Post by Saza on Feb 27, 2010 9:36:51 GMT -5
Radio Stations (Well, by logic they are radio)
#1 - UVB-76
What is it?
UVB-76 was started around 1982. It still runs.
It's an annoying noise not unlike a truck horn going through a cheese grater. It's pretty annoying.
In it's known history, it has only been interrupted three times. The most recent interruption was in 2006.
Information on the mysterious station had been compiled here on Geocities, the best place for code cracking and speculation on the Web. From this, we know it originates from Russia, specifically here:
That listener claimed the operator is the "1st Communications Hub of the General Staff of Army," and its purpose was to "transmit orders to the military units and recruitment centers of the Moscow military district."
Wikipedia argues that this makes no sense, since it's mostly just that simple buzztone.
Other theories are that the transmission is part of the Dead Hand system. The purpose of the "dead hand" system (as described in a book of the same name) was to maintain a second strike capability, by ensuring that the destruction of the Soviet leadership would not have prevented the Soviet military from releasing its weapons.
The dead-hand system he [Dr. Blair] describes today takes this defensive trend to its logical, if chilling, conclusion. The automated system in theory would allow Moscow to respond to a Western attack even if top military commanders had been killed and the capitol incinerated.
The heart of the system is said to lie in deep underground bunkers south of Moscow and at backup locations. In a crisis, military officials would send a coded message to the bunkers, switching on the dead hand. If nearby ground-level sensors detected a nuclear attack on Moscow, and if a break was detected in communications links with top military commanders, the system would send low-frequency signals over underground antennas to special rockets.
Flying high over missile fields and other military sites, these rockets in turn would broadcast attack orders to missiles, bombers and, via radio relays, submarines at sea. Contrary to some Western beliefs, Dr. Blair says, many of Russia's nuclear-armed missiles in underground silos and on mobile launchers can be fired automatically.
It is not known whether Russia continues to use the system, and it is possible that it is still in place. Some commentators state the system never operated in fully automatic mode.
An article in Wired magazine from September 2009 indicates that not only does Dead Hand still exist, but that it is also ready to react as intended. The article goes on to state that Dead Hand still receives system upgrades.
What I think
I don't think that the sound being transmitted contains anything other than noise, and that the voice breaks are just system tests, but it does makes sense to believe that the system is part of a dead man's switch type system, as in, when the sound stops, it means something bad and unwanted has occurred, and then soon after, something even worse will happen. All I know for sure is that the sound is pretty weird.
#2 - The 'Backwards Music' station
This one will really creep you out.
The "Backward Music Station" doesn't actually play backward music. That's just what they call it. What it is broadcasting instead is something from the Belgium-ing bowels of He ll itself: [yo
LISTEN AT OWN RISK. IT'S DISTURBING.
A high-pitched grinding, with some banging thrown in, perhaps just to make it sound creepier. That video said it was recorded in 2004 and claimed the signal had since gone dormant, but there are other recordings claiming to be as recent as September of 2009:
youtube.com/watch?v=SGjoEvEPtvU
In the comments section of that one, our brave listener claims with a burst of excitement and exclamation marks: "Two weeks ago I logged it on four frequencies within a few minutes... all of them CFH wefax frequencies!!!!" WEFAX meaning weather facsimile meaning it's in grayscale meaning Belgium if i know. But it shows the station has resurfaced and resurfaced hard, hard enough to warrant a sudden increase in punctuation.
Unlike the UVB-76, no voice interruptions have been heard. It's just a noise, a noise that may have an encrypted message of World Domination, or may not.
So what's the deal?
People have put quite a buit of effort into solving it, but to no avail, yet.
The signal appears on more than one frequency, one from within the USA, the other from Europe. The frequencies are similar to those used by the U.S. Navy.
Is it a heavily encrypted signal to communicate with spies? If it's a noise deliberately made by someone somewhere, then would there not be someone on the other end who had the know-how to make sense of it? Remember that behind every broadcast signal there is equipment, electricity and expense on someone's part. It has to be for a reason, right?
What I think of it.
I hate this one, it's just creepy. I don't know if I'll sleep tonight.
I think that it's LIKE uvb-76 in a manner of "dead man's switch", and if it stops something will happen.
#3 - The WOW! Signal
This one will surpass the weirdness of the BMS.
