Number Stations: The Dark Side of the Dial

Video featuring an actual audio recording of the infamous "Gong and Chimes" East German numbers station. (Video clips are all public domain footage taken from various propaganda films shot during the Cold War era).

This audio portion of this video is from a recording of a bizarre East German numbers station transmission, set against footage from various Cold War propaganda films. The gongs and chimes heard in the prelude to the numbers transmittal came from a recording that was played prior to each numbers transmission. This recording - probably from an old and faulty reel-to-reel tape player - occasionally speeds up and slows down, causing an eerie and rather sinister-sounding warping effect. Strangely, whomever broadcast this particular station never bothered to correct that rather obvious glitch during the many years it was in operation.

The phenomenon of so-called "numbers stations," mysterious shortwave radio broadcasts that seem to exist only to transmit spoken-word numbers, snippets of weird songs and enigmatic codes, is a genuine mystery.

Exactly who is broadcasting these transmissions and why is unknown. One theory holds that the transmissions are part of espionage efforts by the intelligence agencies of different countries, another, that they are the work of oganized drug smugglers, while still another claims that they are actually communications between extraterrestrial space aliens! (One commentator on an Internet message board referred to them as “the aural equivalent of crop circles”).

While shortwave radio buffs have been aware of them for years, the numbers station phenomenon remains largely unheard of by the general public.

For more information, please visit: labyrinth13.com/OtherWorks_Numbersstations.htm