April 18, 2012 • 26 mins
What is a number station? What is shortwave radio? What could these numbers mean? In this episode, Chris and Jonathan dive into the murky, mysterious world of number stations.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology with
tech stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hello, and
welcome to tex Stuff. My name is Chris Poulette and
(00:20):
I am an editor at how stuff works dot com.
Sitting across from me, as usual, is senior writer Jonathan Strickland.
The Secret Service holds much that has kept secret, even
from very senior officers in the organization. Creepy for So,
the topic we're covering is a numbers stations, which actually
(00:43):
comes to us courtesy of some feedback we received on Facebook, which, unfortunately,
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 under, oh my, Drew Geese,
what a number of stations is? Things being so scory
(01:05):
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
(01:27):
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,
(01:50):
and it has created quite a 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
(02:11):
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
(02:32):
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 an 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,
(02:54):
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
(03:16):
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
(03:40):
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 communication 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 honest sphere you know that surrounds it, binds it
(04:04):
and penetrates it. No, I hoes sphere 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
(04:24):
a radio signal much further than you could if it
were to just broadcast out and radiate out from a towery.
So with this in mind, with this long distance communication ability,
it has opened up opportunities for lots of different applications. Uh.
And you know you'll hear about amateur radio enthusiasts who
(04:45):
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 how number stations were discovered. It was
mainly hobbyists who as they were scanning the different bands
and list thing to what was out there, they were
coming across these very odd sort of transmissions. And um,
(05:07):
before I get too far, I should say 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 hobbiests who are listening in and they would
come across a very unusual and frankly pretty creepy kind
(05:33):
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 if you were to tune
in on a short wave radio. One h kind of
(06:01):
gets you right here, don 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 and 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,
(06:22):
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
have been a lot of people who have suggested what
number stations might be all about, um, you know, everything
from it could just be uh stuff for people who
(06:44):
are surveying areas for for cartography and that kind of thing.
But it doesn't seem likely no one is taking credit
for it, not at all, so that 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
(07:07):
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 and so there. And when
(07:30):
we say there's number stations, there are number of stations
all over the world, 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 these you know,
(07:56):
the governments aren't admitting to it for for pretty understandable reasons.
I would say, well, if you or any of your
team is captured, the government will disavow any knowledge of
this operations. Message will self destructed fifteen seconds. The So
these messages, the numbers those that's a code, it's an
(08:17):
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
(08:37):
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
(08:58):
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
(09:20):
the recipient use page. 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.
(09:40):
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, that's four or five.
(10:01):
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
(10:21):
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 a B equals one, and a
(10:42):
C equals Three'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 as 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
(11:04):
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? Alright?
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
(11:28):
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 M. 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
(11:51):
letter that we would pick. If it's over twenty five,
then we just use number twenty six counts a zero again,
so the number twenty would be an A, twenty 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
(12:12):
have that one time pad in front of you where
you take the value of the letter that is uh
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
(12:34):
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 letters,
(12:55):
so that you don't or you don't repeat strings, like
you don't go to the end of a page and
and 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
(13:17):
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.
(13:40):
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
paths adds, then it is it's just meaningless numbers. I mean,
(14:04):
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
(14:27):
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, well,
(14:51):
that's what I'm saying. If if you for some reason,
if you may right, or if they use a repeating key,
because if they use a repeating key, then it would
take a lot of an you would have to analyze
the heck out of the message, but you could potentially
start detecting patterns. Well that's what broke the enigmac Yeah, exactly,
because they were they got lazy, lazy, and they started
(15:11):
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 the tone and the style of the
broadcasts is really really creepy, especially when you add that
(15:35):
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, right, this
could be a message saying to like and then think
(15:55):
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 a essentially
a prediction for what actually unfolded? And yeah, it's it's
(16:16):
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
(16:37):
sort of like kind of 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
(16:57):
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.
(17:18):
And they played the little musical uh prelude that would
happen before the numbers broadcast on the number station Lincolnshire
Poacher Do 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
(17:43):
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
podcasting in neither two thousand or two thousand nine. But
(18:03):
there are a few others that also were pretty famous.
Cherry Ripe. There's the song Cherry Ripe, 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 Glockenshfield it's playing and a ace. The
(18:27):
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
(18:51):
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
(19:16):
have for dinner tonight? For I gotta pick up the
drug leading 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,
(19:41):
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, which I
went back and revisited UM for for this, and they
were categorizing this Russian station UVB seventy six, which had
(20:05):
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
(20:28):
and they changed the call numbers at the station to
something entirely different. It makes me wonder if the guy
was just asking for toilet paper and it finally arrived
and he was like, now blue jeans blue. Well, you
can you can still listen to this at UVB dash
seven six dot net and you can go and visit
(20:48):
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. U. Well.
