Thinking Sideways: The "Wow!" Signal

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Thinking sideways. I don't know. You never know. The story
is of things we simply don't know the answer too. Well,
Hi there, I'm taking a page from Steve's book today

(00:25):
and saying, well, hi there there. I'm Devin, I'm Joe,
I'm Steve, and we three, with our powers combined, are
thinking sideways. Oh. I thought we'd planned this before. No,
I think you need to like coordinate a little bit. Dang, alright,
I was definitely not a page out of my bad

(00:46):
not a page from my book. We actually didn't need
some superhero music for for this, you know, we do.
With the number of mysteries Joseph's Joe is so far,
I think we're going to solve another one. We're probably not.
Maybe we are, I don't know. I think we will, Okay,
Joe thinks, so Steve doesn't. I say, maybe, Well, we'll

(01:09):
at least come up with a plausible theory. Yeah, that's true.
I love couple. Probably you can accept that. Yeah, so
I this is a big one. You guys know. It's
the wow signal, It's the wow yes wow. Um. I
wish you guys could see the crazy faces that we're making.

(01:31):
Always say that, Um, but I don't want to start
out the story the way everybody else does because I
feel like that's super boring. Also, I don't want to Okay, okay,
we're gonna be talking about something picked up by a
radio observatory or radio telescope called the Big ear Um.
It's officially called the Ohio State University Radio Observatory. It

(01:55):
was a how do you say that cross type radio
telescope located on the grounds of the Perkins Observatory in
the Ohio Wesleyan University from nineteen sixty three to nineteen
at which point it was annexed, torn down, and became
a golf course. Yeah seriously, yeah, seriously golf course. Now yeah,

(02:16):
I think they developed that land for like a golf
to expand a golf course and also put in some housing. Yeah.
Poor science, poor science of other radio telescopes out there. Uh.
And I know Joe has a better grasp on science,
your science stuff like this than I do. I'm gonna
let him talk about what a Crouse radio telescope has.

(02:41):
It has three components, right right, yeah? Yeah, So I
imagine imagine a flat like sort of almost football field
sort of shaped place, and then at one end of
this At this thing, you've got what's called the flat array.
The flat aright reflects radio way as it come down
from the sky across the field into this vertical parabolic array,
which is a curved array, and that reflects the signals

(03:04):
back towards the flattery and right in front of the
flat ter ay, there are these two things called feeder
cones which which receive the concentrated radio ways into them
and they convert them into electrical energy. So the then
this thing is adjusted north and south by moving the
flatter ay up and down, so essentially it's hinged at
the bottom and then it just like moves up and down.

(03:27):
So if you want to like, say, further south, you
move it up. For the north, you move it down,
and that's how it works. Very and then in the
eighties thing I think that they had changed the Yeah,
they put one of the arrays on tracks. Now they
put the feeder cones on tracks. Oh, so they could
move east to west and stay with a whatever kind
of tone and yeah, are there if there was just

(03:50):
some galaxy they wanted to observe more closely something like that,
they could actually move them slowly side to side and
keep it in focus for longer than seventy two seconds
because yeah, otherwise, and we rotated out of because it's
the rotation of the ears. Yeah, that's how long they
could focus on some of I mean, anything with any
kind of meaningful distance from us. Basically, Yeah, basically it

(04:13):
was that the mercy of the of the turning of
the Earth. Yeah, So this update would have been really
really helpful to have had on August fifteen ninety seven,
a mere three years before they instituted the track system.
So the update you're talking about is where the was
it the ears the feeder cones as well? Just make

(04:34):
sure I understand which update we were talking about. Yeah,
it would have been really helpful to have a guy
who was a member of study. I think is kind
of the way you say that's participating in steady. Yeah,
participating that you can can't really same member. Yeah, itization.
It's just a group of people mostly volunteer anyway, aren't they. Yeah? Yes, Okay.

