There has been a reply from Ian Harry - a postdoc within LIGO who was involved in the data analysis for the discovery - on Sean Carroll's blog. To quote the blo

There has been a reply from Ian Harry - a postdoc within LIGO who was involved in the data analysis for the discovery - on Sean Carroll's blog. To quote the blog: "In Creswell et al. the authors take LIGO data made available through the LIGO Open Science Data from the Hanford and Livingston observatories and perform a simple Fourier analysis on that data. They find the noise to be correlated as a function of frequency. They also perform a time-domain analysis and claim that there are correlations between the noise in the two observatories, which is present after removing the GW150914 signal from the data. These results are used to cast doubt on the reliability of the GW150914 observation. There are a number of reasons why this conclusion is incorrect: 1. The frequency-domain correlations they are seeing arise from the way they do their FFT on the filtered data. We have managed to demonstrate the same effect with simulated Gaussian noise. 2. LIGO analyses use whitened data when searching for compact binary mergers such as GW150914. When repeating the analysis of Creswell et al. on whitened data these effects are completely absent. 3. Our 5-sigma significance comes from a procedure of repeatedly time-shifting the data, which is not invalidated if correlations of the type described in Creswell et al. are present." http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2017/06/18/a-response-to-on-the-time-lags-of-the-ligo-signals-guest-post/ http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2017/06/18/a-respon...