TechStuff Classics: Number Stations

This one is from April two thousand twelve, and it's about one of the creepiest things in tech history, number stations. Enjoy So the topic recovering is numbers stations, which actually comes to us courtesy of some feedback we received on Facebook, which uh, fortunately, due to my computer being silly right now, I cannot pull up. However, this is Facebook feedback asking us to cover numbers stations. And you may wonder, oh, my, Drew Geese, what a number stations is? Things being so

scory and people being quick to forget. That's that's like a double reference right there, since I throw in some clockwork orange. So here's what a number station is. It is a radio station using shortwave radio that blasts out a transmission, usually at a very regular interval that normally has some sort of tone or even music to it, followed by a series of numbers spoken in sort of a semi monotone voice, sometimes an automated voice, in fact,

very often an automated voice. And it's just a seemingly random string of numbers that have no particular context or meaning to them, and it has created quite to kind of a well a hobbyist dream come true really for people who like mysteries, because there's no official explanation as to what these stations are and why why these numbers are being broadcast. Here's what we know. No, I'm kidding. Now,

let's go to what we can speculate on. Um. We do know that official governments have there there's no official government that has spoken up and said, oh, yeah, we did that. Yeah. The closest was a Czechoslovakian official who acknowledge receipt of a message about numbers stations, but did not It did not go so far as to actually say what the number station was, what it was for. It essentially was just that I got your message. That was pretty much it. The check is in the mail.

There you go, But gosh, I can't believe you were waiting the entire time for me to shut up, So you can use that. However, Uh, there are fewer now than their word during the Cold War. Yeah, and they started the height of they started appearing during the World wars. So world War One, Yeah, not not. You know, this is the early part of the earlier part of the twentieth century. Yeah, the first first couple of decades of

the twentieth century, that's when they start popping up. So let's talk a little bit about about why a number station is even possible before we get into what they were and what they sound like and all that kind of stuff. So first, they are short wave radio, which we have talked about on a previous podcast many many years ago. Yeah, we'll do a quick we'll do a quick refresher course. So technically, a short wave is a is a radio wave with a wavelength shorter than two

hundred meters. Two meters wavelength would have a frequency of around hurts uh, and it's typically these these radio waves are used to broadcast voice and music, but also for a long distance communication. The reason that you can have long distance community ptation is that these wavelengths are at sort of a sweet spot when it comes to the way the Earth works. So the Earth has the ionosphere, you know that surrounds it, binds it, and penetrates it.

For no ionosphere just surrounds the Earth. And if you were to aim a short wave radio frequency at the ionosphere, uh, the ionosphere would refract that frequency and it would beam back down to Earth. So by bouncing it effectively off the ionosphere, you can send a radio signal much further than you could if it were to just broadcast out and radiate out from a tower. Yes, So with this in mind, with this long distance communication ability, it has

opened up opportunities for lots of different applications. And you know, you'll hear about amateur radio enthusiasts who will just they'll they'll use their their radios to dial in and listen to the various broadcasts that go out there. And that's really a number stations were discovered. It was mainly hobbyists who as they were scanning the different bands and listening to what was out there, they were coming across these

very odd sort of transmissions. And um, before I get too far, I should say the the whole refraction by the ionosphere, there's a specific name for that kind of transmission that I love. I love this term skywave propagation. It's a cool term. Right. So, yeah, you've got these hobbyists who are listening in and they would come across very unusual and frankly pretty creepy kind of transmission in some cases. And uh, I think we even have an

example that we can listen to. So let's let's take a quick listen to what a typical number station might sound like. Uh, if you were to tune in on a shortwave radio, kind of gets you right here, doesn't it. If by the by right here, you mean now I'm looking over my shoulder and waiting for someone to break into the room. Yeah, that's pretty much what I'm thinking. There is something particularly creepy about hearing kind of a