(04:57):
He recorded what is widely believed to be some of
the best proof for intelligent extraterrestrial life out there, or
at least at the very least one of the things
that pretty much everybody agrees the best explanation for is
intelligent extraterrestrial life. And that's the wow signal. The signal. Okay,
maybe maybe we'll talk about it first. Some housekeeping. SET

(05:22):
is the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. It's a collective name
for a number of activities undertaken to search for intelligent
extraterrestrial life. And it's comprised mostly I think of scientists,
mostly of people who are not like crack pot alien theorists,
people who are pretty respected. Yeah, it's not it's not

(05:42):
all waing. That's I'm sure there's nuts in there, but
but most of it. A lot of the people who
take part in it are people who have do have
access to high levels of you know, like the big
ear or you've got to be really qualified to operate
or take part and use that equipment. So we make totals,
and of course not everybody is. Some people are just
home astronomers and things like that. But generally speaking, if

(06:05):
SETI says something, they deny a lot of stuff. They say, no,
that's definitely not stuff, so they don't jump right to
it every time. I got you. Yeah, and then we
do need to talk a little bit about this thing
called cosmic background noise. You guys know what that is, right,
kind of cosmic background noise is recorded at about fifteen
mega hurts and it's it's what you hear when you

(06:27):
turn the radio tune in to nothing. It's white noise basically.
And what that is is it's just left over thermal
noise from the Big Bang, which I think is pretty cool.
Let's just watch some Big Bang the other days in fact,
but it's pretty cool right that we can still hear
this left over something from it. Yeah, the Big Bang

(06:48):
is still with us, and I have to admit that
that is it's more supposedly. Is that a theory or
is it accepted as a fact the noise is left
over from the Big Bang? Oh, because it's well, I mean,
it's all theories and we need the Big Bang is
only it's really weird to me. I'm not It's just
really strange to think that this noise and this radiation

(07:11):
has been bouncing around for that long from that one event. Yeah,
it's dispersing still, it's like an echo essentially that I could. Yeah,
just to reiterate, we mentioned it in passing a little
garbled before. The way that this array worked at the
time was that it was only it was focused by

(07:32):
their rotation. Essentially, it was stationary. So if you think
of it as like a pole kind of or just
like a tube extending out of the Earth into space,
that's what we see. And of course things come into
focus and out of focus, so there's a little variable there,
but it's we're only focused on what we can see,
and the Earth's rotation took us out at that point,

(07:55):
took us out of any kind of meaningful field of vision,
every of me two seconds. So what what what an
analogy that would make sense? Tell me if this is correct.
You remember when you were a kid and you got
the paper towel tube and you'd use it like it
was a telescope. So with this is so, the way

(08:16):
I'm understanding the way this thing works is if I'm
using that to look and I'm sitting on the Merrio
ground in the playground and it's moving slowly and I'm
looking through it, I'm going to see something and it's
going to go for if it's spinning left right, then
it's going to go from one side across that entire
field division and then pass out of that field division,
and that takes seventy two seconds exactly, alright, just trying

(08:39):
to because this whole thing again, this is the way
this this telescope works. Yeah, it fruit loops my brain. Yeah.
And there's a lot of really great resources online will
link to and we'll put some pictures up of kind
of what's going on that if you just look at it,
it'll be immediately apparent what we're talking about. Our words
are only so good. That didn't help me. So of

(09:00):
you who didn't know that. You know, astronomers don't just
use optical telescopes. There's all kinds of radiation out there
and it's all it all carries all kinds of interesting
information in it. And so yeah, I was reading the
some of the other radio telescopes out there, like that
one in Puerto Rico, the one that was in Golden
Eye would change the fond Yeah, yeah, I was reading
some of the some of the amazing discoveries they've made

(09:20):
with that thing, you know, And so it's like they've
done some seriously important work and well in the advances
in technology. They were put up in space. It's been
ten years or more now. No, it wasn't humble, but
it was some other telescope or some other array that
they could use, which is how they were figuring out
where the most gravitation and heat in the universe is

(09:43):
because it was mapping all of that, because it actually
had really fine detail for what it was in the
area it was covering. So it's these things just they
go just like smartphones, they go with leaps and bounds.
It just takes longer to figure out what the data
is telling. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's kind of one
of the big you know, like with the Hobble, for example,
you get some really cool pictures out of the deal.

