Speaker 1: Eddie Aragon, Eddie Dragon, Welcome to the other side of midnight.
Speaker 2: Good evening, Walter.
Speaker 1: You have a very big voice. It's intimidating to those
Speaker 1: of us who are still new to radio.
Speaker 2: Not as big as this story coming out of Russia
Speaker 2: that's been around for a long time. And I've really
Speaker 2: got to take all the radio real estate this evening
Speaker 2: for this because it's a captivating story. As a radio
Speaker 2: station owner of AM sixteen hundred KIVA here in Albuquerque,
Speaker 2: New Mexico, ten thousand watts, big station and the most
Speaker 2: powerful AM here in Albuquerque, you get intrigued by radio
Speaker 2: stories and how radio comes to be. And I think
Speaker 2: of Radio Caroline off the coast of England, and this
Speaker 2: is the one that is particularly gripping, I think for
Speaker 2: all radio enthusiasts, Ham radio enthusiasts, anybody who's a radio
Speaker 2: enthusiast whatsoever, as you are Walter and have been for
Speaker 2: a long time. But I want to take you back
Speaker 2: to January of nineteen eighty three the Netherlands. There's, you know,
Speaker 2: one of those small smallish countries in northern Europe, and
Speaker 2: one man alone is sitting in a room with radio
Speaker 2: and his name is Ari Wounder. Not a spook, not
Speaker 2: a general, not a Kremlin insider. He's just a short
Speaker 2: wave radio enthusiasts. So he's a type that lives inside
Speaker 2: you know, the radio spectrum, if you will. And night
Speaker 2: after night he sits there with his receiver, his notebook,
Speaker 2: serfs the static, looking for odd signals. This is something
Speaker 2: that people used to do on radio oftentimes, and listening
Speaker 2: for anything that they possibly can. And most nights it's
Speaker 2: really nothing special. It's just a distant broadcast bait at stations.
Speaker 2: But on forty six twenty five Killerhers take notes listeners
Speaker 2: very deep in the hiss, he hears something, not a song,
Speaker 2: not a speech, no weather reports, no news briefings, just
Speaker 2: a low mechanical pulse, one buzz, and it goes on
Speaker 2: a rhythm every second. It's exact on it. No music,
Speaker 2: no voice, no station ideas required by the FCC, something
Speaker 2: akin to what you saw in Contact back with Jody Foster,
Speaker 2: where you just hear a pulsing out of outer space
Speaker 2: and there's just stubborn tone that just sits there on
Speaker 2: the dial, won't go away. He does what any of
Speaker 2: us radio nerds would do. He writes it down gets
Speaker 2: the frequency, locks it down location. He assumes it's going
Speaker 2: to be gone. But that's not what happens, because the
Speaker 2: next night, the buzz continues to be back, same place,
Speaker 2: same rhythm, same everything. So let's fast forward, and now
Speaker 2: this buzz has now been heard continuously for more than
Speaker 2: forty years, Walter through the end of the Cold War,
Speaker 2: fall the Soviet Union, the rise of Putin sanctions, and
Speaker 2: you name it. It's all there, right, it's all coming
Speaker 2: to it. And this radio buzz has been there, and
Speaker 2: someone somewhere and Mother Russia is keeping it alive. And
Speaker 2: this is the story of UBB seventy six. Okay, it's
Speaker 2: called the buzzer, and it drew a lot of serious
Speaker 2: attention in the early nineteen eighties by radio enthusiasts. And
Speaker 2: you know, a lot of broadcasters adjust their outputs, you know,
Speaker 2: you get low power. Nothing happens to this UVB seventy six.
Speaker 2: It doesn't mess with anything. It's constant and its tone
Speaker 2: has stayed almost consistent regardless of what's happening.
Speaker 3: So when.
Speaker 2: When all these people started giving it a name and
Speaker 2: the assusiasts started going crazy, everyone became obsessed with it, like,
Speaker 2: what is this what is this going to be? What
Speaker 2: is going to happen? And finally the station identified itself.
