The Wow! Signal with Discoverer Dr. Jerry Ehman 

Im going to watch (listen) the science out of this one!

I know this isn't necessary the purpose of your channel, but I find these so relaxing. I've been having terrible insomnia, I had a great day, for example, everything was great but here I am at 2 am on the verge of tears because I just want to sleep. The past few weeks Event Horizon has been the only way I've been able to calm myself and fall asleep. Thank you 💕

This is my favorite episode so far. Such a tantalizing event. It's like fishing for the big one and getting one strong nibble.

Im not saying it was aliens, but it was definately aliens.

There's no going back once you've fallen into the *Event Horizon!!*

EH is probably my favorite youtube channel right now. Fantastic work, John!

It's like the first part of Contact, except nothing happens afterwards :(

Eagerly awaiting this one, Mr Godier. You should reach out to Dr Brian May for an interview. He's quite active online and would be a great pull for your channel too.

Fantastic episode! I learned quite a bit about radio and SETI. Makes me want to do radio astronomy myself. I think the Wow signal was it! Thanks for this interview loved it.

(a) The WOW signal is narrow band, i.e. probably of technological origin. (b) It was only sent once or we only received it only once. (c) It is adjust for doppler shift, i.e. directed at us? (Not sure if I understood this correctly.) (d) It had no modulation, i.e. contained no message. (e) Probability of a stray signal not intended for us is low. So we seemingly have received a letter with no origin address and an empty sheet of paper. Anyone saw the movie "The Hunt for Red October"? There when the Russian ship sends "only one ping" to the US ship, it means "we can see you". A second ping would be needed in order to have all info to send a torpedo. That's why it is important, that they sent only one ping. Also CMIIW, in the naval business sending only one ping for that reason above is interpreted as intimidating. Under assumption that the signal indeed was of alien origin: (f) They had the option of not sending it. (g) They had/have the option of repeating it. (h) They had the option of adding modulation with a message. (i) They know what they are doing and mistakes are unlikely. (j) They would only allow one unambiguous interpretation of the signal. (k) They choose to sent the signal, so we are relevant to them. To me this seems that they want to let us know, that they can see us and are there, but want no further contact. It could mean they are cautious. It could mean a warning. It could mean we should wait for further messages, i.e. build something like SETI but (b) and (g). It could mean we somehow entered their territory or disturbed them in any way, so that they saw the need to react and let us know. In a more martial way think of a sniper circling a laser dot on your chest so you can see it but not pulling the trigger. It could literally mean "you are not alone".

Aliens: "The Hydrogen Line is very important for interstellar detection. Let's ban the use of frequencies on this channel!" Also Aliens: "Let's listen to frequencies on the Hydrogen Line! It's the best line of communication!" All Aliens (including humans): "...sure is quiet."

Dr. Ehrman is a great guest, thanks for this.

He was such a sweetheart, a mindblowing episode! I am 21 and watched every single Episode on booth his channels and I ask myself, why this channel is so underrated. This Channel deserves millions of Subscribers, but our Culture has gone downhill. I mean, English isn’t even my first Language and I am watching this, because there are no good science Channels in Germany, but 510 Million native Speakers around the World have the possibility to listen to this, plus the rest that is speaking English as an additional Language. I am so happy that there are more people like me out there...and I wish you all an amazing day! 🤙✅

This channel should have more likes and subscribers than Taylor Swift & Kardashians combined! ☄

Why are there even any dislikes!? This was awesome to listen to!! I love the mystery surrounding the wow signal the thought that it could have been another civilization is mind blowing.

You've inspired me to build my own radio telescope and see what I can find myself. The more eyes out there the better chance we have of finding something. Thanks for everything you do John I think I'll buy some of your books for a read.

I'm Dutch and got up in the middle in the night just to be here! (and now I see my chat is broken :( ) Thank you John for yet again a great episode. I say Wow

This show is just amazing. The host, the guests, the ambient music in the background, the topics of conversation. Its just lightning in a bottle.

I love that you interview actual authoritative people in your shows. Good job. Very interesting. 👍

Never before heard about the red/blue shift adjustment of the signal. That is almost scary.

What an amazing guest. Event Horizon is such a great show!

I always thought local interference getting into the equipment was a possibility, but his description of how the channel scanning rolled over all of them in succession several times per sampling period seems to rule that out. Any interference should have affected all channels to roughly the same degree. Indeed strange.

