Shortwave "Numbers Stations"
 

I'm wondering if anyone else on TFP has ever heard of these stations. They transmit from all over the world, and do not officially exist in FCC records, or the records of other countries' licensing authorities.

Here's a short description from Simon Mason's site that addresses these stations.

Here's a page on a particularly notorious station, "Papa November." The sound clips are creepy to say the least, and if you're the type to be freaked out by reading ghost stories at night (like me,) I'd reccommend waiting until sometime during the day to listen to them.


I don't really have much to say on the subject, it's obviously a collection of stations transmitting encrypted secret information worldwide, and it's something I wanted to share with everyone.

I've heard OF them, but not heard them. I have read some things (articles and newspaper) on them, and they are as confused as anyone as to what they are. CIA? NSA? Drug runners? who knows.

Yea, ive heard of them, but never much about them :-) btw, im new

Never heard of them. So are they going 24/7 or what?

Yes, many 24/7

There's this song by Porcupine Tree, 'Even Less' that has the forementioned string of numbers being repeated at the end of the song.

I'm a sporadic shortwave listener and I've only ever come across two number stations in my years of listening. Here is one from my logs:

Date: 7/19/1999
Time: 3:05-3:10 UTC
Frequency/mode: 13430 kHz AM
Signal/Interference/Overall (SIO: 1-5, 5 best best): 433
Description: Female announcer with a Russian accent reading sequences of five (?) numbers.

The other one was a Spanish-speaking woman reading numbers for about the same duration. Most people live believe that they are messages broadcasted to spies in the field who have a temporary decryption key for the message. Some are even known to play jingles before the number sequences are announced, such as the "Lincolnshire Poacher" station (which, not surprisingly, plays the song of its station's given namesake.)

Spynumbers.com has a pretty comprehensive database of loggings and patterns attributed to certain stations.

And MrSelfDestruct, I wouldn't say "many" are 24/7. Some tend to broadcast unmodulated carrier signals for a while, but the actual numbers reading are quite short. Either way, it is still an interesting phenomenon considering how many other, more seemingly safe ways there are to transmit messages. By the way, for those who are interested in numbers stations, I also suggest tuning into shortwave pirate radio. Transmissions are usually in the 41 meter range (6950 kHz frequently), and the content can be surprisingly good in spite of the audio quality.

I've always been kind of curious about these stations. Maybe the most interesting thing to me is the fact that whoever is doing them isn't hiding the fact. They're punctual, follow a set pattern, and use the same frequencies over and over again.

A friend of mine once suggested that the Papa November, and other, stations are just automatically run now, and mean nothing to anybody. That, sometime after the switch in 1988, they became obsolete and nobody bothered to stop them.

some of these mp3s are great little electronic music compositions:
check this one out (gongs 1978 is quite cool indeed)

http://www.simonmason.karoo.net/page73.html

great page--thanks....


added later:
you can stream wfmu's broadcast of the entire iridial conet project 4xcd release via this page:

http://www.simonmason.karoo.net/page30.html

recordings of number stations done over the 30 years up to 1997. fine fine stuff.
the link is about half way down the page, just below the video clip boxes.
you'll need real player.

Maybe this is just be a hobby of some persons that like to break codes or what about coordinates for airplanes or something?

"Papa November, Papa November....do dup dee di dup di dup dop di...."

that is some freaky shit. I was not aware of these numbers stations but now I'm very intriqued. Thanks for sharing.

Maybe they mean absolutely NOTHING. I mean, if the CIA (or whoever) was brodcasting *supposedly* secret messages on short wave radio, wouldn't the KGB (or whoever) have to devote resources and manpower to try to decode it? So, just broadcasting jibberish and gongs, etc. could have the desired effect.

Maybe at this point, one branch of the CIA is still broadcasting them, and a whole different branch is trying to decipher them, not realizing they came from the CIA in hte first place...

I like that latter theory of yours Greazy... it's a bit like digging a hole and filling it back in.

it could be "noise." Like if the CIA used 100 methods to send messages, this could be one of 20 or so that are not designed to relay any message. They just exist to use up the resources of some foreign agency trying to decipher all 100 methods.

I just listened to the "Papa November" link, thats some creepy stuff. Makes your mind go to those conspiracy movies.

Wow, this is pretty neat. I have my ham radio license but I've never used it that much. These numbers, it sounds like some of the stations are run just to confuse people, but some really sound like they are related to encrypted codes and spies.

I agree, you could probably write a whole movie based around this idea.

I'm so glad i didnt listen to this at night LOL. Thank for the advice!

Now that i think about it.. that little musical tone on Papa November sounds VERY familiar. Where the hell have i heard that before.

I've heard of these, and there are tons of Websites out there that talk about these things. Just type in "numbers stations" in your search engine and you'll get pages and pages of results.

some say it is spy agencies and, although I odn't really believe that, I cannot disprove it either.

One rather interesting hypothesis I read one time was a global stock trading group sent messages around the globe in real time regarding the performance of certain stocks, although I don't see the point of that with the advent of the internet. These covert communications would be easier electronically, wouldn't they?

Anyway, whatever they are, they certainly are enigmatic, and worth a look (or listen actually) just so you can get the right answer in an obscure trivia contest someday : ) : )

Peace,

Pierre

interesting read guys. i still dont know what this has to do with the dissappearing 747 though. :)

To communicate with a spy in the field, they'd pretty much have to be. Otherwise, you'd have to get a message to the spy first, to tell him when and where to listen, which would defeat the whole purpose.

