Reproduction of Wow! Signal Decoding

There was a thread on ATS yesterday showing someone using audio software to produce human voices from the Wow! Signal, so I decided to try it myself.

ATS: The Wow! Signal Something New

I found a source of the raw audio on Youtube and ripped it to .mp3. Then I brought it into Audacity.



YouTube Link

Link to Ripped YouTube File

More coming... definitely works. Getting human-like voices now, not a hoax - I will have to get a SoundCloud account.


Here is the Soundcloud Link:

Wow! Signal Decoded

You can even hear the words "Ten Sixty One."

This was done myself, if anyone else wants to try it, speed up the audio about 350% in Audacity and then do not apply any pitch change effects or anything of the sort. I just wanted to reproduce the audio in The_Seeker's thread myself from the raw data -

It turns out the raw data was false, but the result was reproducible from the raw data available on the net of the Wow! signal audio.

a reply to: darkbake
But there is no audio of the wow signal...

i think it was definitively proven that the wow signal wasn't an audio one.

whatever you've 'decoded' is a recording of something else, sorry to burst the bubble there

a reply to: ladyteeny

I see... so that must be what the problem with the original thread from yesterday was, which I was trying to replicate. Someone is hosting false Wow! Signals on YouTube then.

I'm still not convinced there was no audio, though. The Wikipedia page says that it was a radio signal, and then mentions attempts to copy it by sending audio of twitter feeds and such into space.

Okay. Here is a Q&A.

Q:I would like to obtain an audio tape of the "Wow!" signal. Can you provide that to me?

A:At the time Big Ear recorded the radio signal that later became known as the "Wow!" signal (based on the notation that Dr. Jerry Ehman wrote in the margin of the computer printout), there was no audio recording equipment attached to the output of that radio telescope. Hence, it is impossible to provide an audio tape of that signal.

Big Ear Q&A

So that means that although there was an audio signal, there is no record of it.

The only information recorded from the Wow Signal was its total power, averaged over 12 second long 'bins'. There is no way of knowing if there was any audio modulation, or not. The audio everyone is talking about was from of police calls recorded by NICAP's MADAR monitoring station at Mt. Vernon, Indiana, at the same time as the Wow Signal was received in Ohio.
NICAP also recorded strong magnetic and background radiation anomalies at the same time. It was suggested that these might have connection to the Wow Signal, not the police calls. The police calls were apparently recorded, on the chance that they might reveal sightings of UFOs at the same time as magnetic and radiation anomalies.

Radio isn't audio. Although we can use radio waves to transmit a signal that can be 'interpreted' as audio, radio itself isn't audio. Radio is simply a region in the electromagnetic spectrum. Like light, infra-red etc. I think you're confusing our usage of radio with what radio actually is.

a reply to: Ross 54
October 1961 Admiral Hillenkoetter would have been steering NICAP.

en.wikipedia.org...

He was obviously heavy in charge of psyops during and after WW2.

First director of the CIA

Was knowledgeable about the KH "Keyhole" downlinked satellite series from1962.

Wasn't the "WOW" signal recovered at the Arecibo dish while spying on the Russians?

a reply to: darkbake

61 Cygni

a reply to: darkbake

Yes, there was no audio signal. It was a radio wave-frequency signal...sort of a "pulse" made once, searched for...and never found or repeated again.

originally posted by: Cauliflower
a reply to: Ross 54
October 1961 Admiral Hillenkoetter would have been steering NICAP.

en.wikipedia.org...

He was obviously heavy in charge of psyops during and after WW2.

First director of the CIA

Was knowledgeable about the KH "Keyhole" downlinked satellite series from1962.

Wasn't the "WOW" signal recovered at the Arecibo dish while spying on the Russians?

Admiral Hillenkoetter was not on the board of NICAP after 1962. The Wow Signal was received at the Ohio State University radio telescope in 1977. It has never been heard by any other facility, including Arecibo.

I call b.s. on the Youtube video. I mean come on.... it's been over 30 years, and NO ONE ever thought of opening up FL Studio and applying simple audio filters? And as stated by other posters, I thought the original Wow! signal wasn't an audio message, it was a measurement of activity in a specific radio spectrum.

Like this..


Clearly it says what frequency range these were detected in, ~120Mhz. Last I checked, thats wayyyy above the human vocal range, but I'm no radio buff so please if anyone else can confirm this I'd appreciate it.

OP, I still give you SnF for bringing it here, good effort!

120 MegaHertz was the local oscillator frequency. The frequency at which the Wow Signal was received was very near 1420.405 MegaHertz. This is the radio frequency of hydrogen, the most common substance in the universe, by far. This seems to make it a good hailing frequency for extraterrestrial signaling. Audio frequencies are from about 20 Hertz to 20 KiloHertz.

a reply to: Ross 54

SETI operatives have been listening for an extraterrestrial signal near 1420 MHZ since the 1950's.
IMHO the black Knight UFO is related, it has to do with the way knights in chess move........

www.abovetopsecret.com...

The Pioneer plaque, attached to the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 spacecraft, portrays the hyperfine transition of neutral hydrogen and used the wavelength as a standard scale of measurement.

In 2012, on the 35ht anniversary of the Wow! signal, Arecibo Observatory beamed a response from humanity, containing 10,000 Twitter messages, in the direction from which the signal originated.

This would make a great movie!

originally posted by: darkbake
So that means that although there was an audio signal, there is no record of it.

No that's not what it means. Sound doesn't travel through the vacuum of space, so the telescope never received any sound from space. Ever.

Electromagnetic radiation is not an audio signal.

You can play and hear an audio frequency of say 100 Hz, but it's not the same thing as an EM signal of 100 Hz.

Nonetheless, NASA does some EM to sound conversions but they explain the difference:

solarsystem.nasa.gov...

One approach scientists use to make sense of the data from instruments is to make pictures and graphs to represent the data. This is called "data visualization". Some types of data, especially radio signals, are very similar in many ways to sound. The power of a radio signal is analogous to the volume of a sound. The radio signal also varies in terms of the frequency and wavelength of the radio waves, which is like the variation in pitch of sound waves. So scientists sometimes translate radio signals into sound to better understand the signals. This approach is called "data sonification".

There are plenty of mentally challenged people making youtube videos claiming these are the "sounds of space", and that jupiter is actually making these noises, but they are mistaken, it's data sonification.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

Thanks for clearing that up, I see, that makes sense - data sonification and data visualization. I hadn't been clear on that before, very informative.

What I was thinking was that sound could have been encoded in the radio signal, and they got data of that signal, but it looks like the signal data wasn't recorded in detail.

originally posted by: darkbake
a reply to: Arbitrageur

Thanks for clearing that up, I see, that makes sense - data sonification and data visualization. I hadn't been clear on that before, very informative.

You're welcome, and it's understandable that it was unclear to you as it's apparently unclear to many.

What I was thinking was that sound could have been encoded in the radio signal, and they got data of that signal, but it looks like the signal data wasn't recorded in detail.

That's quite possible and in fact AM and FM radio are two completely different methods for encoding audio into electromagnetic radiation signals. But to decode those two types of encodings you need two different methods.

This would be pretty much the holy grail of SETI to pick up an alien radio station, but if the EM signal contains encoded audio, in order to decode it, you'd need to apply a decoding method like the AM radio method, or the FM radio method, or some other method.