Frustratingly enegmatic. Did the strength of the signal temporarily 'blind' or overload the 2nd receiver? Back in the day, the electronics could be pretty flakey. Not seeing the signal via the 2 receivers is a massive cause for concern as I find it very difficult to believe that the signal either 'ended' between the two receiver's listening points or started between them and hence only detected by 1 of them.

Wow. Synchronistic. In '77, we got Star Wars, the Voyager launches, and I graduated finally! Today, we get EH AND The Last Skywalker! Kinda feels like '77 again, except I won't be losing my virginity this time. :)

Imagine we get a strong signal & so narrow pointed at us exactly tracking our rotating with our sun & galactic plane, so strong it lasts a exactly ending on a prime number becuase of thier alien unit of tracking time. It comes in molutated in Earth's major languages telling us "Be quite" Think we'll lose our sh*t. 😂

All , I can say is "Thank You" Event horizon for this amazing interview with Dr Jerry. Learnt so much more than I was expecting. The details of the measurements and the possibilities of the origin , things I always wanted to know about this topic were all answered. I am blown away by the details and the compelling narration,

Honestly love your content! Going to save this to watch during my chemo tmrw :)

Thank you John for another extremely interesting program and thank you Dr. Jerry Ehman for your years at SETI and for this contribution in particular. I'm very interested in the direction from which the signal came. Would like to have had more information on that? But I have since read up on where the direction of the signal was estimated to have come from (Sagitarius Constellation....or anywhere in between I guess!) Interesting to see that the only stars that could have been aligned at the right moment as transmission source are 6 very distant stars...no close stars or planets/moons in our solar system? I suppose this also still leaves open the possibility that the transmission came from a spacecraft within or just outside our solar system...wow!

Thinking about the possibilities honestly gives tingles in my stomach. Just imagine.. Lovely conversation as always John, thank you. Amazing guest.

What an episode. All I can say is Wow!

Man, if only we had picked up that signal today with current technology. As discussed in this show; if the source of the signal was intelligent life and they were taking some random shots in the dark to see if they could get a response perhaps they may yet again transmit that signal in our direction so we can pick it up with current technology. Edit: I also did not know how long the signal was received before listening to this interview. I had assumed it was shorter.

This was amazing. The quality of the guests and their knowledge is constantly amazing me. Also, John and crew do such a great job researching the topic that the interview questions are always spot on. Every guest spends the whole show responding with "yes exactly" or "great questions" then they expound. Great work guys.

Can't wait for this one. But I'll have to wait even longer because i'll arrive home very late today. Thanks Event Horizon, JMG and Dr. Jerry Ehman for accepting the interview, very appreciated. I'd have money I'd donate. Only thing I can do is watch the ads. Greetings from Chile

You see? That's why when I get my notification from Event Horizon where ever I am it puts smile on my face! 💜.

If the source was a civilization then that civilization should have advanced their tech many folds over thousands of years, If we were sending a signal towards them can they still detect it or would it be like sending a letter tied to a bird in 2019.

This is the content I live for

Should 't we send a follow-on signal behind the Wow! signal? We know where it originated so we know where it went after leaving, so anyone downstream from it is, like us, listening for a repeat signal. So we should send one behind the Wow signal.

What a legend of a guest. Literally legendary - WOW signal - it will forever be a landmark historical moment.

Love the subject of the Wow signal. Great content John

Thank you John for this great episode.

Hi John, love your channel, I am your space brother. I attempted to make my own WOW signal in visible light back in 1973 when I aimed a flash light at the Pleades for about a minute. I like to think there might be a couple photons still on their way there, they would be almost 50 light years away by now. Many years later I ended up working in on multiple space missions in my job and am totally obsessed with space. You have a great channel and a knack for discussing this topic. Please keep it up.

Anyone else habitually pause decorative code scroll-bys to see what language they're using and what the code does?

So excited for this interview! Thanks so much, John and team. This really is the best channel on RU-vid.

O H I O! The greatest place on the planet😔

I think the real eye opener in this interview was towards the end when Dr. Ehman revealed that they would not have been able to detect modulation in the signal even if any was present. Disappointing, but such where the limitations of their equipment. So, we're back to square one. Based on what we know now there's no way to characterize the WOW! signal as either natural or artificial, and Dr. Ehman wisely refuses to do so.

If I were Dr Jerry, I’d get a W tattooed on each butt cheek so that when I bent over it’d say “WOW” Really cement his place in the hearts and minds of SETI enthusiasts

Man, does this guy sound better at 1.25 speed

Why 7 ads for a video :(

That intro... WOW

How did I miss this one for a year?? I find the WOW! Signal endlessly fascinating. What a special treat to hear directly from Dr. Ehman. Belated thanks to all. And I agree with what Dr. Ehman started to say toward the end about politicians. Maybe a Fermi Paradox filter is having politicians.

