, that's very interesting.

Kellermann:

They had a subscription to one copy of the Astrophysical Journal, which they actually duplicated in a form that looked exactly the same. It looked the same, but you could tell the paper wasn't the same quality, but it had the same gray cover. I mean, they did this with the Astrophysical Journal, Nature, in some other areas of science and physics, and they would distribute these all over the Soviet Union, but it would be delayed for some months.

Charbonneau:

Yeah. That probably disadvantaged them, right?

Kellermann:

Yeah. You may have seen, it's still on my bulletin board I think, a Russian... for the lack of a better word, the IBM card.

Charbonneau:

Okay.

Kellermann:

You know what these are?

Charbonneau:

An IBM card?

Kellermann:

Yeah.

Charbonneau:

I don't believe I do, unless I'm calling it something different.

Kellermann:

Nah, it was before your day. You run a computer program, you used to have to type things onto a card that was about six inches by two or three inches.

Charbonneau:

Okay.

Kellermann:

If you ever get into my office again...

Charbonneau:

I know, I hope so.

Kellermann:

...I can show you a box full of them.

Charbonneau:

Yeah.

Kellermann:

They had 72 characters across and they would punch holes that the computer would read. It was invented by IBM, or... originally it was used in data, banks, things like that, but it soon got into the scientific community. You know what Fortran is?

Charbonneau:

Yes, yeah.

Kellermann:

Okay. So, you're writing a Fortran program, each statement would be on one card.

Charbonneau:

Okay, wow.

Kellermann:

And the cards came 2000 to a box, you could have hundreds of cards, your Fortran program would be hundreds or... nothing I ever did was more than a few 100, but people did 1000s of statements, complex programs, and you feed that into a computer. The computers there used identical cards, identical cards. And in the upper right-hand corner was... I don't know the names of the Russian letters, the "e?"

Charbonneau:

If you draw it, I'll be able to tell you which one it is.

Kellermann:

That's what I'm doing.

Charbonneau:

Okay, yeah.

Kellermann:

This letter?

Charbonneau:

Oh, the I [И] yeah. Wait I can't see it, hold it up a little higher. Oh, yeah. That's right, the I [И]. Yeah.

Kellermann:

And the M was…Whatever the Russian M is.

Charbonneau:

It's an M in Russian?

Kellermann:

Yeah.

Charbonneau:

It's just an M. Same letter, same sound.

Kellermann:

Yeah, right.

Charbonneau:

Yeah.

Kellermann:

It's [IBM] written in little letters, I still have one of them sitting on my bulletin board.

Charbonneau:

That's funny, wow.

Kellermann:

They just copied stuff.

Charbonneau:

Huh. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Backtracking slightly. This is a bit of an aside, something that's made me curious, and it may be a total coincidence, but if anyone's well situated to answer it, it's you. You mentioned Leonid Kogan, and you mentioned how he was Jewish and how that facilitated some conversations between you and helping his son, and organizations in the US. I've noticed, as I continue to look at these networks of scientists who worked with each other from the US and the USSR during the period of the 60s and early 70s, a large proportion of them are Jewish. Do you have any idea why? Is that just pure coincidence? Was there some sort of solidarity between Soviet and American Jewish scientists or... I just find it to be an interesting connection.

Kellermann:

I think it was even broader than that.

Charbonneau:

Yeah.

Kellermann:

There were so many Jewish scientists that came to the US, you know, in the 30s. And they became the dominant scientific force in the US in the post war period. A very disproportionate... this is much less true now, partly because, until 10-15 years ago, the dominant scientific force in the US was a physicist, and that's now sort of shifting into biological sciences, but the huge fraction of those, a very disproportionate fraction of the membership in the National Academy of Science in physics was Jewish, the Jewish immigrants from Europe. The preponderance of Jewish scientists in Russia may just have been part of that. I think Shklovsky almost adopted me because of our common Jewish background.

Charbonneau:

Yeah, I don't mean to interrupt, but in his book, 5 Billion Bottles of Vodka to the Moon, he talks a lot about his Jewish heritage and how that impacted him in his career.

Kellermann:

So, I don't know the answer to your question.

Charbonneau:

Do you think so? I was raised Catholic, I am familiar with Judaism up until year zero, right, because of the way they taught me in Catholic school, but of course I've been trying to educate myself more as I've been reading into these issues. Is there anything about Jewish cosmology, and when I say cosmology, in this sense, I'm not meaning cosmology, like outer space, but just like the religion's idea of the universe and how the world works, because there's also a lot of Jewish scientists that were interested in SETI, specifically, right, with Shklovsky, and Sagan was raised Jewish. There's many examples as well as that, and so I'm wondering if there's anything that you think might... any sort of link between Judaism and astronomy, right, that's my job as a historian, finding connections between bits of data.