almost and almost like a harmonic. It sounds like there's been some harmonic supplied in some cases, like it's an automated voice or whatever, but hearing something like that monotone just delivering number after number, and then they really repetitious music that was used to introduce these So what could these be? And there's been a lot of people who

have suggested what number stations might be all about? You know everything from it could just be uh stuff for people who are surveying areas for for cartography and that kind of thing, but it doesn't seem likely it's taking credit for it, not at all. So that's our cartography channel that has led to uh to some not so much conspiracy theories. It really does boil down to, well, if you're just broadcasting numbers with no other context, what

could you possibly be doing that for. And one of the explanations is that it's a a way to communicate two spies to undercover operatives who might be uh invested in some foreign country, perhaps one that is unfriendly to the the the country of origin. So there and when we say there's number stations, there are number stations all over the world YEP. And they're broadcasting pretty much all the languages that you might expect. They would be in

the major languages of the world. So it's not just that, you know, it's not just one country that's doing this. There, there's multiple countries that are doing it. And UH So the the speculation is that this is these are messages they're sent to government spies, uh and the you know, the governments aren't admitting to it for for pretty understandable reasons. I would say, well, if you or any of your team has captured the government will disavow any knowledge of

this operation, message will self destructed fifteen seconds. The So these messages, the numbers those that's a code. It's an it's encoded message form of cryptography that is called the the the one pad note yeah, or or one time pad yeah. Um yeah. I'm interested in cryptography, uh and have been reading about it for many years. And this is not exactly a new thing. It doesn't even require the use of a computer. I mean, we talked about

cryptography on many podcasts at different levels. Um and we even got into quantum cryptography, which is supposedly unbreakable, although I've seen reports recently that it may not necessarily be unbreakable. Well, one time pads are technically unbreakable if you follow the right procedure right because basically, um and they were called pads because at one time they were and probably still are a pad. So this pad is generated like a pad of paper. You uh write down your message and

encode it on this paper using the tool. Um and it's a one time thing. And there's a part of the key is embedded in the message, So that tells the recipient use page. Well, let's just go for a reference here, use page sixteen of your pad. And that way, you know, you write down the message in the pad that you can decode it on that page and and that then becomes useless. You can't use it again. Yeah, you then destroy that page. So here's here's how here's

how it works. Let's say that I want to send a message to Chris, and I want to use this this one time pad method. All right, So we would each have a pad that would have a string of random letters across each line, all right, And let's say we group them in in groups of five, because that's pretty common terms of four or five. So we'll say we have groups of five letters. And these letters are truly random in that we've had some sort of well

as close to truly random as we can get. We've had some sort of random number generator that has picked random letters, and it's just that we each have a copy of that output. So Chris's string of random letters is the same as my string of random letters. And then I write down my message in normal text, and I write my normal letters above the letters of the that's that's in the key. Then I convert my letters into numbers. So let's say that an A equals zero

and B equals one, and the C equals three. It's not going to take them very long to pick this one apart. No, it's going to take them a long time because here's the here's the that that's just that. All that is is just uh, it's just a simple substitution cipher. Right. But here's the tricky part. So then I take my key, all right, and I convert all of those letters to numbers. That's when it gets harder. And then I add the two numbers together, all right, So I add the I add the number from my

first letter. So let's say that my first letter is H, because I write, hey there, Chris. I take the number from H. Yeah, really, why not? You know, Hey there, Chris, there's a rusky on your tail. That's that's my message. So H is because I'm going back to the Cold War. So so H. We would convert H to a number, and then we look at the first letter in the key. Let's say that the first letter in the key is an N. Well, that M is going to have its

own number of value. We add the H and the M values together and then we convert that into a new letter. So if it's anything up to if we if A is zero, if it's anything up to twenty five, then that's the letter that we would pick. If it's over and we just use number twenty six counts a zero again, so the number twenty six would be an A, seven would be a B, twenty eight would be a C. So we go up there and we we put in