"It was the best of times; it was the blurst of times..."

Wow! Top notch once again JMG!⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

It was either this or Robot Chicken - Best Of Humping Robot. I'm not ashamed to say that i'm watching this first, but that robot chicken is open in another tab.

It blows my minds that when we humans sent the transmission to space from the Arecibo Observatory.. .we only sent it ONCE! Why wouldn't we send it at least twice to any given target so that anyone out there would not be stuck with this same one time WOW signal that can not be confirmed?

This guy is telling us the signal appeared to be correcting for the earth's motion relative to the galactic center and we are still sceptical that it has intelligent origins?

I know we will never know conclusively what the Wow signal was but I prefer to believe that it was an alien civilization telling us we are not alone.

And there is the answer to the Fermi Paradox...if every nation on earth agreed not to use a specific frequency so it could be used for listening for ET, then it stands to reason every ET civilization came to the same conclusion, and we are all listening for the exact frequency that NONE of us will ever transmit. Cosmic irony for the lose.

But the signal is based on hydrogen, the most common element in the Universe. And it had no signs of intelligence, no repeating pattern, it was just a 72 second blip as the Earth turned, probably detecting the hydrogen of a passing comet. {:o:O:}

Such a fascinating mystery, i hope we will get an answer to it at some point, as unlikely as that might be. John, could you make these Event Horizon episodes available in podcast form on Apple Podcasts etc? Would be nice to listen to them on the go. Edit: Spelling.

What bothers me about the Wow signal is that it was found so soon after we started looking and then never again. It would be interesting for someone in the know to give a ballpark estimate of much of space had actually been scanned at that point vs. how much has been done in the entire history of SETI. (This would take into account such things as strength of the detectors, area scanned, length of time per area, amount of data examined, etc.) If it turns out that only a minuscule fraction had been looked at, say .0001% of the total examined by today, then that would mean that the odds against finding our best signal at that point in time would be one in a million.

One of if not your best interview yet

Ok after this interview im 90% convinced it was aliens

What a down to earth man. Excellent interview. Honestly I’ve been a hard skeptic my whole life but I can’t escape the conclusion that at this present time the alien hypothesis seems the least implausible explanation…though it’s probably a mystery forever.

Great story about the, WOW signal. I think this event would have gotten greater coverage in the media, however I believe Elvis Presley died around the same time as WOW signal discovery.

Fantastic interview, JMG!!! Basically, we detected a signal, noted its strength... And that's it. If we have recorded it... Damn... That would've been fantastic!

Fantastic Interview! So there's really no way to determine that it wasn't a alien Signal or not? That's amazing to be honest. Most scientists i saw in the last years tend to dismiss it as some kind of natural signal or glitch in the equipment but there's seemingly no reason to do that. There's just too many coincidences for such a assumption for my taste. A unknown signal at the bandwith we where expecting an Alien signal to appear, that never could be detected again... man that what legends and huge Stories are made of! To me it always appears to be like they noticed we could detect it, and quickly shut the signal down, lol.

Who thinks it was aliens?

Great video! I’m going to listen again. Don’t know if I understand correctly. Each of the six numeric designations of the wow signal represents a ten millisecond sample of radio signal over a 72 second period? Going to watch again. Thank you for this.

Aliens: Wow Us: Who dis? Aliens: Sorry, wrong number

the only good thing about this signal is it was Gaussian and narrow band. they did not have the tech to analyse back then.

One Eyed Willy = Goonies = It's an Echo of the treasure map. 7 & the set of 6 are both connected. A person with a "J" name drew the circles. J is the Echo of the land. You can trace the stolen goods to New York. Copper is the Statue of Liberty from France, also 6, and not in red. 7 is the center of the Planet. Giza = 7 structures = our calling card. The capstone was Copper.

This was definitely the most exciting wait for me this is so cool! I'm also very interested in the great attractor if you're looking for new ideas.

So... so interesting.... another one of our (man kind’s) discoveries that demands more answers! Thanks for sharing.

The problem with the Drake Equation isn't the answer we get using it, it's the error bars. It predicts 10000 civilizations with +/- 20000. So we have anywhere from 20000 civilizations to negative 100000.

Playing Elite Dangerous to these videos just feels right.

WOW signal reminds me of the detection of gravity waves. Interesting how both these signals were detected not long after construction of the detectors. What will be the next signal they detect from space?

