Infinite Monkeys

It's All in the Numbers

Man, if there's one thing I love, it's a Poncho Punch Otter Pop. I don't know whether the little red bugger got into the box legally or not, and to be honest with you I don't care. Documented or undocumented, that Poncho is one seriously delicious Latin-themed pouch of sugar water.

If there's another thing that I love almost but not quite as much as a Poncho Punch Otter Pop, it's a good scare. Not necessarily the jump-out-at-you kind of scare -- good fun though those are -- but the slow-building, eerie, raise the hair on the back of your neck variety. Anyway, I've been sitting here for the last hour creeping myself out, and seeing as I really have nothing much else to contribute at the moment, I thought I'd share.

When I was a kid, I had this book by a guy named William Poundstone, called "Big Secrets". For the benefit of those who've never been fortunate enough to run across a copy, allow me to summarize: it was about big secrets.

More specifically, it was about all sorts of stuff that you probably aren't supposed to know: Freemason initiation rites, weird stuff that appears on American money, the 11 secret herbs and spices in Kentucky Fried Chicken. A good half of the book really gave me the willies, so of course I spent hours reading and re-reading it and basically scaring the crap out of myself for entertainment purposes.

The chapter on backwards messages in music prompted me to spend hours meticulously reversing the spools of my cassette tapes in order to determine whether Paul was, in fact, dead.

After reading the section about subliminal messages in movies, I burnt a hole in my VHS copy of The Exorcist trying to isolate the couple of frames where the word "PIG" is hidden in a wall of graffiti.

And I was so taken with the book's detailed description of the Rorschach inkblot test that I badgered my Dad into finding and photocopying a set of plates for me, which I then used to conduct impromptu psychoanalysis sessions at parties. Coincidentally, it was around this time that I discovered that nearly all of my friends were borderline-psychotic, father-hating, closeted homosexuals. Oddly, many of the girls also had castration complexes.

Without a doubt, though, the chapter that spooked me the most was the one about Numbers Stations.

Conspiracy theorists and hipster types are probably already familiar with the odd lore of the Numbers Station, but for those who are not, it goes a little like this:

Wedged between the AM and FM bands of the electromagnetic spectrum is a huge range of frequencies known as the shortwave band. Most of the transmissions on shortwave frequencies are pretty pedestrian stuff -- news and weather reports, navigational beacons, time signals, and so forth. Slightly more exotic are the frequencies allocated to Air Force One, the FBI, the Secret Service, and other clandestine organizations. And then there are the Numbers Stations.

At various times of the day, on many different frequencies, a mysterious voice appears from nowhere. It may be a live voice or a synthesized one. It may be female or male. It might be speaking English, or Spanish, or German, or some Slavic variant. Whatever form the voice takes, the content of its broadcast is always the same: numbers, and lots of 'em. Nobody knows what the numbers mean, or where the voice is coming from. The station is not registered and the voice never identifies itself. It just chants its senseless litany of digits for a few minutes, then disappears back into the ether from whence it came.

Though the variety of different voices implies that they hail from many different sources, the broadcasts almost all follow the same basic format. They begin with some sort of introductory signal: German yodelling, a series of electronic tones, the quiet tinkling of a child's music box. Then the voice arrives on the scene, usually with a preliminary announcement; "Acthung!" perhaps, or repeated words from the phonetic alphabet, followed by a handful of numbers. This repeats for a while, then the voice proceeds with the meat of the transmission: dozens or hundreds of numbers, in groups of four or five, capped off with some sort of indicator that the broadcast is finished. Then, nothing more.

Heres's an example transmission from the "Swedish Rhapsody" station, so named for the music box melody that plays at the beginning of each broadcast:

- BEGIN TRANSMISSION -

A short but intensely freaky-ass music box piece plays 23 times.

Evil Robot: 73242 73242 95222 95222 04528 04528

More freaky-ass music box madness.

Evil Robot: Achtung! 73242 73242
Evil Robot: Achtung! 40023 40023 67152 67152 76997 76997 Ende.
Evil Robot: Achtung! 95222 95222

Right around here is where listeners who accidentally stumbled upon the broadcast crap their pants.

Evil Robot: Achtung! 83633 83633 84878 84878 21737 21737 Ende.
Evil Robot: Achtung! 04528 04528
Evil Robot: Achtung! 57625 57625 92622 92622 71419 71419 Ende.

- END TRANSMISSION -

Some of the Numbers Stations have a decidedly bizarre way of getting their message across. The lady on the Five Dashes station, for instance, sounds drunk, and not a little bit horny. The aforementioned Swedish Rhapsody employs a female voice that's unusually high-pitched, so that it sounds almost like a little girl inexplicably barking out German numerals.