This was a radio signal that was picked up at The Big Ear radio telescope. Yes, this one comes from space. Big Ear used numbers, from zero to 10, to document how far above the useless background noise any signals went. In a comically childish system, the eggheads ran out of fingers and had to use toes, adding letters A-Z on top of the numbers. The Wow! Signal was "6EQUJ5," meaning it began at a scale of six, crept past the letter threshold, jumped to Q and then as far as U before fading gradually.
All of this happened over 37 seconds, and all of this from a seemingly empty point in space. Perhaps even more mind-boggling, it came from a non-terrestrial and non-solar system source. It was a signal shot to Earth from one of the emptiest places imaginable, and something from that place somehow got to us.
It's called the "Wow!" signal because the man who found it was so amazed by it that he circled it and wrote "Wow!" on the side, which for posterity was better than "HOLY FREAKIN' MOTHER OF GOD!"
So what of it?
It could be, as the killjoys at Wikipedia suggest, interstellar scintillation of a weaker continuous signal. If that statement did little more than sexually excite you, then all you need to know is that a continuous signal is far less remarkable, and what they picked up might have been a weak, continuous signal that gained strength for a short time. However, it's a mysterious signal from space that follows a very calculated system, turning off, and turning on. That... really shouldn't be.
The signal had the trademark of an artificially produced interstellar broadcast. How did they broadcast it from a point in space where there are no planets and there are no solar systems? Well, the only explanation would be a spaceship, and the signal is used to communicate to other spaceships.
The guy who found the signal in the first place tried to deny it was extraterrestrial life; that it was something from Earth reflected off of space debris, but there are problems with that theory.
If it was from Earth, the reflector would have to have been in all sorts of unrealistic requirements for the nature of the signal. For once the explanation that there's an alien craft beaming signals is more logically sound than the tried and true "space debris" argument. Holy shit!
What I think
Well, for one, I'm disappointed that there is no audio recording or even a simulation of the signal, but I'm still impressed at what they have. Putting aside that it could have been a receiver error or some sort of glitch, and also not forgetting that it's a signal, not a noise, that someone (or something) has modulated into a signal that can be transmitted, i think that it's some sort of probe signal, sent out either by us, or extra terrestrials, that has been received by us but not yet properly analyzed.
#4 - The Max Headroom Broadcast
Be prepared t laugh or be creeped out. I hope it's the former.
Basically, it's a man doing this:
Weird, huh?
This was a television broadcast interruption, breaking into WGN-TV and WTTW on November 22, 1987. The only way to sum this up in a single sentence is to say that a man was dressed as Max Headroom and crazy in ways most crazy people can only longingly aspire to.
For those not familiar with him because you don't remember the 80s, Max Headroom was a CGI character with a distorted, electronic, stuttering voice. The background was constantly moving in a dizzying descent into pure madness. He did Coca-Cola ads and even had his own TV show back in the day. As bizarre as that sounds--it was the 80s, you had to be there--the intruder somehow made this infinitely creepier.
The two stations, WGN-TV and WTTW, were interrupted within two hours. The first, the intruder interrupted the WGN nine o'clock news to announce to the world he had a screw loose. Unfortunately for him, there was only a buzzing noise accompanying the video. Then on the PBS station WTTW, Doctor Who was interrupted by the same video, though this time with audio. And it went for a horrifying minute and a half.
The YouTube clip up there has subtitles, but they aren't very helpful
So what?
You might wonder how in the hell some nutjob could have the technical capability to get himself in front of millions of viewers by hacking the TV signal of one of the largest local TV stations in the country (that being WGN) but the shocking thing is it's incredibly easy. Apparently you just need a fairly simple piece of equipment that you can park near the broadcast transmitter. Even if the station encrypts their signal, you can still jam it so that nothing gets through.
Though how this nutjob managed even that has to leave you scratching your head, considering that he used his precious seconds with an audience to utter such thought-provoking lines as "I stole CBS!" and "I made a giant masterpiece for all the greatest world newspaper nerds." He finishes by bending over and allowing a girl to spank his naked ass with a fly swatter, screeching that someone was coming to get him.
Oh and the culprits were never caught. Sleep easy!
What I think
Pre 4-Channers. Trolls.
Weird Sounds
#1 - The Bloop
Tired of having its mind blown by the guys in the archeology department, in 1997 modern science's mind pulled itself up off the mat and triumphantly blew itself. www.pmel.noaa.gov/vents/acoustics/sounds/bloop.html
In that year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recorded a strange sound in the ocean. Strange and LOUD. So loud that it was picked up by two separate microphones 3,000 Belgium-ing miles apart. The sound, dubbed "The Bloop," doesn't sound like anything at normal speed. However, the NOAA did us the favour of speeding up the recording to 16 times the normal speed, causing it to sound like a turd dropping into the toilet. Bloop! Except, you know, awesomely loud.
