This just in, courtesy of Steinn Sugurdsson's blog. At a pulsar conference, none other than Jocelyn Bell Burnell introduced retired USAF office Charles Schisler, who not only monitored emission from pulsars several months before their known discovery, but kept logs and identified celestial coordinates. However, the equipment capabilities were classified and this was not in the mission, so ... the rest is history.

Very similar to the reports that many many new things were discovered but left classified when the Navy put the lines of sonar senors throughout the oceans to detect Russian nuclear subs decades ago...

Mmm..in her biog of Frank Drake, Dava Sobell
revealed that the Crab Pulsar makes a big
burst every 5 minutes or so that may be
noticed as extra noise on a VHF television
screen not tuned to any station. I was caught,
Taurus was up so I tried in on my set. Nothing
seen. But we have negative modulation which
makes noise spikes just dark. So is it a
missed opportunity for some bored TV engineer
in the late fifties wondering where that
extra noise came from on the sets at that
time? Anyway the discovery was made by the
appropriate people

Reminds me of the first GRB's, discovered serendipitously by US military satellites in the late 60's.

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