Kellermann:

I mean, a common interpretation is the emphasis that Jewish families have on education and learning, which can produce scientists. Surely all religions, Christian, Judaic religions, and others as well, I think, all have a beginning of the universe. Genesis, the first day, God created the heavens and second day, the earth or something like that. So that's cosmology, and that, of course, became important. I think you're familiar with the discussions about radio source counts and the steady state universe versus the Big Bang universe. The steady state universe wasn't consistent with Judaic-Christian religions, and the Big Bang was. And that's why it became so controversial, particularly in the UK. One of the diversions that Michele and I had in the last couple of nights was ABC had 10 Commandments on television, it's a 1956 movie.

Charbonneau:

Okay.

Kellermann:

It was four and a half hours long. Well, that was including commercials, we recorded it. It lasted over two nights, but that goes from... well, it's essentially the story about Moses leaving Egypt, and everything.

Charbonneau:

Sure.

Kellermann:

But yeah, I would say that Jewish concepts are consistent with the creation of the universe. And keeping open, what it was before that.

Charbonneau:

Yeah, okay. That's really interesting. Going back to your relationship with Shklovsky, you said he adopted you. Could you go into that a little bit more?

Kellermann:

Well, maybe that was an overstatement. Yeah, he was always very friendly. Well, I should have added, I only found out afterward that it was he that played a major role in convincing the Russian authorities that our experiment, the VLBI experiment that we were proposing in 1967, was real and we weren't agents or spies and whatnot. Because he knew the story about variability, which they had discovered by one of his students in Russia. He together with Kardashev had developed the theory of self-absorbed radio spectra that led to the understanding that they were very small, so he understood all of this. And he was maybe more interested than we were in proving it. And so, I did understand in later years that he played a major role in getting our experiment approved. And when he gave the Jansky lecture here in '69 I think, we spent a lot of time together. I guess it was in the early 70s, he came to one of the Texas symposia. At that time for all the Chinese and Soviet visitors to the US, they had to be escorted at all times. They could only go places that have been pre-approved. We violated that and whatnot when they would come to Green Bank, they were only supposed to be in Green Bank and Charlottesville. We would take them on other trips without telling the FBI. So, I accompanied him back from Dallas, Texas. He was going to New York to meet Sagan.

Charbonneau:

Right, right.

Kellermann:

And Sagan, so I accompanied Shklovsly from Texas to New York. So Sagan was going to come down to LaGuardia Airport. My parents lived nearby LaGuardia Airport. My father was coming to pick me up, take me home from the airport. And so, he met Shklovsky and Sagan, and he was really impressed by a Jewish scientist from Russia and everything. Most Americans had never seen a Russian, a real live Russian.

So, he's very impressed. And of course, Shklovsky took advantage of the situation by telling him he thought that I was the best young scientist in the United States and all this. My father was very impressed. That was kind of nice. But yeah, I had warm, very warm feelings toward him.

Charbonneau:

You've told me in the past that you introduced him to Carl Sagan there?

Kellermann:

Well, I mean, they had correspondence.

Charbonneau:

Of course.

Kellermann:

But physically, I was there at the same time they met right.

Charbonneau:

That's right. How come it came to be that you were the one to facilitate that introduction?

Kellermann:

Well, because, again, I knew him from my various trips to Russia, and he had been Jansky Lecturer and plus this personal affinity, I guess. So yeah, I don't remember how I ended up in that position.

Charbonneau:

Were you familiar at all with Carl Sagan or not really so much?

Kellermann:

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Because early in my scientific life, I did a lot of work on planetary radio astronomy.

Charbonneau:

Right.

Kellermann:

And so I've been to several conferences with Carl. Yes, I've been to Cornell and whatnot. Yeah, so I know him pretty well.

Charbonneau:

Was the first time you met Shklovsky in 1965 when you were returning from Australia?

Kellermann:

Yeah.

Charbonneau:

Would you like to go into more detail about that trip? Perhaps even including the observations you conducted in Australia? The pseudo-SETI observations, I guess you could call them.

Kellermann:

Oh, right.

Charbonneau:

Jill Tarter, you know she has the website categorizing SETI, I think you're up there as number three or two. Is it two?

Kellermann:

Two!

Charbonneau:

So, I'm curious because you've made it sound that that wasn't quite a SETI observation. So set the record straight, Ken, this is your chance.

Kellermann:

On the contrary, that's my claim to fame in the SETI community. Frank Drake never published any results for Project Ozma. The only published results in Sky and Telescope were written by the Sky and Telescope reporter. And so that observation that I made was in Australia is the first published SETI observations, first search for extraterrestrial intelligence that was published in a peer-reviewed journal.

What happened was that Kardashev had just published his now famous paper on SETI. Kardashev had published his paper on the three phases of civilization. Type one civilization is the kind that we have. Type two, the civilization is able to harness the power of its sun. Type three civilizations can harness the power of a whole galaxy.

And he speculated that an advanced intelligence would send—at that time everyone was thinking communication with other intelligent species would be by radio. And he described how he thought the radio signal would look. Because you have a lot of galactic radiation, thermal radiation and low frequencies, high frequencies, you have to recall quantum noise, the optimum wavelength would be in between, and that's sort of 10-20 centimeters.

