You can find all sorts of weird things if you mess around with a shortwave radio in the right place. Well, we say all sorts, but mainly it's just pirate radio stations playing drum and bass that fade in and out of range on your car stereo as you drive through the outskirts of any major metropolitan area. If you look a little harder, however, you might come across what have come to be known as numbers stations. Obsessively catalogued and recorded, resulting in a 5 CD release that has been bought by conspiracy theorists and GCHQ alike, numbers stations are one of the eeriest and most unexplained phenomenons in modern history, and one that you can experience yourself. The stations themselves crop up all over the world, appearing in a wide variety of languages, but usually following similar patterns. Either a voice recording or speech synthesis software will recite a series of numbers - sometimes in the international phonetic alphabet. Sometimes those recitations will be broken up by a piece of classical music, or a piercing beep, or simply fade away into static. And that's it. These are broadcasts that you can pick up on a shortwave radio receiver, ghostly voices with messages nobody knows the meaning to. Something about them is deeply unnerving, and many will make your hairs stand on end without you really knowing why. They give a sort of deep feeling of dread. Perhaps the fact that nobody really knows what the heck they are is part of the allure, and the inexplicable threat. The most common theory as to the so-called numbers stations' existence is that they are used by national military and espionage agencies; in which case, the nations in question wouldn't want to cop to their existence, less they compromise their agents' illicit activities. In which case they're even creepier, because you could be hearing a secret message being sent to a spy, instructing them to kill someone, or worse. Numbers stations have been broadcasting as far back as World War I, which would make them one of the earliest radio transmissions ever made. And despite being able to stumble across them with relative ease, the general public has no idea what their purpose is, or what their messages mean. Are they a method of communication for spies? Are they used for illegal drug smuggling operations? Nobody's telling.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
