Gray attended Shimer College, a Great Books school then located in Mount Carroll, Illinois, where he received a bachelor's degree in 1970.

signal a few years after its detection, Gray contacted the Ohio team, visited Big Ear, and spoke with Ehman, Robert S. Dixon (director of the SETI project) and John D. Kraus (the telescope's designer).

[6][10][11][12] He operated his small SETI radio observatory regularly beginning in 1983 and for the next 15 years, but did not find a trace of the Wow!

[6] In 1987 and 1989 he led searches for the signal using the Harvard/Smithsonian META radio telescope at the Oak Ridge Observatory in Harvard, Massachusetts.

[13] In September 1995 and again in May 1996, Gray and Kevin B. Marvel reported searches for the signal using the Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope in New Mexico[14][15] (which is an array of 27 dishes simulating a single dish with a diameter of up to 22 miles),[6] becoming the first amateur astronomer to use the VLA, and the first individual to use it to search for extraterrestrial signals.

[8][13][18] In 2016, Gray published an article in Scientific American about the Fermi paradox, which claims that if extraterrestrials existed, we would see signs of them on Earth, because they would certainly colonize the galaxy by interstellar travel.

Gray stated that Fermi questioned the feasibility of interstellar travel, but did not say definitively whether or not he thought extraterrestrials exist.