(10:06):
So with the radio telescopes, what people tend to focus
on is this kind of Goldilocks frequency, which is the
frequency that scientists theorized that pretty much any intelligent extraterrestrial
life would likely broadcast in because it would signify both
the fact that they were there and the fact that

(10:28):
they were intelligent. I'm not really I don't totally understand
why they think that particular one is good. I mean,
I'm good with it, I'm fine with it. Yeah, But
it's like, you know, I I could think that the
aliens would be broadcasting all kinds of different frequencies, but
as far as I can tell, it's it's called the
hydrogen line UM and it's once one thousand, four hundred

(10:50):
and twenty point four zero five seven five one seven
seven mega hurts exactly, which is the the electronnetic radiation
spectral line, which that is created by a change of
the energy state of the neutral hydrogen atoms. Which is
language that I will openly admit I lifted straight off

(11:13):
of Wikipedia, because nobody knows about this stuff. Joe might
know about this stuff off the top of the head,
but I think, as far as I can tell, scientists
kind of assume that hydrogen is the most prevalent than
it was the first one. That's why it's the most right.

(11:34):
So I think the assumption is that since it's the
most prevalent, that any intelligent life would like we have
say hey, we're smart enough to identify this and also
know at what mega mega hurts at wattage frequently, thank you,
it changes, And it's universal. It's not like a number, right,

(11:56):
it doesn't. It doesn't depend on our kind of life
or anything like that. It's universal. So they would broadcast
in this to say hey, we're here and we're smart
enough to understand this, and to you, yeah, and also,
I guess we're smart enough to broadcast this because it
takes a lot of energy to broadcast something like this,
but that is an important number. Basically, you know, fourteen megaheurts'

(12:20):
all right, megahirs rounded rounding is probably the easiest way. Yeah,
so they were listening at that frequency. That's well, they
weren't listening at that frequency. They were listening at all frequencies,
but that was the frequency that people were listening for.
That makes sense, really cool, Steve got the glazed overlook. Yeah, wait,
they were listening for I don't, I don't. So they

(12:43):
were hoping that something would come in on that frequency
and other resette was there. They're just an open broadband
listening to listening to everything and that they were hoping.
So they were Their hypothesis was if something is going
to come through, is going to come through this frequency? Yeah, okay,
that's going to signify likely signify intelligent extra trust. I

(13:04):
got it, I got it. Cool. I'm not sure that
that's true, because I mean, not gonna A radio telescope
is like an antenna, and antenna's antennas are usually specific
to frequencies. So like, that's why I like you know,
if you've got a little AM radio has got a
little short one, and then you've got it like something
that transmits or receives on a really long band, you
get a really long, long, long antenna. So I'm not

(13:27):
sure that this thing is really capable of receiving all frequencies. Yeah,
I mean, you know, I haven't. I haven't. I didn't
see anything in the research that said anything. I think regardless,
they're the one they were paying attention to. Was this
four magnats. Yeah right, because that's that's the one, that's
the one they cared about. So who knows, somebody might know. Listener,

(13:51):
call out aliens, tell us all right, so housekeeping. Yeah,
we're done with housekeeping. I think we are. I think
so cool is now we get to tell go into
the story. I know story. I know, anybody die yet.
August fifty seven, Jerry Emon is using the Big Ear

(14:13):
as a part of his Steti project. The Big Ear
records all the noise it hears in an alpha numeric
print out that correlates to the intensity of the noise.
Most numbers that are recorded are like one to five.
You see the occasional six or seven, just background noise. Yeah,
and I guess this guy was not actually sitting there
with headphones on his ears. He was probably off sipping