Speaker 2: The first call sign that people heard in the voice
Speaker 2: messages was something called u ZB seventy six, which was
Speaker 2: used sometime in the late nineties to the Earth Lead
Speaker 2: twenty tens okay. And as the years have ruled on Walter,
Speaker 2: the call signs of this thing have multiplied and people
Speaker 2: are looking for different meetings in it. For a long time,
Speaker 2: the buzzer never spoke. It just continued to buzz. But
Speaker 2: it changed on Christmas Eve, way back in nineteen ninety seven,
Speaker 2: out of this drone came a human voice, a Russian operator,
Speaker 2: reading a line of numbers and a single code word.
Speaker 2: And for a lot of listeners, you know, that's when
Speaker 2: everybody went crazy, well something different, right, looking for something,
Speaker 2: you know, different than what was just a buzzer. And
Speaker 2: the dominant theory was amongst these you know enthusiasts, was
Speaker 2: it was just a forgotten Soviet hardware from the Cold War,
Speaker 2: you know, just left running after the collapse. Right. But
Speaker 2: they don't read numbers, they don't do anything like this.
Speaker 2: This doesn't have any kind of intel to it. This
Speaker 2: is a living voice meant that there was somebody living
Speaker 2: behind it. It was actually alive. This radio signal. Somebody
Speaker 2: was on the other end of that buzz, watching the
Speaker 2: clock and king the mic, and it opened up. So
Speaker 2: through the two thousands, more voice messages started appearing, always short,
Speaker 2: always Russian, you know, always, you know, inside the digits
Speaker 2: of military style code words. And then many other transmissions
Speaker 2: started to follow that were recognizable, like the numeric groups
Speaker 2: code words. And what made it all, you know, very weird,
Speaker 2: was the texture of this stuff. These transmissions didn't sound
Speaker 2: like any kind of clean studio recording like what you
Speaker 2: have right or what the people at WABC or our
Speaker 2: listeners are listening to at WBC. You could actually hear
Speaker 2: just things bleeding through it and around the edges, you know,
Speaker 2: things moving on the desk, phones ringing, the muffled conversations,
Speaker 2: and then those types of noises started feeding more theories
Speaker 2: about all of this, that there was a digital generator
Speaker 2: that was sort of locked away in a rack, and
Speaker 2: then it started to move. It was a bunker in
Speaker 2: a bot with a human being and human operators popping
Speaker 2: in and out. And then June fifth, twenty ten showed
Speaker 2: up and the buzzer did something that it never did before,
Speaker 2: and all that time, from January of eighty three until
Speaker 2: June fifth, twenty ten, it stopped. The tone was gone static,
Speaker 2: just coming in all over the place, and the sneaknem
Speaker 2: came back. It sounded wrong, it was distorted, it was uneven.
Speaker 2: Listeners were starting to report background sounds spilling through all
Speaker 2: of this and through the frequencies. And it wasn't just
Speaker 2: a chair squeaking and the furniture scraping across the floor.
Speaker 2: I mean, it was all of this stuff was coming through,
Speaker 2: and they claimed they heard a woman screaming in the background.
Speaker 2: And just to make the whole thing kind of even stranger,
Speaker 2: there was a Cold war opera playing a fragment of
Speaker 2: Swan Lake from Tchaikovsky. It was all over what's now
Speaker 2: referred to as the Russian doomsday channel, and that signal
Speaker 2: of Swan Lake is indicative of something big happening in Russia. Now.
Speaker 2: A couple of years after that, a Russian student name
Speaker 2: Igor set out to find the source of all this. Wait,
Speaker 2: where are we going to locate this? No one's been
Speaker 2: able to find it. How can we triangulate the signal?
Speaker 2: Where the where's the location, okay, and he traced the
Speaker 2: origin of the signal to an abandoned military facility near
Speaker 2: a town called Pova Rovo, which is northwest of Moscow.
