TheConet Project and numbers stations

[kestrell]

The Art of Darkness blog has a creepy-cool post
http://www.shadowmanor.com/blog/?p=12417
about The Conet Project
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conet_Project
which involves the archiving of recordings from
numbers stations
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_station

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Weird shortwave radio broadcasts that transmit groups of numbers, letters, or different types of (patterned) noises. Shortwave radio hobbyists have known about them for several decades, and the best guess is that they’re used by various secret agencies to transmit messages to spies in the field. Nobody knows for sure, because no government will admit to using them.
They’re strangely long-lived, often transmitting on a strict schedule for years and apparently unhindered by political changes; when the USSR collapsed, for instance, several numbers stations suspected to be associated with that government saw an increase in activity instead of going silent.
They’re also often oddly sinister: Most of the letter or number groups are spoken by adult voices, but there’s a station dubbed “The Swedish Rhapsody” which transmits in the voice of a little girl. There’s a station which employs the voice of a woman “intoning numbers as if she were engaging in intercourse.” And a station known as “The Buzzer” transmits high-precision buzzing on 4625khz, 24 hours a day, every day.
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Comments

[jesse_the_k]

When I entered into My Unfortunate Condition, I was horizontal most of the day. Shortwave radio saved some portion of my sanity. One could find numbers stations everywhere. I loved the conspiracy theories; what struck me was how much the "official time" stations (the NIST version broadcasts at 2500, 5000, 10000, 15000, and 20000 kHz) sound like numbers stations. In other words, they may have been transmitting useful technical information with no sinister meaning whatever. I know, you like the sinister.

[kestrell]

It's true, I like the sinister (you know me so well!), but I think listening to strings of numbers must have a certain surreal and possibly trans-like effect, also. I know from my reading in the history of media that there have always been people who believed that these mysterious transmissions are from the world of the dead (I can't remember the Connie Willis story which mentions this), so obviously there is something about these kinds of transmissions which are fascinating on all sorts of levels.

[jesse_the_k]

For me the magic was in the global reach — which of course is hyperbole, but when the numbers are broadcast across a variety of frequencies, they really can be heard by some folks almost everywhere at once.

At that point the net was still an infant and cell phones were _car phones_ because they drew so much power and were so heavy.