(14:33):
coffee or maybe tequila. And then he just look at
look at the paper. Just go look at the paper.
Look at the paper print out later. Yeah, Because, as
Steve mentioned earlier, apparently white noise sucks to listen to
for some people. I find it comforting. Steve apparently does
not well. And it actually makes a lot of sense
if you can record all this stuff and just glance
at the paper later and look for anomalies. That's a

(14:54):
nice little time saving. Absolutely. But most of these sixes
and sevens that you see can be attributed to kind
of reflections, because you know, we make a lot of noise.
Their space jump that floats around out there for a
second or two is that pesky moon bounces stuff back
at its true sucks, but stupid moon, We're gonna get
rid of it soon, don't worry. In seven, for the

(15:15):
full seventy two seconds that the big ear was able
to receive it, it hurts something well unheard of the
print out read six e q U J five for
something that rarely hears anything above a seven. Once you
hop into the out to the alpha part of the
alpha numeric code. That's pretty intense. Yeah, and then to

(15:37):
get it all the way to queue and you that's
pretty high. And did you want to explain to our
listeners exactly how they this notation works? Oh? Yeah, I
guess my saying alpha numeric doesn't make a whole lot
of sense, does it? Was wondering. So the way that
it works is that zero to one it just it
basically refers. It refers to the amplitude that it receives

(16:00):
in right, So nine is like pretty loud to begin with,
but still kind of reasonable. And then it goes into
the alphabet, which is crazy, right, and all the way
to queue and you again, I mean that's crazy topping
out the scale. And I don't know what they do
if it gets up to z and then beyond Yeah,
I don't know what they do. Ye panic because it's

(16:22):
probably an attack. Probably computer explodes like a star trek.
Ye absolutely. Um. So Jerry sees this print out, circles
it in red pen and remarks wow exclamation point in
the margin, thus dubbing this phenomena the Wow. So that's
how got its name. There's some significant things here that

(16:44):
I like to point out, firstly, the burst was the
full se seventy two seconds long, which means that it
was probably longer than seventy two seconds. Jerry, when the
Earth came back around, searched that same patch of sky
again on the next day and he heard nothing crickets,

(17:06):
which means that space crickets. Yeah, that the signal was
anywhere between seventy two seconds and twenty four hours long,
but not longer than that. Probably, Well do you think
about It's like, you know, even if you're a sophisticated
alien civilization, to create something that strong, because that's gonna

(17:26):
you know, that's going to carry so far and still
be strong at this end, we'll take a lot of power.
I mean, I would imagine they they probably you know,
I don't have enough damned and enough coal plants to
you know, really be doing. Yeah, yeah, I think that's
probably true. They think it came kind of from Sagittarius.
That's about the constellation, the constellation of Sagittarius. I am

(17:50):
not specifically two Sagittary I a solar system within there
as close as they can tell. Again, I mean, you know,
as a rato radio signal. They think it probably came
from that area, but it kind of came from like
a black patch in between some solar systems in the
Sagittarius constellation. And this is where they've done their their

(18:12):
math and their homework to figure out where the telescope
should have been pointing to make this this relatively accurate. Okay, Yeah,
and I think there's there's probably more more accuracy, you know,
side to side than up and down, because yeah, this
thing is like, it's not it's not it's kind of
like moving like a line across the sky. So it's

(18:34):
like picking up a patch of the sky, but like
a slice, like a vertical slice, and so and so
left or right, you know pretty precisely where it came
from up and there's a lot more variation in there. Yeah,
so it's kind of hard to tell where it came from.
But the tone was a continuous mega hurts. Yeah, got louder,

(19:00):
presumably because just because of the rotation of the telescope
just and then finally reaches this peak when it's pointed
directly at that spot. Yeah, Okay, so you're under theories.
I think we should Yeah, I kind of want to know,
but I think we should do it. Stories bore you.