The Wow Signal That's When Elvis Time Traveled To The Future 😜

A great show John Godier! And this shows us all why we need to do more work on SETI. Just think if say NASA put just 0.1% of its budget into it we would have "The Allen Telescope Array" up to the full 350 dishes! and we could work on SETI 100X more than now! But even still according to Seth Shostak, we are now doing more SETI than ever before and listening to over a million radio channels at once since 2011 with The Allen Telescope Array. Partly from you and some of your guests, I have been collecting the parts to settup my own mini SETI project. So far I have been given an old 3m parabolic satellite dish (the minimum size to do 1.4 to 1.7 GHz) and am working on a booster receiver and planing to do drift-scanning with it mainly around the water hole frequency of 1420 MHz, then hoping to join James Brown at SETINet who are looking for the Wow Signal! www.seti.net/NewToSETINet/aboutSETINet/about.php

I think this might be the most interesting channel yet. This is awesome! Thank you so much for doing this! 💛 The link was awesome to have to follow along while he was explaining.

I usually hear that lady say: "Slow down. Speed trap ahead!"

I like the Pepsi bottle analogy, but would take it one step father to say that the tide sweeps the bottle away as you reach for it.

Looking like a hoax signals. There’s several numbers in the surrounding printout weren’t being circled except the vertical column. Why?

Nobel Prize for Dr. Jerry R. Ehman Thumbs up!

Anyone else here from the Cool Worlds video on black swan events?

How about a probe sending data to its home planet? That would explain why we never found anything again at that exact location. Probably the earth just was in the way. If so, wouldn’t it be worth it to look in the exact opposite direction to the signal in which the earth was at that moment?

Silly to me that we haven't sent a reply. Someone knocks on the door, it's custom to say "who's there?" Even if it'll only be our descendants who might get the answer.

Actually Mr. Godier, you are absolutely wrong about what constitutes an "efficient signal", at 41:30. The more narrowband it is, the LESS efficient it is for information carrying capacity per unit of power. If it was a single spike at a certain frequency, it would in fact be an unmodulated carrier wave which would carry no information at all. The most efficient signal would be a signal over all frequencies, using a water filling sort of signal strength, which is to say, the spectral density of the background noise power will make a sort of landscape, and the most efficient signal for carrying information per watt, would use the bands with the lowest noise and add its signal until its signal power plus the noise power at every frequency used, was a constant. So for instance, if the noise power was 100 watts per hertz between 1 kHz and 10 kHz, 150 watts per hertz between 10 kHz and 100 kHz, 200 watts per hertz between 100 kHz and 1 MHz, 130 watts per hertz between 1 MHz and 10 MHz, 70 watts per hertz between 10 MHz and 100 MHz and 40 watts per hertz between 100 MHz and 1 GHz, then an efficient signal would be a very wide band signal with perhaps 100 watts/hz between 1 kHz and 10 kHz, 50 W/Hz between 10 kHz and 100 kHz, no signal between 100 kHz and 1 MHz, 70 W/Hz between 1 MHz and 10 MHz, 130 W/Hz between 10 MHz and 100 MHz and 160 W/hz between 100 MHz and 1 GHz. Which is a smear of frequency components across the spectrum. But that is actually what an "efficient" signal would look like. Having a narrowband spike and near a hydrogen line to boot, that's not efficient at all.

Every day I have a Wow! moment. I see something really weird and then I never see it again.

I have been waiting for this !!!!!!!! Thank you !

It was a very good interview, but I wish a couple of questions had been asked: 1. What are the stars in the general direction of the signal source? (Have any been searched for extrasolar planets?) 2. Could the signal have had extragalactic origins?

Intelligent conversation without any garbage. Exactly what you expect from educated people. This is a great interview. Really enjoyed this.

Excellent thoroughly enjoyed today's show no doubt will watch again

Really enjoy your podcasts! You've got a unique production style. I like how you overlay Bladerunner-esque music on the interviews.

That was Elvis passing he died that night

Awesome episode 👍.

This was a very great video!

Amazing interview! I'm convinced the wow signal could have been an alien signal. Too bad we'll probably never know, unless we receive more signals.

What’s the conclusion if the wow signal was picked up with todays technology ???

The Wow signal combined with signs of microbial life on Mars and in Venusian clouds makes me wonder if life in various forms is super common in the universe...

I'd love to see a show that'd calculate the antenna size and transmitter power required to create a signal of that magnitude on earth. At some point the numbers would get impractical enough to set an outer limit on how far away that transmitter might be.