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Interesting IHTM letter in the current FT where a reader heard the same weird electronic tones and beeps on FM that I did, only on Radio 4's after midnight link up with the World Service and not Radio 2 where I noticed them. Dunno if it's number station related, but I'm glad it wasn't only me who heard it.
 
A blog I read linked me to this pdf document today:
http://irdial.hyperreal.org/www/conet_p ... ooklet.pdf

It's basically 'Number Stations 101' for those interested.

There's also been some CDs created that are recordings of some number stations (I don't know which ones since it's not really an interest of mine). The CDs are available for legal download here. The link for the download is near the bottom of the page (number 59ird), labelled "The Conet Project".
 
Thanks for that. If you want to dip into various recordings of number stations broadcasts try this online Conet Project link at archive.org:

http://www.archive.org/details/The_Conet_Project-1681

Great for creeping yourself out late at night.

In other news, you know how the famous Lincolnshire Poacher stopped broadcasting? Now its sister station Cherry Ripe is off the air as well! What if you were a spy who really liked those tunes? Devastated!
 
Fascinating stuff surprised to see them still around, but I guess it's quite a secure way of communicating, but one does get the feeling that something is not quite right here. It’s alright telling your spy what to do, but how does your spy get the information back to you?

Perhaps it’s all one big hoax, one country started it to spook another one out, so the other country thought we will do the same thing and on and on it goes.

Or perhaps we have armies of hidden spies in the west just waiting for the signal to change.
 
austen27 said:
Georgina said:
Even spookier are the stations that transmit 'sounds'. I remember one that was just an electronic pulse. You miss all this with these new-fangled DAB radios.

Is this why the government is keen for the BBC to make a "digital switchover" in the coming decade?
CONSPIRACY! CONSPIRACY! ;)