Weirder still, some of these stations have no discernable message at all. Some just endlessly repeat the same letter in morse code ad infinitum. Others play a rapid series of seemingly random tones, like an epiliptic trying to dial an international phone number. One station, dubbed "The Buzzer" just, well... buzzes. To be truthful, it sounds more like the end result of a three-burrito lunch to me, but as spooky names go, "The Flatulator" just doesn't roll off the tongue.

I never had a shortwave receiver in my youth, but just the thought of these robotic voices out of nowhere would give me a major case of the creeps. Nobody knows why they're out there, or where they're coming from, or what they're trying to get across; if somebody does know, they ain't talking.

So why the hell has somebody -- or something -- been reading numbers and making vaguely farty noises on the shortwave band for the better part of four decades?

The fertile mind can come up with all sorts of implausible explanations. Perhaps space aliens snapped up the Voyager probes and have been trying to make contact with us using whatever limited vocabulary they were able to glean from those gold discs. Or maybe the stations are paranormal in nature. It's said that ghosts are simply electromagnetic imprints left behind when we shuffle off this mortal coil. Is it possible that shortwave listeners have inadvertently tuned into the poor, lost soul of some long-dead German mathematician, doomed to recite the digits of pi for all eternity, or until he gets to the end, whichever comes first?

Well, probably not, but the generally accepted explanation is hardly more comforting. It's commonly believed that the broadcasts are actually coded messages from espionage agencies to covert field agents operating in enemy territory. The unique attributes of shortwave make it well-suited for such uses. Because shortwave frequencies are refracted by the ionosphere, such transmissions are capable of traveling from their source to the other side of the globe. And because radio is inherently a broadcast medium, interested parties might eventually be able to triangulate the source of a transmission, but they can never identify its ultimate destination.

Perhaps its ultimate destination is that Albanian exchange student you're housing. Perhaps he sneaks down into your root cellar at 2 AM to listen for directives from the Motherland on his portable receiver, and not to masturbate in secret behind the hot water heater, as you had previously assumed. I'd keep an eye on that kid, if I were you.

As for the numbers themselves: the first set of each group is thought to identify the agent for whom the transmission is intended. The rest are believed to contain a message encrypted with a one-time pad, a code that for all intents and purposes is unbreakable. The general idea is that sender and receiver each have an identical "pad", probably just page after page of random numbers. A message could be encoded by adding numerical representations of its letters to the numbers on the pad, and decoded by doing just the reverse. As long as nobody else has a copy of the pad, and as long as the pad is never reused, there's no conceivable way an outsider could correctly interpret the message.

What that message actually conveys is anyone's guess. I think It's safe to say that it's not, "Be sure to drink your Ovaltine." Probably something more along the lines of, "Our exalted premier orders that you terminate the ambassador. Also, Boris says, 'Hi.'" Either way, it's not good. Personally, I don't want any dirty little Albanian spy kid assassinating our ambassadors or depleting America's precious supply of rich, chocolatey goodness.

Since I've never actually known anybody who had access to a shortwave receiver, I always assumed that I would never get to hear an actual Numbers Station broadcast. A few years back I heard about a 4 CD set called The Conet Project, which was basically a compilation of recordings made of Numbers Stations over the years, but by the time I had caught wind of it, the damned thing had gone out of print. I fished around on eBay for a bit, but no luck. Eventually, I gave up. "Have patience," I thought. "Sooner or later, the Internet shall provide."

Sure enough, a little over a year ago I learned that The Conet Project had been made available in its entirety at the Internet Archive. I must admit that as I downloaded the first track, I was a trifle worried. After years of building up Numbers Stations in my imagination as the pinnacle of horror, what if the actual item turned out to be a huge letdown?

I had little reason to worry. The 150 tracks on the compilation are scary as hell. The weird interval signals... the monotone robot voices... the everpresent wow and flutter of radio interference... the high-pitched warbling of some enemy agency doing its level best to jam the signal... it all adds up to one of the most inexplicably disturbing listening experiences I've ever had the pleasure of encountering. I challenge anyone to listen to fifteen minutes or so of this, alone, in a darkened room, and not get goosebumps the size of Pop Rocks.

Interestingly enough, it turns out that I had already heard a couple of Numbers Station broadcasts and not even realized it. If the phrase "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" means anything to you, you probably have, too. And long-time fans of Stereolab may be blissfully unaware that the voice chattering quietly away in the background of the song "Pause" is none other than Little Miss Swedish Rhapsody.

If any of this has piqued your curiosity, I highly recommend you download some or all of The Conet Project and its accompanying book. From there, you should check out Simon Mason's web site and his excellent book on the subject, "Secret Signals." It may not be as downright tasty as a Poncho Punch Otter Pop, but as somewhat of an expert on the subject, I can vouch that it will chill you just as effectively.

Ende.

Posted by Poochucker at August 2, 2006 02:29 AM