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Comment by andrecarini | Hacker News Reader

Would you mind expanding on your theory more?

It was after watching a documentary called "WOW Signal". The receiver they built was along the edge of a field, and it's designed to pick up extremely weak variations in electrical signals/radio waves. They go into great detail about how sensitive it is. The signal itself looks like a parabola when graphed, gaining in intensity and then falling off at the same rate. Exactly what you'd expect from someone walking across the field in front of it. And if I remember correctly, the signal was more about how much it differed from what was expected, not necessarily how intense it was. My thinking is that if it can pick up on the variations in signal from a star system light-years away, it would also indicate on a Timex watch (or flashlight) a dozen meters away.

> The signal itself looks like a parabola when graphed, gaining in intensity and then falling off at the same rate. Exactly what you'd expect from someone walking across the field in front of it.

Also exactly what you'd expect if aliens were beaming a search signal into their sky, no?

Yes, but one is far more likely.

Statistically speaking, everything points to human interference.

My theory is that the government was planning to cut funding, and to stop that from happening someone deliberately created the interference. That's more likely than aliens going extinct after sending one single message.

> Yes, but one is far more likely.

Well, yeah, but I wasn't addressing that. My point is that any signal from an intelligent species is going to look exactly like the signal from someone walking past with an emitter.

I'd like to watch this documentary. Do you know the year and/or channel where you saw it? The antenna is focused with a tremendous amount of gain towards a spot in the sky, and provides a very significant amount of rejection to signals in all other directions. I can't see how you would get a signal at 1.42 GHz from a watch or flashlight. Harmonics from something like a walkie talkie only occur when the radio is transmitting, and they would spread in bandwidth at each successive harmonic. It would have to be an extremely narrow fundamental frequency, with no audio signal on it, to get a signal with less than 10 kHz at 1.42 GHz.

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt7928816/

I don't remember where I watched it, but the 2nd and 3rd links from a kagi search were for Prime and Apple TV.

Trust me bro theory

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