Well, coincidentally, in that range is also the hydrogen line, 21-centimeters, 1.4 Gigahertz. And so he speculated that intelligent civilizations, first of all, would broadcast a signal, broadband, containing a lot of information with its peak in between the Galactic noise and quantum noise, so it'll peak up in the middle frequencies. But to show that it was artificial, he speculated that it would put a notch in the spectrum, a square notch, at 1.4214 gigahertz. It clearly could not be due to a natural cause.

Charbonneau:

Right.

Kellermann:

Well, one of the radio sources that I was looking at was Parkes 1934-63, which had been discovered in Parkes by John Bolton, my thesis advisor, and this kind of broad spectrum that peaked up to 1.4 gigahertz. And I set out on a the perfectly bonafide research program to measure that spectrum in detail to compare it with theoretical models.

Now Kardashev not only had his papers on SETI, but he had these very solid papers on radio source spectra, which I used a lot for my thesis. And he and Shklovsky predicted this kind of spectrum, due to natural causes. And so, I set out to observe this source in great detail to see if it conforms with Kardashev's astrophysical interpretation of radio source spectrum.

And then sort of as a lark, I wanted to look for this Kardashev notch in this spectrum. But that required radio spectroscopy, which I was not familiar with, I had not done that kind of work. So I got one of the other scientists in Australia to help me hook up the spectrograph. We looked for the notch in the spectrum. We didn't find it, it wasn't there, naturally. And of course, I invited him to be a co-author.

The paper was largely on the astrophysics of the 1934-63 source, but I invited him, and you know, since we did this observation of the spectrum, to be a co-author, and he wouldn't have anything to do with me, he thought it was science fiction and whatnot. So, his name doesn't appear in the paper. It's in one paragraph. Part of a very long paper. Both the observational result and the theoretical interpretation based on Shklovsky and Kardashev's theories, you know. I mean, there's one paragraph buried in there. It says we did this experiment and didn't find anything. So that's the first published SETI result in a peer-reviewed journal.

Charbonneau:

Yeah. Is your use of Kardashev's paper what prompted you to go to the Soviet Union afterwards?

Kellermann:

In a large part, Kardashev and Shklovsky, yeah.

Charbonneau:

Was your trip planned before the whole CTA-102 thing or afterwards?

Kellermann:

I think yes, but I can't tell you exactly. I have to look back at the literature and check on that. So, the trip was planned. I was finishing my postdoc in Australia. I was coming back to the US to come to NRAO. By the way, going back to the previous thing, on the way back, I went to a conference in Puerto Rico in one of these fancy hotels on the beach. Planetary astronomy. So Frank Drake was there, and Carl. It was one of these super fancy hotels. We stayed in little huts on the beach.

Charbonneau:

Oh wow.

Kellermann:

And I shared a hut with Kip Thorne.

Charbonneau:

Oh, yes.

Kellermann:

You wouldn't normally associate him with planetary astronomy. But as an undergraduate, two or three or four years younger than me... He was an undergraduate when I was a graduate student at Caltech, and as an undergraduate research project, he had calculated the spectrum of radio emission from the Jupiter Van Allen belts.

Charbonneau:

Right.

Kellermann:

And so, he had come to this planetary astronomy meeting. Anyway, that's aside. You can go to Australia, to the US, either via the Atlantic or the Pacific. And I figured it didn’t cost much more to go back through Russia, and I wanted to go to Russia on the way back. Again, it's mostly Kardashev and Shklovsky who I wanted to meet, but you couldn't just buy a ticket to the Soviet Union at that time.

Charbonneau:

Right.

Kellermann:

I had to be organized. I was spending a lot of time in Canberra at Stromlo because I was using their computer. CSIRO Sydney, where I was working, didn't have a computer. In fact, I was using the computer at Stromlo to do the theoretical calculations of this 1934-63 spectrum.

And I got to know Bart Bok, who is an American and was one of the people who founded NRAO. He had left because he had a fight at Harvard and was going to become director of Stromlo Observatory. And I'm telling you this to show you how things worked in those days. Australia, especially then, is a very small country, and I got to know the United States scientific attaché, something like 15 of the major consulates and embassies around the world. And I'd gotten to know the American attaché.

And so, I asked him how I go about going to the Soviet Union and meeting these people and everything. He showed me a list of the scientific attachés around the world. You know, the 15, or 14 of them. I know he helped organize trips for US scientists visiting in Australia for visiting Americans to go to labs and whatnot. Of these 15 US scientific attachés, he showed me, including himself, 14 of them, were Dr. So and So, except the guy in Moscow. And he didn't explicitly tell me, but it was clear from what he was saying that while the other 14 scientific attachés were there to help American scientists and trade scientific information, the guy at Moscow was there for different reasons. He didn't think that he would be of any help for me.

And I remember casually mentioning my own thought, that I wanted to go to the Soviet Union to Bart Bok, but it didn't seem possible. And he says, oh, I have many friends. And so, I'll take care of it. And he got me an invitation from the Astronomical Council of Soviet Academy to come visit the Soviet Union for two weeks, traveled to these places and whatnot, which is great. Then he asks well how are you going to finance it? I said well, my ticket to the US is paid for. He said well, you need money in the Soviet Union. I have a friend who, and, at that time, the IAU still had a commission on the exchange of astronomers.