Nope, its to do with the plot sysnopis of They Live :gaga:

~~~~~~~~

Seriously though, I was told that the "computer game data loading sounds" was banking info sent over the airwaves. How true? I don't know.
 
Dammit it why did you post that?! I'm a big fan of Pledge Music stuff and am so tempted by that. I got (eventually) Killing Joke's live double album, autographed by the band and in January will get the new Breed 77 CD, also autographed by the band.
 
Number Stations

I know that there is a thread about Number stations but I'm damned if I can find it.

Still, there is an article on the BBC website about them, including recording:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24910397

This is the era of hyper-tech espionage, encrypted emails and mindboggling cryptography. But you can hear a very old-fashioned form of espionage on shortwave radio.

It is 13:03 on a Tuesday in a little crammed room of the BBC Monitoring building in Caversham and what is suddenly heard on a shortwave receiving station is a 10-minute message in Morse code.

There is a small community of aficionados who believe messages like this are a throwback to the era of Cold War espionage. They are the mysterious "numbers stations".

At the apex of the Cold War, radio lovers across the globe started to notice bizarre broadcasts on the airwaves. Starting with a weird melody or the sound of several beeps, these transmissions might be followed by the unnerving sound of a strange woman's voice counting in German or the creepy voice of a child reciting letters in English.

Encountering these shortwave radio messages, many radio hams concluded that they were being used to send coded messages across extremely long distances. Coming across one of them was a curious experience. Radio enthusiasts gave them colourful names like the "Nancy Adam Susan", "The Lincolnshire Poacher," "The Swedish Rhapsody" or "The Gong Station."

The Lincolnshire Poacher was so named because of two bars from an English folk song of that name being used as an "interval signal".


Times have changed and technology has evolved, but there's evidence that this old-fashioned seeming method of communication might still be used. Shortwave numbers stations might seem low-tech but they probably remain the best option for transmitting information to agents in the field, some espionage experts suggest.

"Nobody has found a more convenient and expedient way of communicating with an agent," says Rupert Allason, an author specialising in espionage issues and writing under the pen name Nigel West.

"Their sole purpose is for intelligence agencies to communicate with their agents in denied areas - a territory where it is difficult to use a consensual form of communications," Allason says.


A former GCHQ officer, who does not wish to be named, whose duty was to intercept signals towards the UK and search for these numbers stations in the 1980s is also adamant that these were broadcasts to agents in the field or in residencies or directed to embassies.

It was "one-way traffic" - the transmitters broadcast numbers to the recipient. The recipient did not reply.

Why might the numbers stations have been used?

"This system is completely secure because the messages can't be tracked, the recipient could be anywhere," says Akin Fernandez, the creator of the Conet Project - a comprehensive archive of the phenomenon of numbers stations. "It is easy. You just send the spies to a country and get them to buy a radio. They know where to tune and when," he says.

Fernandez was fascinated by the mystery of numbers stations.

An image of the antenna that used to sit behind the Dorchester in London
Any kind of antenna, innocent or otherwise, might once have attracted raised eyebrows
"It was so weird I wanted to know more about them," he says. He put three years of his life aside in order to put together a coherent archive of these stations.

"Once you hear them, it has an effect on you," he says. "I never expected to be talking about it 17 years after hearing it for the first time - when the Conet Project first started."

Unlike other aspects of the Cold War era, the numbers stations didn't leave a lasting impression on popular culture. "It is a dry subject until you listen to them," Fernandez says.

"It is a way of communicating securely between the Secret Intelligent Service and agents, and it is incomprehensible," says Philip Davies, a politics and history professor at the Brunel University in London.

Continue reading the main story
The Magazine on spies

Scene from the BBC spy drama Spooks
Revelations about the US National Security Agency's spying have provoked global outrage. But government snooping is nothing new, says Anthony Zurcher.

People and nations spy, even on friends. But in the realm of international electronic espionage, the US wields a nuclear arsenal while the rest of the globe fights with guns, says Tara McKelvey.

Most people have watched a spy film, but few have ever met someone from the intelligence community. So how close are real spies to the Bournes and the Bonds? Peter Taylor looks at the world of the modern day secret agent.

But espionage was not the only explanation posited. Some people have even argued that the phenomenon was an elaborate prank. But the scale of the stations - multiple different frequencies in different languages - makes that explanation seem far-fetched. Fernandez notes that any prankster would need to buy millions of pounds of radio transmitters.

Despite the general veil of secrecy around espionage, the odd bit of corroborative evidence for the purpose of numbers stations has leaked out. "The purpose of numbers stations has been guessed at first by anonymous leaks, stories of people being arrested with radios and 'one-time pads' and other scattered pieces of evidence, as well as some privately published books and magazines," says Fernandez. The one-time pads enabled a form of code that would have been uncrackable to anyone listening in.

In 1989, a Czech spy was arrested in the UK because his equipment was faulty and it radiated into other people's flats. He was unlucky. "When the Ceausescu regime collapsed, there was a cessation of broadcasts from Romania," the former GCHQ officer says.

Experts are confident that numbers stations do still exist, even if there are fewer of them.

"In the same way spy tricks such as pretending to feed ducks around a pond might still exist, numbers stations still exist too," says Al Bolton, a radio amateur who works for BBC Monitoring. "It is an old-fashioned means of communication but you have to think of security."

Computers almost always leave traces, whereas a paper and a pen are easy to destroy.

Headlines about the 2010 spy case
"The danger with a computer is that if you get caught, the data on it is still retrievable. Whereas with a one-time pad, you can eat it or flush it down the toilet," he says.

In the 2010 raids on a Russian spy ring in the US, court papers alleged that they had used "coded radio transmissions and encrypted data", a hint that they might have received their orders via shortwave numbers stations.

Despite all the clues, no government has ever officially admitted or denied using numbers stations, nor have intelligence agencies.

"Once The Conet Project was released, some spy agencies admitted that they were, 'not for public consumption'. This is as near to an admission that we have been able to obtain," Fernandez says.

Enthusiasts might be fighting sceptics about the stations' real purpose, but what is certain is that they aren't a pure product of imagination.

If you don't believe so "you could always get yourself a short wave radio, wait till the night time and then start scanning for them", Fernandez says.

And then listen and wonder.
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The numbers stations are indeed spook stuff-and they go off the air time to time changing frequencies and other things to confuse the other side.

What side that may be, deponant saith not. This is real spookery.