Scientists determined that its wave pattern indicates it was made by an animal, and not a giant electromagnet sucking a plane out of the sky, as the creators of Lost were no doubt hoping.
So What's the Deal?
There is no animal big enough or loud enough to make that kind of noise, not by a long shot. Not a blue whale, not a howler monkey, not a startled teenage girl.
Not long after the NOAA posted the sound to their web site, some HP Lovecraft fans on the internet quite reasonably decided that The Bloop must have been made by Lovecraft's Cthulhu, a giant, murderous squid-dragon-thing.
What I think
Well, i'm scared by this noise, more so when you realise that scientists know more about the surface of the moon than they do about what's in some of our oceans. It's either some massive octo-whale monstrosity, or a giant Russian nuclear submarine bigger than our minds can comprehend, that is studying the octo-whale.
#2 - The Slowdown
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/79/Slowdown.ogg
Another phenomenon similar to The Bloop is The Slowdown . Similarly the slowdown was also recorded with an autonomous hydrophone array, which are basically microphones in the sea listening out for cool noises and such. It was recorded some miles offshore to the west of South Africa.
The Slowdown got it's name because the sound slowly decreases in frequency over about 7 minutes, creating a sort of comedy trumpet yet horrifying gut-wrenching wail.
However, unlike The Bloop, this has been picked up more than once, in fact it happens several times a year since it was first heard in 1997.
So what?
The most popular theory is that it's the sound of ice moving in Antarctica, or a friction phenomenon of ice rubbing over land.
What I think
To me, The Slowdown sound is a lot lower than the sound i would expect ice to make, whether it be rubbing against land or more ice. Also wouldn't that make a sound going from low to high if it rubbed in the opposite direction? I don't believe such a sound has yet been recorded. Once again i'm going to chalk it up to old octo-whale.
Yes, I know I didn't include Number Stations. It's just too creepy. Too too creepy, and you guys would shit yourselves probably.
Have fun sleeping tonight.
Oh, here's the source of this. I just rewrote some stuff. Thanks, Cosmic Duck! www.facepunch.com/showthread.php?t=879713
#1 - UVB-76
What is it?
UVB-76 was started around 1982. It still runs.
It's an annoying noise not unlike a truck horn going through a cheese grater. It's pretty annoying.
In it's known history, it has only been interrupted three times. The most recent interruption was in 2006.
Information on the mysterious station had been compiled here on Geocities, the best place for code cracking and speculation on the Web. From this, we know it originates from Russia, specifically here:
That listener claimed the operator is the "1st Communications Hub of the General Staff of Army," and its purpose was to "transmit orders to the military units and recruitment centers of the Moscow military district."
Wikipedia argues that this makes no sense, since it's mostly just that simple buzztone.
Other theories are that the transmission is part of the Dead Hand system. The purpose of the "dead hand" system (as described in a book of the same name) was to maintain a second strike capability, by ensuring that the destruction of the Soviet leadership would not have prevented the Soviet military from releasing its weapons.
The dead-hand system he [Dr. Blair] describes today takes this defensive trend to its logical, if chilling, conclusion. The automated system in theory would allow Moscow to respond to a Western attack even if top military commanders had been killed and the capitol incinerated.
The heart of the system is said to lie in deep underground bunkers south of Moscow and at backup locations. In a crisis, military officials would send a coded message to the bunkers, switching on the dead hand. If nearby ground-level sensors detected a nuclear attack on Moscow, and if a break was detected in communications links with top military commanders, the system would send low-frequency signals over underground antennas to special rockets.
Flying high over missile fields and other military sites, these rockets in turn would broadcast attack orders to missiles, bombers and, via radio relays, submarines at sea. Contrary to some Western beliefs, Dr. Blair says, many of Russia's nuclear-armed missiles in underground silos and on mobile launchers can be fired automatically.
It is not known whether Russia continues to use the system, and it is possible that it is still in place. Some commentators state the system never operated in fully automatic mode.
An article in Wired magazine from September 2009 indicates that not only does Dead Hand still exist, but that it is also ready to react as intended. The article goes on to state that Dead Hand still receives system upgrades.
What I think
I don't think that the sound being transmitted contains anything other than noise, and that the voice breaks are just system tests, but it does makes sense to believe that the system is part of a dead man's switch type system, as in, when the sound stops, it means something bad and unwanted has occurred, and then soon after, something even worse will happen. All I know for sure is that the sound is pretty weird.