Charbonneau:

Right, yes.

Kellermann:

It's mostly used now for people from underdeveloped countries. Anyway, he got me, he just wrote his buddy, the chair, president of the Commission, who I can't remember, sent me a check to pay for my expenses in Russia. And that's the way it worked.

Charbonneau:

So, you were involved in that case, in one of those formal exchanges.

Kellermann:

Well, no this is the IAU exchange of astronomers, has nothing to do with the government. And all they did was pay for my expenses. I can't remember, I think I had to write a report afterward or something. The point is that it was the old boy’s network that worked in those days. There are no applications or whatnot.

And so, as you started to ask, just prior to that, that’s in May 1965. Prior to that, one of Shklovsky's students, Sholomitskii had used a military antenna system. Shklovsky had gotten permission for him to use it to study radio sources. And he made the first discovery of rapid variability in a quasar or active galactic nucleus, which was unknown at that time. So scientifically very important, again, demonstrated that the radio sources, which are very strong, also were very small. So the radio luminosity per volume was just extraordinary, almost unbelievable, and in fact, violated astrophysical theory as we then knew it, in fact theory that had been developed by Shklovsky and Kardashev. Any object that was that small, that was that luminous would destroy itself by its own radiation.

So, there's a lot of interest. How could this happen? I think only semi-seriously recognizing that this rapid variability violated theory as we then understood it, everybody understood. The Russians, Shklovsky, Kardashev, and Sholomitskii, made some public speculations on whether it was an extraterrestrial beacon, it was half serious, half in jest and they posted the idea in jest.

The Russians have a very special, you know, sense of humor, and that this might be due to extraterrestrial civilization... It got picked up by a Russian journalist; the Soviet media... what's it called?

Charbonneau:

TASS.

Kellermann:

TASS, right. And published it on the front page. And it got picked up by the Western press, and published. And so that was another... Again, I can't remember for sure whether I knew about that before I started planning this trip or afterward. But certainly, at that time, that was also one of my motivations for wanting to go talk to these people.

Charbonneau:

There's that incriminating line in that Australian newspaper you showed me about your experiments, where the journalist claims you were going to the Soviet Union to compare notes, right?

Kellermann:

Yeah. So, what happened was it got picked up by the Western media. And some reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald did the obvious thing, called CSIRO Radiophysics, which was the radio astronomy place in Australia, asked what they knew about it.

And because I had done this experiment that I alluded to a few minutes ago, they referred him to me. And we talked about it. And he said, okay, I'm gonna write it up and I'll send you a copy to look at in a few days before we publish it. And I casually said, I'm sorry, I'm not going to be here. I'm leaving tomorrow or the next day, I can't remember, for Moscow. Well, he immediately concluded, of course, my trip to Moscow had something to do with extraterrestrial civilizations and I couldn't convince him otherwise. I still have a copy of the newspaper clipping, which I think you've seen, which alludes to the, you know, the American scientist has gone to Russia to share notes on extraterrestrial civilizations or something.

Charbonneau:

But of course, this begs the question, did you, while you were there, discuss that?

Kellermann:

Oh, of course.

Charbonneau:

Yeah.

Kellermann:

Yeah.

Charbonneau:

What was the atmosphere there like? I've spoken to quite a few former Soviets about it, like Gindilis, people who were involved at the time, and it seemed a bit chaotic from what I gleaned.

Kellermann:

You know better, when was that press conference? April?

Charbonneau:

1965, April, yeah.

Kellermann:

April. So, this was, say a month later? I don't recall anything special. I mean, we certainly talked about it.

Charbonneau:

Sure.

Kellermann:

But I was not aware of that, of all the publicity and discussion. Until the fact that three years ago, when you and I talked with Leonid Gurvits. I was more interested in the interpretation of the radio source variability and its implications to astrophysics. So, while the SETI part came up, I don't remember any great detailed discussion about that.

Charbonneau:

Yeah. I asked this of everybody and some people have passionate answers on it, some people have dismissive ones, but did you, when discussing this with the Soviets, notice any sort of difference in perspective or temperament or attitude towards SETI versus your American colleagues? Especially at that time, but from any time.

Kellermann:

I think as you know, my American colleagues were bimodal. There are a few people, like Drake and Phil Morrison and others that you know, who gave it serious consideration. But the great majority of scientists, as my colleague in Australia, dismissed it as, well, something between science fiction and fraud.

And remember, flying saucers were popular at the time. And I think SETI was considered to be more a part of the flying saucer genre than science. I remember at that time, SETI was spelled with a C. Communication with extraterrestrial intelligence. Certainly very few people publicly admitted to taking it seriously. I am not sure... I’ll try and think where I stood. As a young scientist, you couldn't take it too seriously.

Charbonneau:

Right.