(19:22):
So you know, my theory is that it was the
death Star vaporizing a planet. That's very plausible. Actually, thank
you for sharing. Yeah, I want to talk about the
first theories are something of terrestrial origin. There are a
lot of self righteous quote air quote rationalists or air

(19:44):
quote skeptics who say, well, obviously it was a reflected tone.
Obviously we just it would pick something, you know, reflected
something and it was from the Earth and dot's fine.
Or was an airplane that flew over, or it was
something totally ball but doesn't really fit the pattern. None
of those fit the pattern. The problems with this, I

(20:05):
think are fairly obvious. The fact that it was the
continuous seventy two seconds. Who have to be a fixed point.
This guy could be something zipping by everything. Actually it
probably it couldn't have really been an airplane for the
same reasons. The other point that I want to make
is that MEGA hurts because the scientific community has come

(20:28):
together as a whole on an international scale. I'm pretty
sure that everybody in the world kind of agrees with
this is a protected bandwidth, so people aren't allowed to
broadcast on Earth. I can't get on my CB until
I mean, I don't know, I don't know how well
that's monitored. Of course, there's the possibility that some military

(20:50):
decided on all we're gonna do it. Oh, here's this
frequency that no, but he's using crazy or whatever. But
I think it's pretty widely accepted within the scientific community
that it's unlikely that somebody on Earth was just randomly
broadcasting at this frequency for seventy two seconds and it
randomly got reflected directly into the Yeah, that's a that's

(21:13):
a big coincidence, a really really big. The second theory
is user error. There are some grumbles. They're not super
super present, but there are some grumbles that Jerry didn't
have the radio telescope focused quite right, maybe that maybe
it reflected on itself, or maybe he misinterpreted something. Maybe

(21:36):
there was a smaller frequency that kind of built on
itself and he just let everything happen. I don't like
that theory, obviously. They The kind of proof that people
use for this is that the very large array, Yes,
very large array. It's the real picture. Yeah, it's huge.

(22:01):
It's far more sensitive radio telescope array. Yeah, but you
don't keep saying, oh, well, the very larger rate didn't
pick it up. So obviously it was something terrestrial local.
It wasn't something from outer space. But how can it's
in New Mexico. Well, I know what it is, but
how can they say that the very large rate was
pointed at that precise spot. They can't at that time.

(22:22):
They can't. They absolutely can't. That's yeah, that's kind of ridiculous.
It is a very large rate. Did I mention that
it's very large? But I don't know very large. It's
very large. Yeah, So I think that just kind of
crumbles to pieces. Well, yeah, that's not I think it's
a bad theory. So the third very bad theory. The

(22:50):
third theory is something of extraterrestrial origins, kind of kind
of not intelligent extraterrestrial. You were talking about maybe like
a lighthouse speaking sort of effect, that it would be
something that was out broadcasting or reflecting and kind of
a lighthouse like quasar effect sort of. Yeah, And that's

(23:13):
just it's it is possible. It's just some sort of
natural origin for the whole thing. It is possible. I
just feel like if it wasn't natural phenomenal, we would
have seen it probably again, particularly when we came back
around you know, or if the very large array focused
at that spot, you would kind of see something. I
don't know. I think that if let's just presume that

(23:34):
it's a quas a something throwing something out on that frequency,
and it's reflecting off some giant asteroid outside of our
solar system, or off a plant or something, and those
things are still bodies in motion, well, then it stands
to reason that the essentially the beam that it's shooting

(23:57):
is going to continue to drift, as you were saying,
in the lighthouse effect, and so it would drift past
where we were in our orbital track, so then we
wouldn't pick it up. But of course when we come
back a year later to that same spot, everything's not
all in the exact same spot because nothing everything in
space doesn't move according to us, so it doesn't. I

(24:20):
can see where it would be potentially naturally occurring. That
that makes sense to me. Yeah, that's that's fair. I
hadn't thought of it that way. Occurrences. Yeah, I guess
it's not fun though, that's not that's not a fun theory.
The fourth theory is something seriously extraterrestrial, like intelligent extraterrestrial.