There was a film called 'Numbers Station' a while back, with spies running about with firearms, doing one another mischief in the dark hours.

I used to listen to them, sometimes, they'll help you go to sleep.
 
This is a bit scary, the Russian number station called The Buzzer was interrupted by a message when the Crimea situation began:

On March 18, 2014, less than 24 hours after Crimea voted to join the Russian Federation, a new voice message was recorded:
"T-E-R-R-A-K-O-T-A. Mikhail Dmitri Zhenya Boris. Mikhail Dmitri Zhenya Boris. 81 26 T-E-R-R-A-K-O-T-A."
The message was repeated again followed by the Buzzer resuming.

From:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Buzzer

This is the station that speculation tells us is meant to indicate whether World War 3 is breaking out if or when the buzzer stops. Here's what it sounded like:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYKK9xfWR7w

Helps if you speak Russian, obviously.
 
Bit of a latecomer to this thread, which is fascinating and oddly unsettling in equal measure.

I used to listen to Radio Luxembourg late at night, under the bedclothes on a small transistor radio using an earpiece, and several times while searching for it I picked up a station that seemed to consist entirely of the first two lines of the children's nursery rhyme "Oranges and Lemons" played on chimes or a xylophone over, and over, and over again...it got quite oppressive and creepy after a while...
 
monops said:
I used to listen to Radio Luxembourg late at night, under the bedclothes on a small transistor radio using an earpiece, and several times while searching for it I picked up a station that seemed to consist entirely of the first two lines of the children's nursery rhyme "Oranges and Lemons" played on chimes or a xylophone over, and over, and over again...it got quite oppressive and creepy after a while...

I did exactly the same, and I vaguely recall hearing something like this too.
I also remember once tuning into an English-language broadcast from Russia, which was just 'odd'. One bit I remember was where the announcer dryly announced that Professor [Can'tRememberHisName] would be playing his own composition on a synth that he 'invented and built himself', which he called the 'EMS Synthi 100'.
What followed was a fairly nondescript piece of 'Radiophonic Workshop'-styled music.

It amused me at the time, because the 'EMS Synthi 100' was a well-known model of synth made by a British company. Only approx. 40 units were made. How did they get one in Soviet Russia? How could they afford one in Soviet Russia?

I think these broadcasts were a strange combination of propaganda and coded messages to their network of spies.



Off-topic: I have actually played around with an old EMS synth, back in the early 80s.
 
Mythopoeika said:
kamalktk said:

Nope, that one's been solved.
Apparently, it was just someone testing some software they'd written, using an automation tool.
It wasn't quite solved if you read the update at the bottom of this Guardian article. There is at least one post from the youtube uploader, and at least one video that's not the patterns.
http://www.theguardian.com/technolo...uth-youtube-mysterious-videos-webdriver-torso
 
gncxx said:
Have numbers stations gone FM? I fell asleep with the radio on last night, Radio 2, and was woken by the sound of "Boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop... Oooooooowweeeee!" instead of the sounds of Neil Sedaka, or whoever.

Not finding that terribly relaxing, I retuned to Radio 4 for some news but fell asleep again, only to wake up a half an hour later to the "boop" sounds on that channel too. I retuned back to Radio 2 and it was business as usual.

Any idea what that was about? Was it a hidden message?

Better late than never: https://soundcloud.com/fortean-tims/bbc-radio-anomaly
 
Belshazzar said:
gncxx said:
Have numbers stations gone FM? I fell asleep with the radio on last night, Radio 2, and was woken by the sound of "Boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop... Oooooooowweeeee!" instead of the sounds of Neil Sedaka, or whoever.

Not finding that terribly relaxing, I retuned to Radio 4 for some news but fell asleep again, only to wake up a half an hour later to the "boop" sounds on that channel too. I retuned back to Radio 2 and it was business as usual.

Any idea what that was about? Was it a hidden message?

Better late than never: https://soundcloud.com/fortean-tims/bbc-radio-anomaly
Sounds a lot like a dial-up modem as part of that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvr9AMWEU-c
 
Thanks for that clip, it has the "oooooweeee!" but not the "boop boop boop!" I heard, plus there was a lot less static, though that may be a reception issue. Are there variations? I'm none the wiser, I must admit.
 
gncxx said:
Thanks for that clip, it has the "oooooweeee!" but not the "boop boop boop!" I heard, plus there was a lot less static, though that may be a reception issue. Are there variations? I'm none the wiser, I must admit.

The static is due to the fact it was recorded onto my phone by holding it to the speaker on my clock radio!

I've recorded these interruptions a few times, and the recordings are quite long, so there are some variations. It's all very strange really.
 
We could always e-mail the BBC about it, though we risk joining the internet equivalent of the green ink brigade and "filed", i.e. binned.
 
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Numbers_Station

I caught this by chance on television. It isn't really about numbers stations, but as a backdrop they kind of work. I wanted to like the film, but in spite of the relentlessly claustrophobic setting the story doesn't quite work and one feels as if one is watching a 'neat' compromise edit of a larger story that was planned. Almost straight-to-video, but with some passing appeal.
 
gncxx said:
We could always e-mail the BBC about it, though we risk joining the internet equivalent of the green ink brigade and "filed", i.e. binned.

I wonder if the BBC are aware of it happening? It only interrupts the FM broadcast, and not digital or online, etc.
 
You mean... sinister outside forces are at work?
 
You didn't know that? Quel naif!

The cover stories and covert ops of so many years have left a world devoid of trust(a good thing, I ween) and great potfuls of paranoia, very useful for hiding the truth.

I greatly enjoyed William Gibson's "Spook Country" and Tim Powers' "Declare", each one showing us how spying has deformed our world. or so I thought until I read Conrad's "The Secret Agent"-this has been going on for quite a while. The Prague Cemetery" also points out the long lasting legacy of these secret operations.

(for those who are unfamilier with the Protocols, they were sophisticated by the Czarist Okhrana-the Secret Police-to justify pogroms. Tax money at work, they are still doing that a century later)

Numbers stations, dummy chatrooms on the internet....to paraphrase Our Savior, yea, the spies we have always with us.

Turn over a rock, see what you find.
 
krakenten said:
You didn't know that? Quel naif!

The cover stories and covert ops of so many years have left a world devoid of trust(a good thing, I ween) and great potfuls of paranoia, very useful for hiding the truth.

I greatly enjoyed William Gibson's "Spook Country" and Tim Powers' "Declare",
each one showing us how spying has deformed our world. or so I thought until I read Conrad's "The Secret Agent"-this has been going on for quite a while. The Prague Cemetery" also points out the long lasting legacy of these secret operations.

(for those who are unfamilier with the Protocols, they were sophisticated by the Czarist Okhrana-the Secret Police-to justify pogroms. Tax money at work, they are still doing that a century later)

Numbers stations, dummy chatrooms on the internet....to paraphrase Our Savior, yea, the spies we have always with us.

Turn over a rock, see what you find.

Two excellent books.Must read Conrads.
 
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