I think 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
(21:09):
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
(21:29):
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
(21:51):
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
(22:16):
over time. They didn't want it solved immediately. And I
think for for the people who followed they 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
(22:36):
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 your fun ends.
So I don't know very interesting stuff. Jonathan has been
(23:02):
researching something as we're talking, and he's got this mysterious
look on his face. Yeah. Um yeah, No, creepy, that's
all I'm saying. It is creepy. Uh yeah, I mean
these are these are definitely one of those things that
that I hope stick around just for the sake of
(23:23):
perpetuating this kind of air of mystery, because you think
about it, you're like, Okay, first of all, let me
get this clear. Our world is amazing and the universe
is astounding. But even so, there are days where you
feel like you're living in a pretty mundane kind of existence.
And then you find out about numbers stations and you're like,
there's a whole level operating just under the surface that
(23:45):
I've always suspected but never really proven, and now I
know there's something to it. Then you're like, hey, our
world is amazing again. By the way, our world is amazing,
whether there's number stations or not. It's just that occasionally
we have to be reminded of it. Puppies boomtiata Alright,
so shout out to the parent company. Uh, guys, that
(24:06):
kind of wraps up our discussion on number stations. I
wish we could tell you more, but frankly, there's just
nothing official. We can't you know, we we can speculate
all we like, but we can't really, uh say for sure. Now,
I think I think it's fairly safe to say that
if these are encoded messages, which I can't imagine them
being anything else, that they're not. Yeah, it's hard to
(24:29):
it's hard to come up with a set of circumstances
whereas a string of numbers isn't meaningful in any other way,
that if they are encoded messages, that this is some
form of espionage I mean at least some form of
secret communication. And it's one way. I mean, these are
a broadcasts that are going out. It's not that we're
receiving answers from from another one. It's also I mean,
(24:52):
they're they're regular, they're they're broadcast usually at regular intervals,
like on the hour or on every quarter hour or whatever.
So oh, you know, I think it's pretty safe to
say these are some form of of espionage communication. Um,
but that's really all we can say, although that go
listen to some because they are both fascinating and incredibly
(25:14):
unsettling for just being a series of numbers. So that
wraps up this discussion. You guys, if you have any
topics you would like us to cover, let us know.
Send us a message on Facebook or Twitter are handled.
There is text stuff H s W or you can
always send us an email. That address is tech Stuff
at Discovery dot com and Chris and I will talk
(25:35):
to you again really soon. Four seven Do do Do
Do Do three Do be sure to check out our
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(25:57):
Download it today on iTunes, brought to you by the
reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology with
tech stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hello, and
welcome to tex Stuff. My name is Chris Poulette and
(00:20):
I am an editor at how stuff works dot com.
Sitting across from me, as usual, is senior writer Jonathan Strickland.
The Secret Service holds much that has kept secret, even
from very senior officers in the organization. Creepy for So,
the topic we're covering is a numbers stations, which actually
(00:43):
comes to us courtesy of some feedback we received on Facebook, which, unfortunately,
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 under, oh my, Drew Geese,
what a number of stations is? Things being so scory
(01:05):
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
(01:27):
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,
(01:50):
and it has created quite a 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
(02:11):
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
(02:32):
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 an 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,
(02:54):
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
(03:16):
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
(03:40):
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 communication 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 honest sphere you know that surrounds it, binds it
(04:04):
and penetrates it. No, I hoes sphere 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
(04:24):
a radio signal much further than you could if it
were to just broadcast out and radiate out from a towery.
So with this in mind, with this long distance communication ability,
it has opened up opportunities for lots of different applications. Uh.
And you know you'll hear about amateur radio enthusiasts who
(04:45):
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 how number stations were discovered. It was
mainly hobbyists who as they were scanning the different bands
and list thing to what was out there, they were
coming across these very odd sort of transmissions. And um,
(05:07):
before I get too far, I should say 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 hobbiests who are listening in and they would
come across a very unusual and frankly pretty creepy kind
(05:33):
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 if you were to tune
in on a short wave radio. One h kind of
(06:01):
gets you right here, don 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 and 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,
(06:22):
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
have been a lot of people who have suggested what
number stations might be all about, um, you know, everything
from it could just be uh stuff for people who
(06:44):
are surveying areas for for cartography and that kind of thing.
But it doesn't seem likely no one is taking credit
for it, not at all, so that 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
(07:07):
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 and so there. And when
(07:30):
we say there's number stations, there are number of stations
all over the world, 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 these you know,
(07:56):
the governments aren't admitting to it for for pretty understandable reasons.
I would say, well, if you or any of your
team is captured, the government will disavow any knowledge of
this operations. Message will self destructed fifteen seconds. The So
these messages, the numbers those that's a code, it's an
(08:17):
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
(08:37):
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
(08:58):
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
(09:20):
the recipient use page. 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.