#2 - The 'Backwards Music' station
This one will really creep you out.
The "Backward Music Station" doesn't actually play backward music. That's just what they call it. What it is broadcasting instead is something from the Belgium-ing bowels of He ll itself: [yo
LISTEN AT OWN RISK. IT'S DISTURBING.
A high-pitched grinding, with some banging thrown in, perhaps just to make it sound creepier. That video said it was recorded in 2004 and claimed the signal had since gone dormant, but there are other recordings claiming to be as recent as September of 2009:
youtube.com/watch?v=SGjoEvEPtvU
In the comments section of that one, our brave listener claims with a burst of excitement and exclamation marks: "Two weeks ago I logged it on four frequencies within a few minutes... all of them CFH wefax frequencies!!!!" WEFAX meaning weather facsimile meaning it's in grayscale meaning Belgium if i know. But it shows the station has resurfaced and resurfaced hard, hard enough to warrant a sudden increase in punctuation.
Unlike the UVB-76, no voice interruptions have been heard. It's just a noise, a noise that may have an encrypted message of World Domination, or may not.
So what's the deal?
People have put quite a buit of effort into solving it, but to no avail, yet.
The signal appears on more than one frequency, one from within the USA, the other from Europe. The frequencies are similar to those used by the U.S. Navy.
Is it a heavily encrypted signal to communicate with spies? If it's a noise deliberately made by someone somewhere, then would there not be someone on the other end who had the know-how to make sense of it? Remember that behind every broadcast signal there is equipment, electricity and expense on someone's part. It has to be for a reason, right?
What I think of it.
I hate this one, it's just creepy. I don't know if I'll sleep tonight.
I think that it's LIKE uvb-76 in a manner of "dead man's switch", and if it stops something will happen.
#3 - The WOW! Signal
This one will surpass the weirdness of the BMS.
This was a radio signal that was picked up at The Big Ear radio telescope. Yes, this one comes from space. Big Ear used numbers, from zero to 10, to document how far above the useless background noise any signals went. In a comically childish system, the eggheads ran out of fingers and had to use toes, adding letters A-Z on top of the numbers. The Wow! Signal was "6EQUJ5," meaning it began at a scale of six, crept past the letter threshold, jumped to Q and then as far as U before fading gradually.
All of this happened over 37 seconds, and all of this from a seemingly empty point in space. Perhaps even more mind-boggling, it came from a non-terrestrial and non-solar system source. It was a signal shot to Earth from one of the emptiest places imaginable, and something from that place somehow got to us.
It's called the "Wow!" signal because the man who found it was so amazed by it that he circled it and wrote "Wow!" on the side, which for posterity was better than "HOLY FREAKIN' MOTHER OF GOD!"
So what of it?
It could be, as the killjoys at Wikipedia suggest, interstellar scintillation of a weaker continuous signal. If that statement did little more than sexually excite you, then all you need to know is that a continuous signal is far less remarkable, and what they picked up might have been a weak, continuous signal that gained strength for a short time. However, it's a mysterious signal from space that follows a very calculated system, turning off, and turning on. That... really shouldn't be.
The signal had the trademark of an artificially produced interstellar broadcast. How did they broadcast it from a point in space where there are no planets and there are no solar systems? Well, the only explanation would be a spaceship, and the signal is used to communicate to other spaceships.
The guy who found the signal in the first place tried to deny it was extraterrestrial life; that it was something from Earth reflected off of space debris, but there are problems with that theory.
If it was from Earth, the reflector would have to have been in all sorts of unrealistic requirements for the nature of the signal. For once the explanation that there's an alien craft beaming signals is more logically sound than the tried and true "space debris" argument. Holy shit!
What I think
Well, for one, I'm disappointed that there is no audio recording or even a simulation of the signal, but I'm still impressed at what they have. Putting aside that it could have been a receiver error or some sort of glitch, and also not forgetting that it's a signal, not a noise, that someone (or something) has modulated into a signal that can be transmitted, i think that it's some sort of probe signal, sent out either by us, or extra terrestrials, that has been received by us but not yet properly analyzed.
#4 - The Max Headroom Broadcast
Be prepared t laugh or be creeped out. I hope it's the former.
Basically, it's a man doing this:
Weird, huh?
This was a television broadcast interruption, breaking into WGN-TV and WTTW on November 22, 1987. The only way to sum this up in a single sentence is to say that a man was dressed as Max Headroom and crazy in ways most crazy people can only longingly aspire to.