whatever the substitute letter will be. Well, the only way to know what the original letter is is if you have that one time pad in front of you where you take the value of the letter that is U that the represented letter, the ciphered letter. You subtract the value of the key from the ciphered letter, and that gives you the value of the original letter, and then

you can convert that into the original letter. So the process of coding and decoding is pretty painstaking because you know you have to you have to convert all the letters to values, add and then make new letters. But the nice thing is is that because as long as you keep that that string of letters that acts as your key truly random and that you don't repeat, lets so that you don't or you don't repeat strings, like you don't go to the end of a page and

then start at the top again. As long as you avoid that, it is impossible to crack that without without getting possession of one of those pads. So that's where we talk about if you follow this correctly, it is unbreakable. The correctly. By correctly we mean you you have truly random string for your key, You do not repeat the key, and you do not let the key fall into the wrong hands. As long as that happens, it is unbreakable. So it's kind of like when we talked about the

the various ways of ciphering. You know, there always seems to be some way to crack the code. In this case, unless you have physical possession of the pad or if someone uses a key that repeats, it's just not practical. So that's that's the basis for the secret messages. Um, what those secret messages are, we can't say, because again, unless someone gets hold of one of those pads, then

it is it's just meaningless numbers. I mean, you could convert those two letters, but all that's going to do is give you the product of those those two that like the original message and the key. Without having the key, you can't figure out what the original messages. Now. Um it is likely too that the uh, well we talked about that in the Enigma machine, how the German codes during World War Two were broken down into those um five letter combinations. Um as an added layer of security.

These these combinations stand in for other words too, So it is possible that you know, even if you did break the code, you would also have to have the book that explains what these these letter combinations mean. But um so still would never Well, that's what I'm saying.

If you, if you for some reason, if you maybe hold of the path right, or if they use a repeating key, because if they use a repeating key, then it would take a lot of ani You would have to analyze the heck out of the message, but you could potentially start detecting patterns. Well, that's what broke the Enigma cary exactly because they were they got lazy, lazy, and they started using repeating keys as opposed to using a key that just doesn't repeat, which would have been

impossible to crack. So it's just an added layer of security. That's that just makes it much more difficult, so they do these repetitions over and over again. Um, and it's Uh. The thing is, the tone and the style of the broadcasts is really really creepy, especially when you add that spy layer in your head to it. You start going, this message is not intended for me, and and somebody

could be doing something. You know, I could be listening, well, this is what I think, you know, I'm you know, listening to it, going I could be listening to a message that tells somebody to kill somebody else. Yeah, this could be a message saying to like And then think about this. You hear those messages and then maybe a week later, you hear about some massive political event that takes place in the country, and you think, is there any connection to what I heard and what just happened?

Is what I heard? Was that? Was that? Ah? Essentially a prediction for what actually unfolded? And yeah, it's it's kind of I mean, it is definitely creepy. And um, there are a lot of really cool names for these various broadcasts, some of which are named after the music that they use. Yeah, and again, Um, in some cases, you could kind of some of them. The station's sort of semi identify themselves, and others I think are given sort of like stars, you know, or viruses. They're given

the names of their discoverers want to name them. Yeah, so there's um, there's One of the famous ones is the Lincolnshire Poacher. Yeah, which was was featured not too long ago as of the recording of this podcast on another podcast called The Skeptics Guide to the Universe. They have a little feature where it's called Who's that Noisy? And they which which is named after one of the one of the hosts has a daughter who would say,

who's that noisy? As in what's making that noise? So anyway, Who's that Noisy is the name of the segment where they'll play a sound file and it's the listener's job to try and figure out what that sound file is. And they played the little musical uh prelude that would happen before the numbers broadcast on the number station Lincoln Sure poacher do do do Do Do Do Do Do Do Do Do do doo, And it's really creepy when