Speaker 2: Now they describe, you know, thick dust, paint, dead equipment,
Speaker 2: you know, sort of this, you know, run down military facility.
Speaker 2: And it was an old transmission logbook that they found
Speaker 2: there was sitting where operators might have actually recorded all
Speaker 2: this traffic. So everything about this place was completely off.
Speaker 2: So apparently one of the men feeding off of Igor's
Speaker 2: research rode a bicycle silently out of the surrounding force
Speaker 2: along the path that led nowhere. Another witness in that
Speaker 2: area found a woman in her forties shuffling past the
Speaker 2: fence with an empty baby stroller. No baby inside, by
Speaker 2: the way, no supplies, just an empty carriage rolling around.
Speaker 2: So who brings an empty stroller to a dead military
Speaker 2: outpost and why is this thing here? So by the
Speaker 2: time that people walked through all of this area around
Speaker 2: twenty ten, the triangulation suggested that a transmitter had shifted
Speaker 2: to another location outside of Saint Petersburg from Moscow, and
Speaker 2: it lined up with a western military of the district
Speaker 2: footprint for Russia's military, and the measurements briefly pointed towards
Speaker 2: another region near the Estonian border. And then after all
Speaker 2: of this stuff became military, the Internet started to discover it.
Speaker 1: And how long how long had it been on before
Speaker 1: the Internet started to discover this signal?
Speaker 2: Twenty fourteen?
Speaker 1: How many years?
Speaker 2: So it had been on forty years?
Speaker 1: Forty years this signal had been on, and then at
Speaker 1: some point we started we heard a voice. How many
Speaker 1: years was it on before we heard a voice?
Speaker 2: You heard a versus voice in nineteen ninety seven, so
Speaker 2: that would have been sixteen years, but eighty three to
Speaker 2: fourteen years? Excuse me?
Speaker 1: Is it possible that it was put on the air
Speaker 1: forgotten about somebody in Russia triangulated it, went to it
Speaker 1: and started to speak on the frequency.
Speaker 2: Is possible? Didn't happen? It has been what it's gone
Speaker 2: from place to place right place? Internet discorre Yeah. So
Speaker 2: after the Internet discovered it, there's various communities that showed
Speaker 2: up all over the place. You know, YouTube read it,
Speaker 2: I don't know, some Facebook stuff and yeah, right, but
Speaker 2: they started locating and there's like, why is this thing moving?
Speaker 2: Some of the hardcore people who were, you know, calling
Speaker 2: themselves buzzerheads, started decoding contest.
Speaker 3: Did they have swapped?
Speaker 1: Did they have their own sweatshirts?
Speaker 2: The T shirts? Actually it's funny. Yeah, they became this
Speaker 2: whole entire thing. So they started hijacking.
Speaker 3: Did you get one?
Speaker 2: No? I didn't.
Speaker 1: All right, now before you hijack the frequency, all right,
Speaker 1: you and I can always talk at eight hundred and
Speaker 1: eighty four eight nine two to two, two twenty two
Speaker 1: past the hour with Eddie Dragon from New Mexico, lives
Speaker 1: within walking distance of the Zoro Ranch. The Zoro Ranch
Speaker 1: with Epstein's secrets, Epstein's secrets, And now he's concluding the
Speaker 1: most astonishing mystery story I have heard in some time.
Speaker 1: A mystery signal in Soviet Russia, sending out a signal
Speaker 1: every second for years and years without id without explanation,
Speaker 1: until a voice appeared. And now it's moved, the signal
Speaker 1: move and it continues. It's a crazy story. Please wrap
Speaker 1: it up, my friend.
Speaker 2: So the trolls, you know, besides creating T shirts and all,
Speaker 2: they started breaking into the signal. The station started actually
Speaker 2: talking back. In twenty twenty four, they had a new
Speaker 2: kind of visitor, a hacker right, and a guy comes
Speaker 2: in and he says, can I tell you a joke
Speaker 2: in Russian? Of course, he says one buzz for yes,
Speaker 2: two for no, and the station actually buzzed back two buzzes.