Kellermann:

And Frank Drake himself. In fact, you ask people, what did Frank Drake do, how do they know the name, they'll tell you about SETI. And they won't know about all the work he did in planetary radio astronomy, the greenhouse effect, which he observationally found on Venus, which Sagan then said was to do a greenhouse. The nonthermal radiation from Jupiter and so on.

Charbonneau:

Right. Were you concerned about that when you published, since you were the first publication? You didn't really have a data set to compare what would happen if you did that.

Kellermann:

Well, if I had to do it all over again, I would have published it in a separate paper. That's been one of my faults, sometimes burying things in a bigger paper.

Charbonneau:

You're not the only scientist to do that. It makes my job a lot harder.

Kellermann:

So sorry. In a way, if it wasn't for Jill finding out about it, or my telling her, I can't remember, it wouldn't be listed, because it really is buried.

Charbonneau:

No, I know, I read that paper, and it's true. It's kind of hard to tell what you're even trying to get at. You have to kind of know, I think going in.

Kellermann:

Not only that, it was in the Australian Journal of Physics, which is not a widely read astronomical journal. In fact, I thought it was an important paper for other reasons. And I wanted to publish it in the Astrophysical Journal. I didn't finish the papers until I got to Green Bank. And I've done the observational work and the analysis in Australia, and I've written the paper and had gone through several drafts with John Bolton, who was the director at the time and, as I've previously said, my thesis supervisor at Caltech. And I felt that it was important enough, not the SETI part but the rest of it, that I wanted to publish it in a journal that people would see, not the Australian Journal of Physics. Now I wanted to publish it in the Astrophysical Journal. And I asked Bolton about that. He said, well, you can do that, but not if you ever want to come back to Australia. The Australian Journal of Physics was the publication record for CSIRO, it was a CSIRO journal essentially.

Charbonneau:

Right.

Kellermann:

They felt obliged to support the journal.

Charbonneau:

Okay. Shifting gears, staying within generally the same subjects. The 1971 conference you went to in Byurakan. Can you tell me a little bit about how you got involved in that and what your experience of the conference was? Of course, you know, I'm quite interested in that conference for a myriad of reasons, but I haven't been able to speak to many people who were there, because, of course, many people are dying. Freeman Dyson just died.

Kellermann:

There aren't many left.

Charbonneau:

Yeah. So, I'm very curious to hear your firsthand testimony on just what it was like and how'd you get involved.

Kellermann:

I'm not sure if Frank Drake and I… who's very ill…

Charbonneau:

Yeah, no, he's very ill.

Kellermann:

... are the only ones perhaps living. I don't know how I got involved. I think it was through Sagan. The only physical record I have is a letter from him inviting me to go.

Charbonneau:

Why would he think you were interested?

Kellermann:

Again, because I had this one paragraph in the paper. It was a US-Russian Academy joint meeting. I don't think Carl, independently, on his own, decided on the US. The US participants were decided in the US and the Russian participants in Russia. Well maybe that's not true, I don't know, maybe there was some input from Russia. I don't know. But I knew Frank was involved. So, I knew him and I knew Frank. NRAO was the major radio astronomy facility in the world. So, it was also Dave Heeschen and Sebastian on Hoerner from NRAO. So, you know, it's kind of obvious to take people from NRAO, and I'd been to Russia. I'd been to Armenia. I had the SETI background. So yeah, it was fantastic. It was a small meeting. I think there were 10 or 15 from the US and 10 or 15 from Russia. At that time, the Russians didn't really have a good command of English.

Charbonneau:

Right, I was just gonna ask that.

Kellermann:

Everybody spoke in their own language at the meeting, informally. Dinner and drinks and whatnot were all in English, but the actual presentations, everybody spoke in their own language. And there was this fantastic guy who did simultaneous translation. Americans were sitting on one side of the table, and the Russians on the other side, and he sat in the middle.

Charbonneau:

Do you remember his name?

Kellermann:

Has somebody else told you?

Charbonneau:

Someone has told me, but not the name.

Kellermann:

Boris... I'll find out.

Charbonneau:

It's not super crucial, but it's better— [KIK: Boris Belinsky]

Kellermann:

Well, it's important. It's important because he had been taken... he was an American. He had been taken to the Soviet Union, as happened, to a number of people those days, in the 30s, as a child. His parents were devout communists.

Charbonneau:

Right, I was told that.

Kellermann:

And so, he grew up in the Soviet Union, completely bilingual. Only a child can learn a language. He was the translator at the trial of Francis Gary Powers, he was the pilot that got shot down.

Charbonneau:

I'll help you find his name.

Kellermann:

Yes.

Charbonneau:

It doesn't matter. I'll figure it out later.

Kellermann:

You have a copy of the book?

Charbonneau:

The proceedings? I do. Yeah. Well, in England.

Kellermann:

I think it's mentioned in the preface that Sagan wrote.

Charbonneau:

Okay.