(09:40):
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, that's four or five.
(10:01):
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
(10:21):
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 a B equals one, and a
(10:42):
C equals Three'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 as 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
(11:04):
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? Alright?
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
(11:28):
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 M. 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
(11:51):
letter that we would pick. If it's over twenty five,
then we just use number twenty six counts a zero again,
so the number twenty would be an A, twenty 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
(12:12):
have that one time pad in front of you where
you take the value of the letter that is uh
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
(12:34):
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 letters,
(12:55):
so that you don't or you don't repeat strings, like
you don't go to the end of a page and
and 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
(13:17):
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.
(13:40):
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
paths adds, then it is it's just meaningless numbers. I mean,
(14:04):
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
(14:27):
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, well,
(14:51):
that's what I'm saying. If if you for some reason,
if you may right, or if they use a repeating key,
because if they use a repeating key, then it would
take a lot of an you would have to analyze
the heck out of the message, but you could potentially
start detecting patterns. Well that's what broke the enigmac Yeah, exactly,
because they were they got lazy, lazy, and they started
(15:11):
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 the tone and the style of the
broadcasts is really really creepy, especially when you add that
(15:35):
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, right, this
could be a message saying to like and then think
(15:55):
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 a essentially
a prediction for what actually unfolded? And yeah, it's it's
(16:16):
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
(16:37):
sort of like kind of 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
(16:57):
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.
(17:18):
And they played the little musical uh prelude that would
happen before the numbers broadcast on the number station Lincolnshire
Poacher Do 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
(17:43):
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
podcasting in neither two thousand or two thousand nine. But
(18:03):
there are a few others that also were pretty famous.
Cherry Ripe. There's the song Cherry Ripe, 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 Glockenshfield it's playing and a ace. The
(18:27):
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
(18:51):
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
(19:16):
have for dinner tonight? For I gotta pick up the
drug leading 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,
(19:41):
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, which I
went back and revisited UM for for this, and they
were categorizing this Russian station UVB seventy six, which had
(20:05):
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
(20:28):
and they changed the call numbers at the station to
something entirely different. It makes me wonder if the guy
was just asking for toilet paper and it finally arrived
and he was like, now blue jeans blue. Well, you
can you can still listen to this at UVB dash
seven six dot net and you can go and visit
(20:48):
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. U. Well.
I think 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
(21:09):
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
(21:29):
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
(21:51):
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
(22:16):
over time. They didn't want it solved immediately. And I
think for for the people who followed they 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
(22:36):
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 your fun ends.
So I don't know very interesting stuff. Jonathan has been
(23:02):
researching something as we're talking, and he's got this mysterious
look on his face. Yeah. Um yeah, No, creepy, that's
all I'm saying. It is creepy. Uh yeah, I mean
these are these are definitely one of those things that
that I hope stick around just for the sake of
(23:23):
perpetuating this kind of air of mystery, because you think
about it, you're like, Okay, first of all, let me
get this clear. Our world is amazing and the universe
is astounding. But even so, there are days where you
feel like you're living in a pretty mundane kind of existence.
And then you find out about numbers stations and you're like,
there's a whole level operating just under the surface that
(23:45):
I've always suspected but never really proven, and now I
know there's something to it. Then you're like, hey, our
world is amazing again. By the way, our world is amazing,
whether there's number stations or not. It's just that occasionally
we have to be reminded of it. Puppies boomtiata Alright,
so shout out to the parent company. Uh, guys, that
(24:06):
kind of wraps up our discussion on number stations. I
wish we could tell you more, but frankly, there's just
nothing official. We can't you know, we we can speculate
all we like, but we can't really, uh say for sure. Now,
I think I think it's fairly safe to say that
if these are encoded messages, which I can't imagine them
being anything else, that they're not. Yeah, it's hard to
(24:29):
it's hard to come up with a set of circumstances
whereas a string of numbers isn't meaningful in any other way,
that if they are encoded messages, that this is some
form of espionage I mean at least some form of
secret communication. And it's one way. I mean, these are
a broadcasts that are going out. It's not that we're
receiving answers from from another one. It's also I mean,
(24:52):
they're they're regular, they're they're broadcast usually at regular intervals,
like on the hour or on every quarter hour or whatever.
So oh, you know, I think it's pretty safe to
say these are some form of of espionage communication. Um,
but that's really all we can say, although that go
listen to some because they are both fascinating and incredibly
(25:14):
unsettling for just being a series of numbers. So that
wraps up this discussion. You guys, if you have any
topics you would like us to cover, let us know.
Send us a message on Facebook or Twitter are handled.
There is text stuff H s W or you can
always send us an email. That address is tech Stuff
at Discovery dot com and Chris and I will talk
(25:35):
to you again really soon. Four seven Do do Do
Do Do three Do be sure to check out our
new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how Stuff
Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing
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