you hear it over and over again. Um And anyway, that particular broadcast has been linked to Cyprus to the Royal Air Force base on Cyprus, and is believed, though there's no proof because there's no one actually coming out and saying this is true, that it was operated by the British Secret Intelligence Service out of Cyprus. Now that particular station is no longer active. I think it stopped

broadcasting in neither two thousand or two thousand nine. But there are a few others that also were pretty famous. Cherry Ripe, there's the song Cherry Write, another British folk song which was a station somewhere in Australia or Australia if you prefer. There's Swedish Rhapsody, which is possibly the creepiest thing I have ever heard in my life, which is a there's a glockenspield that's playing and a ace.

The voice is clearly that of a female child reading out numbers in Germany, and you just hear this glockenspield play and then this little girl reading out numbers in German, and it is you can't help but feel a deep sense of foreboding. But then there's also other ones called like the Mad Violinist and the Boardman, because apparently it's just for two seven eight that that's kind of how I would be like, like day one, I'd be all creepy, and day two I'd be you know, less creepy. Day three,

I just be like three six. What am I gonna have for dinner tonight? For I gotta pick up the dry cleaning to read the message you're not getting anything for dinner. Um. Yeah, there are there are a number of places number um where you can if you don't happen to have a short wave radio, where you can pick up on these. Um. The Internet Archive, of course, which collects all sorts of strange and esoteric things. Um. There are many many recordings that you can listen to

on there. And actually the first place that I encountered

these was in an article in Wired magazine. Would I went back and revisited UM for for this, and they were categorizing this Russian station UVB seventy six, which had been broadcasting essentially the same thing for many, many years until one day it stopped and then started again, and then stopped again, and then you could hear so it sounded like somebody in the room with the microphone, uh, you know, just you know, too creepy stuffling stuff and

banging around, and then it started broadcasting something else, and and they changed the call numbers at the station to something entirely different. So it maasically wonder if the guy was just asking for toilet paper and it finally arrived, he was like, now blue jeans and the blue ge Well you can you can still listen to this at UVB dash seven six dot net and you can go

and visit that website and they will tell you. The enthusiasts who keep track of these things will will share information about the station and what it changed to, but very very weird stuff. Well, I think it is funny is that a lot of the people who are following numbers stations, who really have a passion for listening to them and finding them on on shortwave radio, they don't want to have the mystery solved because it would mean their hobby would be over. Well, I mean it even

um information about this. This is kind of something that is operated for so many years. Uh, if you will pardon the radio punt under the radar, I mean it's it's not something that the general public knew anything about up until the last handful of years, which is kind of ironic considering it was going on through the cold war, and before that, and and and now after most of it has stopped anyhow. Uh. It even made an appearance

in an episode of Lost. I understand. I never was really much of a fan of the show, but I think it's cool that they put that into the the show's um storyline, that there was a number station involved with uh, with the plot line UM. And of course that was about codes and code breaking and creepiness and all sorts of stuff, so it fit right in. UM. So yeah, I mean, it's it's fascinating. But the people who watched Lost, you know, wanted the mystery to unravel

over time. They didn't want it solved immediately. And I think for for the people who followed the these number stations, it's the same kind of thing. They don't and you kind of want to know, But then I don't know if you've ever read a book where you didn't want the story to end and you just stopped reading because you just enjoyed the fact that it was still going on, and you didn't really want to know quite what was going on, although you knew it had an end and

somebody was behind it. I don't want to know, So I've done that many times. Or slowed very very slow way down. You know, um, because you don't want to find out because then you know you're fun and so UM. I don't know very interesting stuff everything. I hope you guys like that classic episode. I still get creeped out by number station recordings. So what tech gives you? Guys?

The heb gbs right, and let me know. My address is tech stuff at how stuff works dot com or give me a shout out on Tumbler, Twitter, or Facebook. You can find me at tech stuff hs w S. I'll talk to you again. Release it, put more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it half stuff works dot com