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Gravitational waves can be focussed by the gravity of an intervening galaxy,just like light, thereby magnifying binary merging events in the far Universe.High magnification by galaxies is found to be responsible for the brightestsources detected in sky surveys, but the low angular resolution of LIGO/Virgois insufficient to check this lensing possibility directly. Here we find thatthe first six binary black hole (BBH) merging events reported by LIGO/Virgoshow clear evidence for lensing in the plane of observed mass and sourcedistance. The four lowest frequency events follow an apparent locus in thisplane, which we can reproduce by galaxy lensing, where the higher themagnification, the generally more distant the source so the wave train isstretched more by the Universal expansion, by factors of 2-4. This revises thereported BBH distances upwards by an order of magnitude, equal to the squareroot of the magnification. Furthermore, the reported black hole masses must bedecreased by 2-4 to counter the larger stretch factor, since the orbitalfrequency is used to derive the black hole masses. This lowers the masses to5-15 solar masses, well below the puzzlingly high values of 20-35 solar massesotherwise estimated, with the attraction of finding agreement in mass withblack holes orbiting stars in our own Galaxy, thereby implying a stellar originfor the low frequency events in the far Universe. We also show that the othertwo BBH events of higher frequency detected by LIGO/VIRGO, lie well below thelensing locus, consistent with being nearby and unlensed. If this apparentdivision between local and distant lensed events is reinforced by newdetections then the spins and masses of stellar black holes can be comparedover a timespan of 10 billion years by LIGO/Virgo.

Reinterpreting Low Frequency LIGO/Virgo Events as Magnified Stellar-Mass Black Holes at Cosmological Distances