Kellermann:

But he was really good. He translated simultaneously, you know, with only about a one second delay. He could listen in one language and talk in the other language. And for the whole week, or more, whatever it was, he only slipped up once, and that was in some heated discussion that Shklovsky responded to some American in English because he just spontaneously, you know, wanting to argue with somebody, and he was supposed to talk in Russian, but he talked in English. And then the translator stumbled there because he was expecting Russian.

Charbonneau:

Switching so fast.

Kellermann:

Yeah, right.

Charbonneau:

Funny.

Kellermann:

But yeah, he was really good and a very, really nice, friendly guy.

Charbonneau:

So, was there any sort of distinction between the Soviet presentations and the American presentations? I've gotten hints that maybe there were, in papers. To refresh your memory, I can tell you a little bit of what I've read. So, I know for example, the Soviets allegedly, you'll be able to confirm this or not, invited more of the philosophical ilk. Shklovsky wrote about this semi-embarrassingly. In his book, he talked about how the Soviet philosophers embarrassed the scientific delegation, and Freeman Dyson allegedly, according to Lev Gindilis, at one point stood up during a Soviet philosophy presentation and wrote on the board, "philosophy can go to hell" or something along those lines, so it's in character. So, I'm curious if you remember anything of that kind.

Kellermann:

No, I don't, and I don't remember that specific incident. But, the American delegation, I mean you can look at the list of people, were not all scientists, or at least not astrophysicists.

Charbonneau:

William McNeil, the historian, we’ve discussed him, right.

Kellermann:

Exactly. By the way, I'm still struggling through his book.

Charbonneau:

It's not the easiest to read.

Kellermann:

So, it was he and there was this guy, I can't remember his name, who lived with the pygmies in Africa.

Charbonneau:

Hm, an anthropologist, right.

Kellermann:

And he learned their language, which he would use with us. It was just clicks. That was the language. I can't remember the other non-scientists, but there was Crick.

Charbonneau:

Yes.

Kellermann:

Double Helix guy, certainly nothing to do with astronomy, just… you know about his life and whatnot.

Charbonneau:

Of course. You know that, just as an aside, he published a book later, a small book on the theory of panspermia.

Kellermann:

I don't think so.

Charbonneau:

Yeah.

Kellermann:

I'll have to look at that.

Charbonneau:

It's interesting, it's short. Once you can get to a library again, recommend. Interesting read.

Kellermann:

So yes, I don't remember any distinction that you could say was Soviet and American. As far as the approach, my impression was both groups were quite diverse. The Russians may have had a disproportionate number of... I think, if they were philosophers, I probably didn't know them and don't remember them. So, my interpretation isn't entirely correct.

Charbonneau:

So, what would your interpretation be then of what you thought the most heated or important subjects covered in the conference were like? What was the main major focus, beyond the obvious broad theme?

Kellermann:

Well, I think that was it, whether or not there is extraterrestrial intelligence, and the other person from the Soviet Union, and of course the main person was Shklovsky. You know, this is preaching to the choir, so to speak, but the consensus was, yes, there has to be, and we have to find a way of recognizing it. My recollection is, as I said, going into that meeting, the terminology that was used was CETI: communication with extraterrestrial intelligence. And I have a distinct memory of Shklovsky and Drake and Kardashev standing around after dinner in Byurakan, after lots of Armenian cognac, agreeing that the terminology was inappropriate, that you had to find evidence for extraterrestrial intelligence before you could communicate, and they agreed to use SETI with an "S", search for extraterrestrial intelligence. I have a very clear memory of that and somebody verified that.

Charbonneau:

I think you and I had that conversation with Frank Drake at the astrobiology conference in Green Bank, yeah in 2019.

Kellermann:

I was going to say, I think I confirmed that with Frank.

Charbonneau:

That's right. So, I guess a follow up question would be: What did you find to be the most valuable thing to come out of that conference, beyond kind of the obvious consensus that yes, of course, there must be extraterrestrials?

Kellermann:

I think to me, being a young scientist, being super impressed by all these famous people, Crick and Shklovsky. I don't remember anything substantial that I said during that meeting.

Charbonneau:

Did you give a paper? I don't think I remember reading one.

Kellermann:

I don't think so. I don't think so. I haven't looked back, you probably know more than I have, because you've looked.

Charbonneau:

I might, yeah. But it's good to have firsthand testimony regardless.

Kellermann:

Yes. I certainly took part in the discussion, but I don't think I made any presentation. But I think the main thing I came away with was an increased interest in the subject.

Charbonneau:

Of course.

Kellermann:

And that it wasn't all science fiction, and maybe I should be okay to pay a little more attention to it. Although I never again did any observations.

Charbonneau:

That is interesting. But you did get involved in SETI a bit more afterwards, right, with NASA.

Kellermann:

Yeah. So, there was a series of NASA workshops. The third one may have been after they divorced NASA. It was at the SETI Institute that... yeah, the first one was at NASA Ames. By the way, another person, of course, that was at that Byurakan meeting was Barney Oliver, who had run Project Cyclops earlier. He was interesting. An impressive person also. It was a few years after that that they got Phil Morrison to chair this series of workshops, looking into prospects for SETI and Drake, Sagan, and Oliver were involved. I can't remember who else. In four or five of those meetings... Oh, Jesse Greenstein. Because one of these was about what kind of stars could evolve to have planets.

