The 5 Creepiest Unexplained Broadcasts

Every once in a while, people encounter things on their radio, TV, or interstellar wave detectors that no one can explain. Is it a secret military message? A prankster hacking just to see if it can be done? Aliens trying to contact us? Cracked has five cases that still haven't been settled. Take, for example, the case of UVB-76.
It is an irritating, electronic noise, not unlike the sound of a truck horn played through a cheese grater. It is broadcast over a certain frequency, constantly, and has been since at least 1982. But the weird part isn't the tone, but what happens when it stops.

In its 20-something year run, the sound has been interrupted only three times, the earliest known time being Christmas Eve in 1997. Each time a voice comes on and lists several Russian names and numbers before returning to the foghorn. The most recent occurrence was 2006, a mere three years before the time of this writing. It is clearly becoming more active after remaining quiet during the Cold War.

Link

My question is, if it is such an "irritating electronic noise", how would people know to listen in at those times, and why? Conspiracy theory, inside the conspiracy theory? Hmmm...
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AWWWW! the site is blocked here at work...tear**

someone copy and paste the article here in the comments :-) (can it be done?)

...you will be rewarded in heaven with tons of kittens and non stop great neotarama articles. <3

please???? someone?
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@SenorMysterioso

That's what I'm wondering about. If that's the case, it makes me less concerned about the broadcast, and more concerned about that guy who has been listening to it his entire life!
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UVB-76 creeps me out a lot more than the other ones, even though it's the lowest on the list. I don't know why...probably because there's something innately terrifying about the USSR's secret operationis.
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It is easy to Record these stations and then just look at them visually to see if there has been any change.

I used to do this for a company. i monitored 75+ different broadcasts of repetitive announcements and visually checked in on them once a day for problems.

The tech to do this has been available for over 30 years, and before that you also could have the sound waves printed to paper and backed up with analog tape.
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These are numbers stations. A spy relic from the cold war. Many countries still have them in place, including our own. You can usually find these signals between the spectrums. The common belief is that the send out information that's associated with a one-time-use pad. Once they use the numbers to decode the message, they can't use that pad any longer. There's a large collection of these listed under The Conet Project (The End Project, in Czech), which is a downloadable album that can be purchased from Amazon.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_stations
http://www.archive.org/details/ird059
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i was a Ham operator in the late 70s KA4BGX and i used to spend countless hours tuning thru frequencies and would find all these way out sounds very similar to the "backwards music" station. most of it was microwave repeaters for telephone transmission, some of it was locator beacons for air navigation. you could tell what it was by the frequency. the one thing that used to baffle me was what i called the quacker. it was in the 6500khz upper side band, similar to the aforementioned backwards music and was something of a turtle on a fence....a signal that shouldn't be there.
sounded like a duck. quack quack quack nonstop. never figured it out.
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I have a shortwave radio and have always been interested in these types of mysteries.
I have heard the "quacking" on the 6500khz that Johannesburg Jay mentioned. I had found that by accident.

There is one that comes from Laguna Pueblo in my state, and that one is Yosemite Sam.
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