Pulsars Were Discovered By a US Airman Before Scientists Found Them

The discovery of pulsars (rotating neutron stars) has been credited to UK scientists Jocelyn Bell Burnell and her supervisor Antony Hewish, a discovery that won Hewish (but not Bell Burnell, sadly) the Nobel prize.

Now an 81-year-old US airman, Charles Schisler, has revealed that he detected pulsar signals before Bell Burnell and Hewish, and even reported the discovery to scientists at the University of Alaska, but the discovery was never recognizd, partly because his work was classified.

Schisler says he first noticed a faint blip on his radar as he used the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System to watch the skies over Siberia for any signs of an attack.

He noted the signals repeatedly after that and soon realised that they were happening four minutes earlier every day. This told him they must be extra-terrestrial because the stars rose four minutes earlier every day due to the Earth’s motion around the Sun.

Schisler drove to the University of Alaska at Fairbanks to meet an astronomy professor who identified the source of his blips as the Crab, the tattered remains of a supernova blast, 6,300 light-years away.

he following months, Schisler recorded more celestial radio signals and believes most were pulsars. However, he did not appreciate how special his observations were until he heard of the UK astronomers’ discovery on his short-wave radio. Hewish later won the Nobel Prize for the find while his research student Bell Burnell, controversially, did not.

I'm surprised this story hasn't been more widely reported.