Long before podcasts and streaming, people were already tuning into some of the strangest content imaginable: anonymous voices reading strings of numbers over shortwave radio. These so-called “numbers stations” have gone from obscure intelligence tools to recurring characters in music, films, games and internet folklore.
This article looks at how mysterious transmissions – especially numbers stations – escaped the world of spies and hobbyists and became part of popular culture.
What are numbers stations, and why are they so odd?
A numbers station is a shortwave radio station that broadcasts formatted groups of numbers, often read by an automated or synthesised voice, sometimes sent as Morse or digital tones. The most widely accepted view among researchers and intelligence historians is that they are (or were) used by governments to communicate encrypted instructions to agents overseas, usually decrypted with a one-time pad.
They are unusual because:
- No government has ever formally admitted running one, despite decades of monitoring by hobbyists.
- Many have distinctive “signatures”: interval tunes, tones or voices that make them instantly recognisable.
- Anyone with a basic shortwave receiver can listen; the content is clearly artificial, but the meaning is opaque.
That combination – obvious human intent, global reach, and complete mystery – makes them perfect raw material for stories.
The Conet Project: turning secret signals into an album
For most people outside the radio world, numbers stations first came to attention through The Conet Project: Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations, a multi-CD release of numbers-station recordings assembled by Akin Fernandez and released by Irdial-Discs in the late 1990s.
The collection pulled together around 150–170 recordings made by shortwave enthusiasts worldwide and packaged them with detailed liner notes explaining what listeners had discovered about each station.
Even more important for popular culture, those recordings were sampled in:
- The film Vanilla Sky (2001)
- Wilco’s album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2001), where snippets of numbers-station audio appear between tracks
- Later works including the 2022 survival-horror game Signalis, which uses Conet material to reinforce its cold-war, radio-mystery atmosphere
By treating obscure shortwave captures as “found sound” worthy of an album, The Conet Project effectively launched numbers stations into the wider culture.
The complete Conet Project release, including around 170 recordings and the original booklet, is legally available to stream and download via Archive.org’s Conet Project collection, which also links back to background material on the album and its creator Akin Fernandez.
The Lincolnshire Poacher and other “celebrity” stations
Some stations became famous enough to be characters in their own right. One of the best known is “The Lincolnshire Poacher”, nicknamed after the English folk tune it used as an interval signal. Before each transmission, it played a snatch of the melody, then switched to a female English voice reading groups of five numbers.
Amateur direction-finding linked the station to RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus and it is widely believed to have been operated by the British Secret Intelligence Service. It appears to have run from the 1960s until 2008.
The Lincolnshire Poacher has since turned up in:
- A BBC Radio 4 documentary, Tracking the Lincolnshire Poacher, which explored the wider world of numbers stations
- The BBC fiction podcast The Lovecraft Investigations and the TV series Truth Seekers, where the station’s tune and style are used as eerie plot devices
- A Torchwood audio drama built around the idea of a mysterious signal known as “The Lincolnshire Poacher”
Here the station functions almost like a legend: a real signal with speculative backstory, reimagined in different genres.
Another long-running mystery transmitter is the Russian station commonly called UVB-76 or “The Buzzer”, known for its repetitive buzzing tone punctuated by occasional voice messages. It has been active, on and off, since the late Cold War and is believed to be part of a Russian military communications network.
A concise technical timeline of UVB-76’s frequencies, call signs and notable voice transmissions is maintained on Wikipedia’s UVB-76 entry and in the HF Underground UVB-76 wiki, both of which aggregate years of listener logs and open-source analysis.
Recent reporting has highlighted how Russian state media and online communities have leaned into its “Doomsday” image, using its cryptic messages as raw material for nuclear-themed speculation and propaganda, even though experts still view it as a routine communications link.
Numbers stations on TV, in games and in fiction
Because numbers stations are so distinctive and easy to dramatise, they appear frequently in television episodes, novels and games. A curated list maintained by HF Underground documents dozens of appearances. Examples include:
- Fringe (Season 3, Episode 6 – “6995 kHz”), where a mysterious numbers transmission triggers amnesia and hides coordinates linked to a larger plot device.
- Various thriller and horror novels that use shortwave numbers as a backdrop for conspiracies or supernatural events.
- Indie games and ARG-style projects that incorporate fake numbers-station audio into puzzles or world-building.
Many of these works play on the same core ideas: anonymous voices, unknown locations, and the suggestion that a tiny radio in your home might be a window into something vast and hidden.
Why mystery transmissions still resonate
From a technical perspective, there is nothing exotic about most numbers stations: they use ordinary shortwave transmitters and simple modulation modes, and can be received on cheap radios.
What keeps them interesting – especially for radio hobbyists, history buffs and preppers – is the contrast between the simplicity of the technology and the opacity of the messages:
- Global reach from basic gear: a basic shortwave set lets you hear signals likely linked to real intelligence or military networks.
- Clear intent, unclear meaning: the voices, intervals and schedules are obviously deliberate, but their purpose is rarely confirmed.
- Evidence without explanation: direction-finding, leaked documents and historical analysis give partial clues, but rarely a full official story.
For many listeners, that makes numbers stations and other mystery transmissions a kind of live, ongoing folklore: signals you can still tune in yourself, sitting halfway between documented history and unresolved story.
For readers interested in the intelligence and historical angle, a detailed article at War on the Rocks, “Explaining the ‘Mystery’ of Numbers Stations,” summarises what declassified material and expert research say about how these stations have been used, and links out to further resources such as Priyom.org and the numbers-stations.com CIA CREST archive of relevant FOIA releases.
As long as there are high-frequency bands, government users and curious listeners, it is likely that some form of odd, unexplained signal will continue to haunt the airwaves – and to appear, sooner or later, in the background of films, albums and stories.