Charbonneau:

Right, right. A bit of a moot question now, I guess.

Kellermann:

Yeah, exactly. Actually, the leader, the person who was in charge, is an interesting guy. Now, I can't remember his name. It starts with a "B".

Charbonneau:

Who are you referring to?

Kellermann:

He worked on SETI at NASA, SETI Ames.

Charbonneau:

Oh, Billingham.

Kellermann:

John Billingham, right. Who, by training, was a medical doctor.

Charbonneau:

Yes, that's right. He's founded Astrobio, basically, at Ames, right?

Kellermann:

Yeah, and he became interested in SETI and together with Oliver started a series of workshops and they got Phil Morrison to Chair the workshops. And of course, he... Morrison, brought a credibility to the subject, because of his…

Charbonneau:

Right, of course, the Manhattan Project…

Kellermann:

And then there were other people from NASA Ames—Kent Cullers, he was blind.

Charbonneau:

Yes.

Kellermann:

Who appeared in the movie Contact, I think.

Charbonneau:

Yes.

Kellermann:

I mean, not he but--

Charbonneau:

Right. Yes. I'm familiar with Kent Cullers.

Kellermann:

Have you met him?

Charbonneau:

No, unfortunately not.

Kellermann:

I don't know whether he's still living or not.

Charbonneau:

That's a good question. I'm not actually sure myself. Yeah, Jill would know. I tend to not get involved too much past the mid-1970s, just because of the nature of my research, so I haven't really bothered interviewing the next generation, so to speak. I probably will get around to that eventually, maybe in a postdoc or something.

Kellermann:

He's certainly not involved now because he's not been at... he's been at some of the SETI meetings, but certainly not recently. He's really sharp. And he builds a lot of the technology for their spectrometer. That series of workshops that was published by NASA. And then in the 80s, I guess, the SETI Institute published the three sets of meetings.

Charbonneau:

According to Wikipedia, he is still alive.

Kellermann:

Who? Oh, Kent Cullers.

Charbonneau:

Kent Cullers, yeah.

Kellermann:

I think there was a series of meetings sponsored by NASA Ames in the 80s. And then in 2000, it was yet another series.

Charbonneau:

SETI 2020 right?

Kellermann:

Yeah, Ron Ekers chaired that.

Charbonneau:

Ekers, yes, that's right. I've read that.

Kellermann:

And the character I remember best from there is Nathan Myhrvold who…

Charbonneau:

Can you spell the last name?

Kellermann:

Nathan's the first name, and I'm not sure I can spell it right, but M-E-H-V-O-L-D, something like that. You can easily look him up.

Charbonneau:

Yeah, that'll help.

Kellermann:

He was one of those people that was a buddy of Bill Gates, but different from him. And after he made his first few billion, he got out.

Charbonneau:

He got involved with SETI.

Kellermann:

Yes, he became an independent thinker or something.

Charbonneau:

Wow, that's a lot of Microsoft folks getting involved in SETI, right. Because there's also Paul Allen.

Kellermann:

Yeah, well, Paul Allen's in a different way. He was never at any of these meetings. Myhrvold was on the SETI 2020 Committee.

Charbonneau:

Okay. Okay.

Kellermann:

And so, he would come with a very different perspective. Each one of those series of workshops was perhaps less productive than the earlier ones. Because, you know, it's like, movies, you know, sequels. Never going to outdo the first one.

Charbonneau:

Right, right.

Kellermann:

And the first one that Phil Morrison chaired, and what's his name? The guy who... you should know, the president of Notre Dame?

Charbonneau:

Oh, the Theologian.

Kellermann:

Hesburgh.

Charbonneau:

Yes, that's right.

Kellermann:

What's his first name?

Charbonneau:

Gosh, I've read it. He has an introduction, right? Yes, I've read it.

Kellermann:

Yes, he was there and everything. So, you know, these are pretty interesting people.

Charbonneau:

Yeah, yeah. No, that was a really great opening paper he wrote, very interesting. We could talk endlessly about the theology of that, but we're getting close to two hours. So let me make sure I just ask the last couple of things I wanted to get in.

This is a bit of a selfish question, because it pertains directly to me rather than, you know, history in general. As you may know, I've gotten involved in a research group in artificial intelligence at Cambridge. That's partially because of my research into early theories, development of theories of intelligence right, which is connected to SETI. And of course, Marvin Minsky was at that 1971 conference. I'm just curious if there's anything at all you can tell me about Marvin Minsky's involvement in SETI or maybe the role of computer scientists or the development of artificial intelligence in SETI, anything at all. Just pure curiosity.

Kellermann:

Yeah, I don't think so. I don't think I knew what artificial intelligence was at the time.

Charbonneau:

Yeah, well it was a brand-new word, right?

Kellermann:

Yeah, and I'm very uneducated. I mean, I knew who Crick was.

