It is an awesome sight, when, upon turning a bend in a winding, wavy paved road, one first glimpses the "giant eye in the jungle." This giant eye—a dish antenna 1,000 feet across, set in a natural sinkhole in the rough karst terrain—has become an iconic structure of technology, having won significant design prizes from the professional societies for mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and currently under consideration by civil engineering. It is emblematic of humankind’s quest for extraterrestrial intelligence in film, but also in reality.

The Arecibo Observatory, the world’s largest and most sensitive radio/radar telescope, was built, starting in 1960, in an astonishingly brief time.
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The Arecibo Obervatory: A Timeline