For those not familiar with him because you don't remember the 80s, Max Headroom was a CGI character with a distorted, electronic, stuttering voice. The background was constantly moving in a dizzying descent into pure madness. He did Coca-Cola ads and even had his own TV show back in the day. As bizarre as that sounds--it was the 80s, you had to be there--the intruder somehow made this infinitely creepier.
The two stations, WGN-TV and WTTW, were interrupted within two hours. The first, the intruder interrupted the WGN nine o'clock news to announce to the world he had a screw loose. Unfortunately for him, there was only a buzzing noise accompanying the video. Then on the PBS station WTTW, Doctor Who was interrupted by the same video, though this time with audio. And it went for a horrifying minute and a half.
The YouTube clip up there has subtitles, but they aren't very helpful
So what?
You might wonder how in the hell some nutjob could have the technical capability to get himself in front of millions of viewers by hacking the TV signal of one of the largest local TV stations in the country (that being WGN) but the shocking thing is it's incredibly easy. Apparently you just need a fairly simple piece of equipment that you can park near the broadcast transmitter. Even if the station encrypts their signal, you can still jam it so that nothing gets through.
Though how this nutjob managed even that has to leave you scratching your head, considering that he used his precious seconds with an audience to utter such thought-provoking lines as "I stole CBS!" and "I made a giant masterpiece for all the greatest world newspaper nerds." He finishes by bending over and allowing a girl to spank his naked ass with a fly swatter, screeching that someone was coming to get him.
Oh and the culprits were never caught. Sleep easy!
What I think
Pre 4-Channers. Trolls.
Weird Sounds
#1 - The Bloop
Tired of having its mind blown by the guys in the archeology department, in 1997 modern science's mind pulled itself up off the mat and triumphantly blew itself. www.pmel.noaa.gov/vents/acoustics/sounds/bloop.html
In that year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recorded a strange sound in the ocean. Strange and LOUD. So loud that it was picked up by two separate microphones 3,000 Belgium-ing miles apart. The sound, dubbed "The Bloop," doesn't sound like anything at normal speed. However, the NOAA did us the favour of speeding up the recording to 16 times the normal speed, causing it to sound like a turd dropping into the toilet. Bloop! Except, you know, awesomely loud.
Scientists determined that its wave pattern indicates it was made by an animal, and not a giant electromagnet sucking a plane out of the sky, as the creators of Lost were no doubt hoping.
So What's the Deal?
There is no animal big enough or loud enough to make that kind of noise, not by a long shot. Not a blue whale, not a howler monkey, not a startled teenage girl.
Not long after the NOAA posted the sound to their web site, some HP Lovecraft fans on the internet quite reasonably decided that The Bloop must have been made by Lovecraft's Cthulhu, a giant, murderous squid-dragon-thing.
What I think
Well, i'm scared by this noise, more so when you realise that scientists know more about the surface of the moon than they do about what's in some of our oceans. It's either some massive octo-whale monstrosity, or a giant Russian nuclear submarine bigger than our minds can comprehend, that is studying the octo-whale.
#2 - The Slowdown
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/79/Slowdown.ogg
Another phenomenon similar to The Bloop is The Slowdown . Similarly the slowdown was also recorded with an autonomous hydrophone array, which are basically microphones in the sea listening out for cool noises and such. It was recorded some miles offshore to the west of South Africa.
The Slowdown got it's name because the sound slowly decreases in frequency over about 7 minutes, creating a sort of comedy trumpet yet horrifying gut-wrenching wail.
However, unlike The Bloop, this has been picked up more than once, in fact it happens several times a year since it was first heard in 1997.
So what?
The most popular theory is that it's the sound of ice moving in Antarctica, or a friction phenomenon of ice rubbing over land.
What I think
To me, The Slowdown sound is a lot lower than the sound i would expect ice to make, whether it be rubbing against land or more ice. Also wouldn't that make a sound going from low to high if it rubbed in the opposite direction? I don't believe such a sound has yet been recorded. Once again i'm going to chalk it up to old octo-whale.
Yes, I know I didn't include Number Stations. It's just too creepy. Too too creepy, and you guys would shit yourselves probably.
Have fun sleeping tonight.
Oh, here's the source of this. I just rewrote some stuff. Thanks, Cosmic Duck! www.facepunch.com/showthread.php?t=879713
[img src="http://i25.[tinypic].com/10ygymt.png"]