(24:45):
Of course, I love this theory. Of course you do,
because I am. I love aliens. I think so some
intelligent life on the on a planet in the Sagittarius system. Yeah,
strong continuous radio wave, pulsive energy, and a bandwidth they
knew other intelligent life forces in the universe would understand. Uh.

(25:06):
It would require some seriously advanced civilization. It would have
required scientists estimate a two point to gigawatt transmitter. I
don't know what the most powerful transmitter we have, you know,
I really don't know either. How many giga watts was
it in Back to the Future that that operated the
DeLorean and made it go in time. I don't think

(25:27):
it was time. I just know that this is like,
sway far in our future. It's nothing that we have.
I think we're still in Like that's the level of
lightning that that kind of scale of power you talking about.
Get my I have no idea science. I'm taking this
again from Back to the Future, but life. I don't know.

(25:49):
All I know is that's seriously powerful. Uh, and that's
something that we don't have developed. I think that some
of the implications of this theory could potentially be pretty haunted. Yeah,
I mean there's the potential for it to be like, yeah,
they're just saying, hey, what's going on, we're here, you
guys are there, let's talk. But that seems really unlikely,

(26:11):
doesn't it. Well, here's the the thing. If they're but
they really are intelligent beings, then the smartest thing you
can do is laylow and not advertise your presence. I
personally think that, you know, the aliens, if we ever
meet them, it might be a wonderful experience, but more
likely they're gonna come here and murder us and take
our planet from us. And I'm serious about this, I'm

(26:31):
not just joking. Uh, And so I think any intelligence
life form would actually not go out of its way
to advertise his presence. That should include us too. I
don't think we should be sending out advertisements to hey, guys,
we're here. Here, we got a really cool planet with
lots of water, yeah, in a really cool atmosphere. You know,
the kind of signals that we send out are are

(26:53):
really indicative of a race who's just trying to say, hey, right,
you know, we send physical things out, we send radio
waves out, but they're like pulses and they're like meant
to be messages and they're kind of weak, and they're
pretty weak. There were definitely in our infancy of that, right,
they're also meant to be sent to somebody who could

(27:15):
get to us, like right now, no warp over to
us and eat us and take our planets all those things.
The thing that strikes me is the like almost urgency
that seems to go with a signal that this implies. Right,
it's almost like a s O S stress signal. Well, yeah,
but it wasn't an s O S. I mean, hello,

(27:36):
if their intelligent aliens seeing us no more, and obviously
they would know, they would know our language and our
weird codes, you know, it actually might be like a
really really slow s OS. So in a few years
we'll get them, we'll get the next character. So it's like,
so we got the first and waiting for the other ones. Yeah,
these guys start to move with their own pace. Yeah.

(27:58):
The you know the thing is that ut so the
place that they think it came from in space is
uh two light years away, which means it took two
d and twenty years to get to us, which is
kind of sad because there's nothing we could have done
about that, right Ever, I mean not that like we

(28:18):
could if it was an S O S and if
we were the closest people to it, intelligent life that
was evolved to even receive the signal not even be
able to do anything about it. That's so sad, it is.
It's kind of sad. I don't think it was a
distress signal because obviously any intelligent alien would would perceive
the futility of the whole thing, because it's not going
to get anywhere where to somebody that can help you,

(28:40):
and you know, anytime soon, it's gonna be years number
one and number two. It's not obviously distress signal. What
I think it was is I think that it was
probably some alien race self destructing. They probably had a
major cataclysmic war, and that was just one artifact of
all the electromaticnetic radiation that was given off when they

(29:00):
were dropping nukes or you know, yeah, I mean so,
so they were busially like nuking the hell out of
each other, and probably energy was going out at all
kinds of different frequencies on the electro magnetic spectrum, but
this particular radio telescope was only tuned to this one
particular frequency. So the this this moment in time this like,

