The Microwave Problem

In 2015, we discovered aliens again.

A group of astronomers at Parkes Observatory in Australia noticed these brief, intense, and seemingly random bursts of radio information; mysterious signals that seemed to be coming from the further reaches of space. They called them "perytons". For months, the team worked to identify the source. It could be neutron stars colliding. Black holes merging. Or potentially, hopefully, signals from intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.

Emily Petroff was determined to solve it. But she'd noticed something odd. The perytons only appeared during working hours. Australian working hours. Never at night. Never on weekends. Always during the day when staff were in the building.

She eventually realised that every time they detected a signal, the telescope had been pointed in the rough direction of the staff break room.

After deep investigation, she discovered the truth. The alien signals weren't coming from deep space. They were coming from staff heating lunch in the microwave.

The microwave happened to operate at 2.4 GHz, close enough to frequencies the telescope could pick up. Even though microwaves famously work within Faraday chambers, anytime someone impatiently opened the door before the timer finished, the magnetron was still running, sending a burst of radiation that the telescope dutifully recorded as a cosmic event.

Despite months of investigation, with sophisticated equipment, and some of the world's best astronomical experts, they were all undone by a microwave twenty metres away in the kitchen.

The narrative trap

We prefer compelling narratives to probable ones. Aliens are interesting. Microwaves are boring. Our minds easily escalate the mundane into exciting explanations that titillate the mind – even when mundane explanations are more likely.

In the 1970s and 80s, elaborate crop circles appeared across the English countryside. Complex geometric patterns that seemed impossible to create overnight. Books were written about alien communication. Researchers analysed the hidden mathematics. Television specials investigated the phenomenon.

And then in 1991, two men named Doug Bower and Dave Chorley came forward. They'd been making crop circles since 1978 using planks, rope, and a cricket pitch roller. They demonstrated their technique. It took a few hours and required no alien technology.

The exciting explanation had sustained an entire cottage industry of researchers, authors, and documentarians. The boring explanation was two retirees with too much time.

We have an innate preference for interesting stories. And worse, we're often incentivised to believe them. And incentives are powerful.

But here's what makes these cases interesting: it's not just that we prefer good stories. It's that we're often incentivised to believe them.

Finding alien signals can change your career. It gets you grant funding. It gets you published. It makes you the person who discovered extraterrestrial intelligence. Oprah will want a word. The New York Times will want a profile.

Finding that you've been detecting staff lunch breaks makes you look foolish instead. You've wasted months chasing kitchen appliances with million-dollar equipment.

We have an unconscious resistance to investigating boring explanations when exciting ones benefit you professionally.

You occasionally see this with Doctors. A rare, interesting diagnosis is a case worth discussing. Worth publishing. Worth presenting at conferences. Common ailments are boring. So there's subtle pressure toward complexity even when simple explanations fit better.

Financial bubbles work the same way. "This time is different" is always more compelling than "this is another cycle." If you're making money in the bubble, you're incentivised to believe the boom is justified by fundamentals rather than speculation. The boring explanation threatens your position.

There's also complexity bias at work. Sophisticated equipment detecting sophisticated things feels appropriate. A telescope capable of detecting signals from billions of light-years away should be finding something equally sophisticated, not someone's reheated soup.

This is the bane of your IT support team. When someone reports their computer isn't working, their first question is always "is it plugged in?" Not because users are stupid, but because complex problems often have simple causes. But asking feels almost insulting because the equipment is complex, so the explanation should be too.

Occam's Razor suggests the simplest explanation is usually correct. But simplest doesn't mean most satisfying. And when your career advancement depends on finding something interesting, simple becomes professionally dangerous.

The Parkes Observatory story is funny because the gap between the suspected explanation and the actual one is so large. But the same pattern proliferates throughout our lives in myriad ways. We reach for compelling complexity when the answers could be obvious, if we were open to them.

The answer you seek is often closer than you think. Sometimes it's in the break room.