Spies and Lullabies
In part two of the ghost radio station story, we dive back into the apocalypse, . Did the earth survive the spirit station’s computer crash? What do the scary signals mean?
In the concluding chapter, we intercept more number station transmissions and try to decipher one of the signals. We encounter spies, secrets and terrifying lullabies.
Guests:
We’re joined by the wildly popular host of the Cold War Conversations podcast, Ian Sanders.
We’re also joined by Josh Nass, call tag KI6NAZ, of the #1 Ham Radio Youtube Channel, Ham Radio Crash Course.
Marie Roeder - Journalist and Podcaster.
We are also joined by friend of the show, Susan Lee.
Mindbender is a show that searches for secrets - the secrets of magicians, tricksters, spies and death. It’s a new podcast genre: magic audio. It fuses principles of magicians and mentalists like David Blaine and Derren Brown, with historical nonfiction shows like Hardcore History and Radio Lab. If The X-Files was a true-life podcast, it would be Mindbender.
If you like this episode, please tell a friend. <3
Visit Mindbender.run to subscribe and learn more.
Visit Vlad’s blog, vladdit.com to learn more about the host.
Transcript
Previously on Mindbender chapter One of Spirits in the Airwaves, we discover number stations.
[:Three. Five.
[:An eerie phenomenon invisibly surrounding all of us.
[:Communications vast shortweight radio transmissions.
[:Born on the battlefields of World War.
[:I.
[:Raised by the cold hands of Soviet American hostility.
[:Yankees, whiskey, tendo.
[:And now strange orphans haunting the globe, singing their mysterious song.
[:He's just a disembodied voice, the product.
[:Of the Cold War. A theory emerges that they may be a trigger for nuclear war transmission.
[:If they stop transmitting, then the Soviet submarines know to launch their nuclear weapons of message.
[:Welcome to Mindbender, a show about audio that shouldn't exist and the stories behind it. My name is Vlad. This is part two of the Spirit series a Spy in Our Ranks.
[:Last time, while listening to German numbers station G Six, their computer crashed. It would be a sick irony if a computer crash brought upon the apocalypse, but then the world didn't end. And listening to the archives of number audio, there are many examples of systems crashing, computer errors, feeds shutting down. Number station tech support must be very busy. And the dead hand is probably not a very good theory, but it doesn't answer what they are. They're taunting us like a real life Bond villain.
[:And why would these Cold War relics still be transmitting today?
[:Well, I guess it depends who you ask. I mean, there's Cold War 2.0 going on.
[:This is Ian Sanders, our resident Cold.
[:War expert and host of the Cold War Conversations podcast.
[:I think they do still exist. I mean, it's a very low tech way of communicating with an agent in a secure and untraceable fashion.
[:Agent as in spy?
[:And okay, you've got the Internet, but almost everything can be traced through the Internet. Whereas unless somebody knows how the code is that's generating the numbers from the number station, it is completely secure and untraceable.
[:The kind of interesting thing about that.
[:Is we're tuning into ham radio operator Josh NASS. Calltag ki six. Naz.
[:The Cold War yes is over. But that doesn't mean that country's desire to know intimate details of what other countries are up to has gone away. That's never going to go away. So the fact that we don't have this kind of soft aggression against another country, in the case of Russia versus the United States, that doesn't mean that other countries still don't also want secret access to things that other countries know and want to keep tabs on them. Right? I think it's reasonable to assume that that's never going to go away. So things like number stations will probably be around for a long time.
[:Every number, every language, every song is a signal to spies. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor.
[:Paul and Patty know this no matter where they go or what they do, they always try to remember what to do if the atom bomb explodes. Right? Then it's a bomb. Duck can cover Sundays, holidays, vacation time. We must be ready every day, all the time, to do the right thing. If the atomic bomb explodes. He did what we all must learn to do.
[:This is where the journey started. I spent hours, days listening to these mysterious messages. All I wanted to know was what do they mean? First I called my friend Susan, who lived in Germany for a few years and might be able to understand what the clip is saying. It was recorded in 1990 to a German number station.
[:Can't tell. I mean, they're singing or something. It's something rhythmic, but I can't tell what it is. It's a song because you can hear the up and down, the you know, the rhythm of it, which in the beginning I was like, they're chanting something. They're saying something. What are they saying? But they sounded almost too slow or drunk or muffled. That's why I was like, yeah, I don't know.
[:Maybe playing the clip backwards would give us some clarity.
[:No, it could have had that sort of like, hey, I'm going to do a human sacrifice thing. But that's not what I felt necessarily. It did sound a little spooky.
[:We spoke for a while longer, but really didn't come any closer to figuring out the message. This story would require someone with a little bit more fluency in German and some more cultural context as well. I connected with a woman named Marie who grew up in Germany and was my first solid lead.
[:My name is Marie. I am 27 years old. I grew up in Berlin and I work as a journalist and recently also have been working in podcasting. There's always this idea of East Germany and East Berlin. People didn't have access to a lot of things, a lot of goods that were completely accessible in the west. There's this weird picture that people always stand in line in the east waiting for anything. And obviously I know the stories of my parents that when the Wall came down, they actually lived right at the Wall. From their apartment, they could see over to the east and they tell the story about how amazing this feeling was when suddenly the Wall came down. It was something that, I don't know, they didn't really see coming for them. They just grew up with thinking, that's how it is, that's how it's always been and that's how it's going to be. And then suddenly there were people in in Berlin and the bars that they used to go to and mingled with them. And they always say it was an amazing time, like right after the Wall fell. I couldn't understand words, but the melody is if I'm not mistaken, it's like a children's song.
[:A children's song?
[:Yeah, I think so.
[:At this point, I sped up the clip and it really started to come to life.
[:Okay, I think it is the children's song now. Thinking that it might be this. I feel like I understood even, like, the words. And it's the lyrics of this children's song. I think it's Alamana. Ancient. All of my ducks. It's like a one line, very popular children's song. Everybody learns it. It says, all of my ducks are swimming on the lake and their head is inside the water and their tail is in the sky and usually sounds much happier. This one is very scary. Very scary version.
[:A spy message hidden in the words of a German children's song. Here's a happier version to compare to. Now let's match that up to the number station audio.
[:I shrink in the room
[:636-466-3646.
[:While listening to Marie's story about the fall of the Berlin Wall, I realized an important detail about the nursery rhyme transmission. It was the very last one on that station. Just a few months later, the Berlin Wall was toppled and Germany reunified. Maybe the message was to spies the ugly ducklings sent out to sacrifice everything and live a life in hostile lands. Or maybe it's just a kid sitting in a cold bunker in the middle of Delaware, day after day, transmitting random numbers, the only other human voice they hear. Then one day, the kid learns that the cold war is over and they take over the transmission. And in their final act, a moment of defiance. They play a nursery rhyme that they sang as a kid. Not because it means anything to spies, but because it means they get to go home to see the person that they haven't in so long. That taught them that very rhyme. It means they finally get to see mom. Thank you for listening. I have been glad and you have been a pleasure. If you like this show, please tell a friend visit Mindbender run. To learn more, to subscribe and not miss a single episode, and to visit my website, please go to ladith.com. That's Vladbit.com. Here's a question for you how can balloons be scary?
[:Find out on the next Mindbender in our very first fiction episode. See you next week.