Speaker 2: Then it said he asked him, can I play a song?
Speaker 2: Two buzzes another note. So these were responsive tones that said,
Speaker 2: and for the first time after nearly half a century,
Speaker 2: indicated that there is definitely somebody there. Now there's theories
Speaker 2: behind all of this stuff, and it's important. They just
Speaker 2: thought it was a number station away for the Russian
Speaker 2: military to send, you know, encoded instructions to units in
Speaker 2: the field or see or wherever they can pick it up.
Speaker 2: Because remember a short wave, so it bounces and it
Speaker 2: goes everywhere. Two five. But that particular signal has been
Speaker 2: mostly dismissed as a number station because it doesn't behave
Speaker 2: as such, it doesn't follow what's called a five digit
Speaker 2: structure in most number stations. There's another theory that it's
Speaker 2: a channel marker, which is a constant signal that reserves
Speaker 2: that frequency and allows military units to check reception before
Speaker 2: a real message goes out. So if the buzz is cleaned,
Speaker 2: the line is live in that type of setting. The
Speaker 2: rotating call signs and occasional relocations make sense, right, But
Speaker 2: the new districts, the new hubs, new hardware don't necessarily
Speaker 2: indicate that it's that. But we do know that it
Speaker 2: has been used in that way. But that doesn't even
Speaker 2: kind of come full circle on this and what it is,
Speaker 2: because you'd have to go back to fourteen years to
Speaker 2: the first time it happened nineteen ninety seven. This is
Speaker 2: the first you know, documented in the early eighties. But
Speaker 2: it doesn't transmit any voice messages, which is exactly what
Speaker 2: that military line would actually do. Now here's the what's
Speaker 2: called a dead hand theory. Walter So During the Cold War,
Speaker 2: the Soviets explort systems that could trigger a nuclear counter
Speaker 2: strike hence the name doomsday if their central command was destroyed,
Speaker 2: a fail safe network designed to ensure that the regime
Speaker 2: could reach back from the grave and transmit messages. This
Speaker 2: apocalyptic version, if you will, this theory, and most experts,
Speaker 2: including people who follow this station obsessively, have dismissed the idea.
Speaker 2: But the shortwave, given that they're relied on, it is
Speaker 2: all too reliable over the years, despite it being noisy,
Speaker 2: despite it being vulnerable to outages. It has been consistent
Speaker 2: the entire time. But in all of it, it's stayed consistent.
Speaker 2: And during that entire time, from the end of the
Speaker 2: Cold War, you know, nineteen eighty four to today, there's
Speaker 2: been no missiles, no mushroom clouds, so it's actually never
Speaker 2: been tested.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: The decision to restore that buzz and put it in
Speaker 2: different places shows you that it's active and it's listening,
Speaker 2: and there is definitely something behind it. Obviously that is
Speaker 2: of course the Russian government. But this buzzer Walter keeps buzzing,
Speaker 2: it keeps pulsing. It is alive today even as we speak,
Speaker 2: and occasionally people who are still monitoring it. You can
Speaker 2: monitor on the internet. It's a sort of interrupted by
Speaker 2: you know, cryptic Russian messages and voices. So the we
Speaker 2: know the frequency, we know where it's at, we know
Speaker 2: the pattern, we can plot the towers when they move,
Speaker 2: you can go to the places where.
Speaker 3: It's the frequency. What's the frequent four six two five
Speaker 3: four six five short wave on short wave radio? Yeah,
Speaker 3: and there's still a lot of enthusiasts. I actually have
Speaker 3: a shortwave radio myself.
Speaker 1: Oh, I I would have never guessed that I would
Speaker 1: have never guessed that you had a short wave radio.
Speaker 1: I am let me just say, I am going to
Speaker 1: have to sit in a more comfortable chair. Thank you
Speaker 1: very much, Thank you very much, Eddie Dragon for being
Speaker 1: on the other side of midnight