Charbonneau:

Sure.

Kellermann:

I did not know who Marvin Minsky was, I did not know who O'Neill was, at the time.

Charbonneau:

Theodore, sorry, I just remembered. Theodore Hesburgh.

Kellermann:

Right. I probably didn't know who he was either.

Charbonneau:

It came to me a bit late.

Kellermann:

So, yeah. I mean, the simple answer is, no, I can't tell you anything because it made no impression on me. It was only later that I knew who he was. So, we probably overlapped at MIT when I was an undergraduate, but I had no exposure to him or anything.

Charbonneau:

Yeah. So, I think I'll rephrase my question slightly differently, maybe in a way that you can answer. You've talked about the fact that these conferences and these workshops were involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligent life, right. So, if there was gonna be a search, how would the technicalities work? You also discussed if communication was established, how might that work? And of course, then there's also the bigger question of: does life exist elsewhere in the universe, period? But the fourth thing we haven't spoken at length about is just how much involvement was there, just on theories of intelligence, on how to identify intelligence. You and I have discussed a little bit about the Green Bank conference in 1961. How John Lilly was there, because they recognized that that was an important question. Did you get involved in that at the workshops at all, any sort of just questions about intelligence and how to identify it?

Kellermann:

Not that I can recall. And now I'm thinking or realizing now, the inability to address some of these other points that you asked is because my interests were mostly technical.

Charbonneau:

Yeah, makes sense.

Kellermann:

How could we establish... so I accepted that there were other... you know, all the coefficients of Drake's equation that they were all about one, which we now know that they are, and that there were other intelligent civilizations. And so, I think the focus of my interest was how to establish their existence.

Charbonneau:

That makes sense, that's the tools you have, right.

Kellermann:

Yeah. That I was familiar with. Another person that we haven't mentioned who is apparently going to come to the Green Bank meeting this month, is from Harvard, optical SETI. He's an electronics person. He wrote the book called The Art of Electronics, which has sold a million copies or something. He used to be very actively involved.

Charbonneau:

Paul Horowitz?

Kellermann:

Yeah, right.

Charbonneau:

Okay. So, you mentioned that your intellectual interests and skill set lied in the technical aspects. I have to ask for the record, will you tell me what your thoughts are, for oral history purposes, on the SETI question now.

Kellermann:

One thought. There are all these projects. The NASA Ames project, the targeted search, there was the, I forget what it was called, the survey from JPL, and of course now Breakthrough SETI. This is the subject of my next book, which I've nothing else to do sitting here at home...

Charbonneau:

Oh boy, I'm getting the first scoop.

Kellermann:

I think we've talked about it before.

Charbonneau:

We probably did.

Kellermann:

Serendipitous discoveries in radio astronomy; that's not going to be the title. But look at all the discoveries in the name of radio astronomy, all of which were accidental or serendipitous and not predicted, or where predictions were wrong. A lot of the discoveries came about because they were trying to do something else, like Jansky, or Penzias and Wilson.

Charbonneau:

Right, right.

Kellermann:

When you think about how well we know, or think we know, before we knew astrophysics, the nature of the interstellar medium, and how stars work, galaxies work, how inadequately we were able to predict any of these discoveries. We know a lot less about the technology of extraterrestrial civilizations, we know even less about their culture or their intent. I think we're completely incapable of predicting what kind of signals we should be looking for.

And in fact, over the 50-60 years of SETI, it's changed so many times. Started out looking for neutral hydrogen, because neutral hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, it radiates at a frequency we talked about earlier, which is 1.4 GHz, and it's right in the middle of the electromagnetic spectrum where the technology is relatively straightforward.

And even an advanced civilization would know that even a primitive civilization like us would know about this, and it would be the obvious place to transmit. Well, that's probably all wrong. Because one of the big problems of radio astronomy is interference. And certainly, advanced civilization would know better than to transmit at the most important frequency in astronomy and mess things up for radio astronomers.

So then of course came up the water hole between hydrogen and hydroxyl. And for a decade or so that was the obvious place to look. And then Paul Horowitz with optical SETI. Even back in the beginning, I think Phil Morrison thought about the gamma rays. Every 10 years, we sort of change our emphasis, and I don't think we have any idea of what the extraterrestrial will do. And so, I predict when it's discovered, the first thing: it's gonna be loud and clear. Just like carbon monoxide was and OH, radio source variability, and so many other things. It's just a matter of the right person looking at the right place at the right time, and maybe a radio amateur or somebody who has nothing to do with radio astronomy. That's my position.

Charbonneau:

All right, that's a good one.

Kellermann:

But I probably won't be around long enough to see. That's another prediction. It's not gonna happen.

Charbonneau:

Well, you're not allowed to die Ken. I think that seems like a good place to wrap up. I've got a lot of information. I've got two hours to work with and if we're not going anywhere for the foreseeable future, and I have follow up questions, I'll be in the same place. I imagined you will be too.

Kellermann:

You know where to find me, right?

Charbonneau:

Yep, that's right. All right. Then I'm gonna click pause.