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the ones I heard once on a friend's shortwave/amatuer radio would broadcast a series of numbers......they seemed random, ie is...35476 (pause) 82391(pause) 78348
What was told to me, was that say at 12 noon, the series 67567 was followed by 35342 for example. Most of the numbers were meaningless, a spy had to know what time to listen for a certain series of numbers....
Then a spy deep inside the eastern block would consult his book and say Code 35342 means rendezvous with another spy near the czech border....for example
This was part of an intricate spy network.
There is a scene in the Film Longest Day (Aka the Longest Film) where a member of a french resistance is listening to radio messages at random from London when he hears "John has a long moustache" Which tells him that the invasion is a go and to proceed to destroy his target (the railroad tracks or something)
In the case of the codes, this is a more secretive and designed for an english speaking agent perhaps.....
I have never heard the backwards one, but if someone had the right equipment they could play the message backwards and it may say "Comrade Fisticov, drop your secter maps in central park at 1PM"
Nowadays with smart phones and encrypted messages, the technology of radio broadcasts may be antiquated.
No. The voices had a ghostly feel to them, Drifting in and out of the noise. These broadcasts are interesting and weird. As a matter of fact, There is even an actual CD sold called the Conet Project that has tracks of these broadcasts. Some musicians even use parts of these in their recordings. I discovered these on Chroma key's Dead air for radios by former Dream theater alum Kevin Moore as it was on track 2 and I was fascinated. Then i did research and and found put all about this subject.
Not sure who the men are, But I agree there is something so intriguing about the audio from these. I picture someone mysterious in a bunker in the desert, Coffee in hand turning the dials to communicate with "them", Whomever it is.
How crazy would it be if men in black knocked on my door over this thread? Wait...someone's at the door.
I was going to start a new thread on numbers stations but I found this thread so... Bump! Lol
Anyway, I love these stations. They're really fascinating.
They're widely believed to communicate info to embedded agents worldwide. The way they work is they use a mathematically unbreakable one-time pad method of encryption. The agents have the one-time pads to decrypt the numbers and get their message then destroy the used pad (which is why it's unbreakable - it's used once and destroyed). Numbers are always broadcasted in constant groups of 3 or 5 so as to not give away any simblance of words.
I.E. If 1=A, 2=B, 3=C, etc and you were trying to say "The cat ran quick":
You would NOT broadcast
"20,8,5.... 3,1,20.... 18,1,14.... 17,18,9,3,11"
Or "2085... 3120.... 18114....17189311"
But rather you'd broadcast something like
"2085... 3120...1811....4171...8931...1"
Which translates to
"the... cat... ra.. nqu... ic... k"
Which can be easily put together by the agent (or whoever the recepiant is) as "the cat ran quick".
What makes these stations so tantilasing is the creepy factor. They're broadcasted at the extreme ends of the shortwave spectrum and they can pick some creepy music to play (music is usually played -it is thought- to give the recepiant time to fine-tune the reception before the message starts).
Listen to this spooky broadcast:
And finally some good journalism on the topic:
All of this is just educated guesses though. Numbers stations do actually exist so there's no debate there. No government has ever actually come forward though to explain what it is exactly it is that they're used for. The closest we ever got was the British government saying "They're not for public consumption."
Yeah, back in the 1970s we had a shortwave and you could pick up some stations that just had some beeps going in a pattern. Sort of like R 2 D 2 but maybe a little musical.
We had an old black and white portable TV that could pick up airplane signals at the higher channel settings. We'd also pick up telephone calls. It was usually to an answering service although we could get some private calls over cordless phones. One time we got really good reception but it was two ladies having the most inane conversation imaginable. And we could only hear one side of it. Blah blah blah my mother blah blah her friend blah blah her boyfriends sister. I owned a police scanner but now it doesn't seem to work at all. Did they go digital?
Many municipal agencies have gone to trunked radio systems, beginning more than 20 years ago. The larger the municipality, the more likely they are to have done so.
A trunked radio system does not use just one frequency, but rather, multiple frequencies spaced a set distance apart. Each transmission utilizes a different frequency. If you do not have a "trunk tracker" scanner, then you need a scanner than can scan very rapidly, set the delay to 'none' so that it does not stop at each frequency. Then you have to find at least *one* of the frequencies being used. After you find one frequency, you can use the offset to calculate all of the others and program them in. If the agency uses multiple 'channels', then you will have to do the same thing for each one.
Years ago, I used to manage a private security company and I was in the office with the owner one morning when he was bragging on the 'new' trunked radio system he had purchased, in particular, he was laughing about how the public and competitors couldn't listen in any more. I told him to go ahead and make a call on the transceiver he kept in the office, when he did, it came over my scanner. He looked shocked. I said "Do it again." Once again my scanner picked it up. When I explained to him how I had done it, he was really ticked off. Apparently, the salesman who sold it to him swore that no one would be able to listen in. He had spent a boatload of money on the new system solely because he thought it meant no one could listen.
Radio signals bounce or 'skip' between the atmosphere and the earth, some times numerous times, depending on the wavelength and atmospheric conditions. Amateur radio operators (hams) and CB/pirate DX enthusiasts depend on this factor for worldwide communications (called 'DXing', 'DX' is shorthand for 'distance').
Various portions of the radio spectrum are allocated to business, ham and CB use, the greater remainder is reserved for government use (even if the frequencies are not specifically assigned for voice communication and seem empty). In addition to voice communications, there are various data communications signals that sound like...very strange noises, especially if you do not have the proper equipment to decode the signals. Even voice communications sound odd if you are not listening in the proper mode, for example, if someone is transmitting in SSB mode (single sideband) and your receiver is in AM mode, it will sound all garbly and 'jumbled', even 'backward'. 'Skip' conditions and other atmospheric conditions can introduce additional distortion.
There is nothing paranormal or even the slightest bit unusual about these things- you just don't know how to listen to what you are hearing.
Playing with radios for 50 years (CB/ham), former technician for military radar systems, radios and radiosondes (ballon-carried radio systems transmitting data about atmospheric conditions and weather).
Numbers stations do actually exist so there's no debate there. No government has ever actually come forward though to explain what it is exactly it is that they're used for. The closest we ever got was the British government saying "They're not for public consumption."
As a US Army linguist in Chinese & Russian, I spent a lot of time in training transcribing foreign language numbers from audio recordings. Every year thousands more Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines are trained to do this at the Presidio of Monterey at the Defense Language Institute in California. Many different languages are taught there including Serbo-Croatian, Persian-Farsi, Japanese, Tagalog, Vietnamese, German, Spanish.
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