(29:21):
you know, a minute and a half, two minutes, whatever
it was that this alien planet was being evaporated by
their their cataclysmic world war was recorded by the by
the radio telescope because it was the only instrument that
was looking in that particular spot in the sky at
that time. So that's that's one theory. I have another
theory ready to hear It was cabra. Oh my god, yes,

(29:47):
uh uh. Well, as you know, these guys are these
seaty scientists are They're they're kind of a they're kind
of a fun love and bunch and they and they
really love practical jokes. So another way you can replicate
this whole signal would be to actually walk out onto
that field with a radio transmitter portable radio transmitter tune

(30:07):
to mega hurts and just basically set it down, start
at volume zero, and just crank the amplitude up very
very very very slowly for thirty six seconds and then
crank it slowly back down and then make Jerry look
like a boom and then yeah, well and that's the

(30:28):
whole thing. It's like knowing, snicker snicker, that Jerry is
going to see this on the readout and go nuts over.
I feel that's unlikely. But you've done a perfect segue
into the next bit of theories, which are the crackpot theories.
All right, So there's two of these. One is you

(30:48):
can totally hear the English in there if you manipulate
the hell out of There are a lot of videos
on YouTube that are like, ah, you can hear the English.
You can hear the messages is in these things if
all you do is alter it and slow it down,
then speed it up again, and mess with the frequencies
and do this and do that and that, pick up
your phone and you know, dial somebody, and then yeah

(31:11):
on the other end. Yeah, So I would like to
make you guys listen to one right now. Did you
hear it? Did you hear the English? I heard that.
It sound like the devil to me. I did hear
what could potentially be voices in radio static? I will

(31:34):
admit that ostensibly it says people of Washington Security of
October ten sixty one. This is the one. Yeah, that
makes a lot more sense than a radio frequency, a
lot more sense. The other thing. You know, I'm gonna
have to I'm gonna chin up one of those and

(31:55):
put it on YouTube and it's just gonna be like
a YouTube song or something like that. I don't know,
but something. The other thing that people kind of talk
about is that, oh, it's code. It's obviously code. I
saw one website where somebody said, oh, it's a sick code,
which is like a yeah, yeah, ask you sorry. So
it like translates to numbers or letters or something that's

(32:18):
total bunk, and you know it's Russian code. It's the Russians,
because it's always the Russians, always. But that brings us
to the end of our theories. Actually, I did want
to I wanted to bring up something that I found
very funny that I saw in the reading totally I think.
I don't know if you guys saw this. It was

(32:39):
in two thousand and ten. We shot a radio signal
back to gracefully gloss over that. Okay, I have I
have a serious no, no, no. They said it was
a ten Twitter Twitter messages. Twitter messages they shot Twitter
messages about in the space. I heard about that, But

(33:00):
did they shoot them to that particular spot where using Yes,
Oh I did not hear. Okay, So I'm going to
go back to Joe's they're gonna come and eat our heads.
I think they might we just put ourselves on the menu.
Either that or we just pointed ourselves out in the
galactic theater as the idiots, Backwood idiots, because how are

(33:23):
you do in? I feel like it's also so insensitive, right,
like they blasted us something I'm sure like really meaningful.
Whatever it was, Let's just like let's go with that theory, right,
it was probably really meaningful. They put a lot of
work into making it, like getting it to us, not
maybe not specifically us, but out into the We're like, cool,

(33:46):
let's tweet at them. Actually, you don't know that that
might have been their equivalent of Twitter. Two. That's true.
It could have been I'm gonna go to the office
entire Facebook page and I'm just gonna send him a
message to be way faster. Yeah, totally. Great thing about
it is it's like the thing about it sending tantous
and Twitter messages is it would be incomprehensible. It's like,
it's not it's not a decipherable message. That's my problem.