I'm not really up on cryptography, but I believe I read about a way to generate a single-use code that is effectively uncrackable for all practical purposes. On top of that, they probably weave some "noise" into the codes, making for an extremely secure method of communication.

Or perhaps they keep the channels open, broadcasting "noise", in case they're ever needed again. A sudden reactivation of the broadcasts would tip an enemy off. If they've been broadcasting all along, no one on the outside would be able to tell the difference.

That was a very nice read. I've never heard of these stations before reading this thread and I must say that this is some freaky shit. I love listening to conspiracy theories as much as the next guy, but why would spy messages be broadcasted in such an open manner?

By the way, question for the knowlegeble people. Is there any way to track a radio signal to it's source? If it is possible, then it might also be possible to re-route the signal using a computer....right? I think I'm getting too deeply into it.

P.S. Good thing I didn't listen to the Papa November links before bed. I still have goosebumps.

This is extremely bizzare and interesting. Unlike so many wierd conspericy-type things, this is extrordinarly concrete.
-It's undenyable, anybody with the right equipment can hear this stuff
-It's been going on for a long time
-It's there all the time (IE, daily)
-It seems to be utter nonsense
Fascinating. It seems extremely unlikely that they're a hoax, but at the same time they don't seem to make any sense.

Yes, with varying accuracy it is possible to use triangulation to find the source of a signal. The general area of transmission for numbers stations isn't a mystery, but tracking down the actual antenna is another story. I'm not sure what you mean about re-routing the signal, though.

I heard one of these for the first time yesterday morning! It was about 5:20 am ET, at 7890 khz. It was a machine with a woman's voice, and was saying several 5-number groups in Spanish. Either the whole broadcast repeated, or several of the number blocks were the same. I listened until about 5:35, but by that time a news broadcast started bleeding in quite a bit and I had to get to bed.

You nailed it on all 3 points. The code you're speaking of is called a one-time pad, and that's almost definitely what these are. Some people on spynumbers.com have analyzed parts of the messages to know which part is the message and which is the meta-information about the message, but these can never be cracked without access to the original key material.

Most of these messages are indeed spam, I'm sure. They are so regular that they can't all contain information. Also I think the little tunes and general wierdness of these are GREAT psy-ops -- imagine if it was your job as enemy intelligence to monitor all of these?! You'd go fucking crazy!

wow, I didn't think I could get any nerdier, but now i have a huge urge to try out shortwave radio... damn...
edit: you can download the seperate conet tracks here:
http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-d...ctionid=ird059

My old crazy tech teacher told us about these stations. He said they broadcast secret codes to all over the world, and that the CIA and CSIS(canadian secreit intelligence service) are monitering all our phone conversations. Everyone thought he was a bit crazy anyway, and he was in the army for a really long time.

The "flute" in the Papa November sounds to me like a data being transferred in analogue format... kinda like how a 56k modem transfers data...

Interesting.

analogue you say? that is interesting, hmm, maybe your right, i gotta go listen to it again now *shudder*

misfire, see next...

i was reading some year-end lists, i guess there was a lawsuit involving wilco

http://www.laweekly.com/ink/05/05/the-duersten.php

I had never heard of these before. Amazing stuff. Its pretty cool that the "gongs" station basically shut down when the GDR broke up.

I bet most of these were just noise to tie up resources like you guys said. Amazing stuff though. I wonder if you started one of these up over shoutcast how quickly the DHS would be knocking on your door.

I don't think a bunch of theories are really necessary, I'm almost definite these are just transmissions to spies, don't see how they could be anything else. But then again, it's Tilted paranoia, I'm sure there's gonna be theories about midgets and aliens and zombie ninjas. ;)

I'm offically freaked out, and its daytime now

Its no biggie, if the aliens use our shortwave radio system against us and attack all at once to destroy the major cities, we'll just send a cable tv repairman up in one of their spacecraft to give them a computer virus. Its gonna be all good. :thumbsup:

So how does one listen to these? What kind of equipment do we need? Ham radio or something?

Damn, too bad I got in on this thread so late. I know a bit about these number stations... been interested in them for years. Not so long ago they found the origins of a couple of them. The "Lincolnshire Poacher" station was located in a RAF facility, and another CIA site is at the Warrenton Training Center. What are these stations transmitting? No one really knows. Most likely they're secret messages encoded with one time pads sent out to government spies. In fact, at one time an asian number station ended its transmission with a woman saying "thank you for decoding today's message!" Almost certainly some of this traffic, if not most, is misinformation. With today's technology it would be trivial to shoot a highly encrypted digital message down from a satellite and have it recieved, yet the number stations keep broadcasting. Perhaps this is because no sophisticated equipment is required to receive these these transmissions. Just a plain old shortwave radio, a frequency to listen to, and a time to have the radio on.

I read about these several years ago and they scared the shit out of me.

Wierd. I'm listening to The Lillingtons "Backchannel Broadcast" album right now, and there's a little blurb in the liner notes about similar broadcasting stations that were supposedly used to broadcast to spies in the USSR who, when given the right codes, would mobilize to take over. I never really knew if that was real or made up. (It's sort of a spy/secret agent theme album.)

they are interesting...I myself have heard a couple...the reason they are still used today is that they are easy, cheap, and effective as hell. They cannot be easily traced...you cannot trace who it was sent too...You cannot break a one time pad without having a copy of said one time pad (or get amazingly lucky). It is probably one of the most secure lines you can have...