(34:10):
People abbreviate everything. Yeah, so they might they might just
conclude that it's just space noise and which is good
that we're here. I mean, that's that's preferable. So, wow,
what theories do you guys like? I'm like my theory.
I think it was a practical joke. Yeah, practical joke.
I really like his theory. Practical joke. One. I like it,

(34:31):
but I'm not gonna go with that. I personally, I
do think that it was potentially a reflection not from
necessarily from Earth, but some kind of frequency reflection and
maybe there was, like I think we talked about maybe
a little bit of multiple signals hitting and so it
the frequency is it what it really is? So I

(34:54):
think that to me seems the most plausible, especially since
it's never been reproduced. Well, I obviously alien theory, you do.
I know, it's shocking. I know. Um. So, I guess
if you want to see the pictures of what the
big gear looks like, or you want to read any
of the links or anything like that, all of that
information is available on our website website, which is Thinking

(35:18):
Sideways podcast dot com. You can also listen to our
episodes there. Uh, you're probably not though you're probably listening
on iTunes. Um. If you're listening to us on iTunes,
we appreciate if you would take the time to leave
us a comment or a rating, especially a favorable comment.
You know, I don't really care if you have bad

(35:38):
things to say about us, just telling me so we'll change.
We can take it criticism, We'll change for you. We swear.
You can find us on Facebook. You can on Facebook
if you forget to download us. You can also stream
us directly from Stitcher from any mobile device. If you

(36:00):
want to send us an email, if you have thoughts,
if you have any information for us, if you are
the alien that sent out this signal, if you're the
guy that actually walked out into that food with that
radio transmitter, I want to hear from now. I just
feel like Joe, he would have come forward by now. Anyways,
you can send us an email at Thinking Sideway Podcast
at gmail dot com. We have some listener mail this week,

(36:22):
Is that true? We do? Indeed? Well, we got an
email that I really liked and I wanted to read.
Uh And the email is from Pat and she wrote, Hi,
longtime listener, first time emailer. I listened to you guys
as a clean of family practice clinic. I'm a janitor,
or rather, as I like to say, I'm a podcast

(36:43):
listener who happens to clean and she listens earning a
bit of coinage while learning. I think that's a good
way to think. Yeah. Uh. She was listening to The
Hagley Woods Mystery recently and that prompted her to think
about a story that she'd read before, and she sent
us a little bit of the story. And it's from

(37:04):
Every Root and Anchor, Wisconsin's famous and historic Trees by
Bruce R. Allison, and it's it was really it was
interesting because it's a story that is about like the
Hagley Woods. There was somebody in a tree, in a tree,
but it seems like it was because they couldn't sauce her.
It seemed the way the story it was more for lumber. Yeah,

(37:28):
and then find us corpse inside it and they can't
they can't cut through it, so it was it was
really kind of a coincidence. But they're the stories were
really close together, so it was it was kind of interesting. Yeah, Apparently,
this dying inside of trees, or dying and being stuffed
in the trees, it's not as uncommon as was. Unfortunately not.
I don't like that we live in Oregon now, Yeah,

(37:50):
I know, I look at my neighborhood. I got a
lot of big old trees. Yeah. Yeah. But anyway, so
Pat had there was a couple other bits of feedback
in there, and I'm corresponding with Pat a bat so
I I we totally appreciate the feedback, and I really
like because that was just a really cool story. Yeah,
totally kind of creepy though, Yeah, it's a mistake. It

(38:14):
just makes you think that every time you walk past
a big old tree with a whole and it's probably
a corpse in it, you know, stop it. Yeah, Okay,
Thanks Pat, And before I forget, thanks Tom for the
suggestion of the wow signal? Is this a listener suggestion? Yeah?
I didn't realize that because I've been talking about it

(38:36):
for a little while. Yeah, but the listener suggestion always
seals the deal for me. Tom, Tom, are you the
guy with the radio transmitter on? Tom tell us you
can tell, you won't tell? Yeah, we'll keep your identity
of secret. Anyways, Thanks for solving a mystery with us,
all right, See everybody. Bye. By