Stuff You Should Know - What is a Numbers Station?

Episode Date: August 7, 2014

If you think secretly coded messages sent via short wave radio is Cold War relic, think again. Chuck and Josh are here to dispel that myth, along with many others relating to numbers stations, including why they might still be operational. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Munga Shatikler and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-Pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too.

Just a Skyline drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And this is, oh, Jerry. And this is Stuff You Should Know.

One, four, two, five, eight. Can you say it in German? You speak German? Don't even jog me. Zwei, drei, fünf, acht, sieben. Now, can you do that in a little girl voice? You're just toying with me. Come on, do it.

No, you always make me play St. Pauli Girl. I'm tired of it. St. Pauli Girl. No, this is apparently even younger than the St. Pauli Girl. It's like a little girl, and it was a live little girl. Who? In the Swedish Rhapsody number station. It was a young, a little girl reading out numbers and letters in German.

Which makes it even creepier. Yeah. It's obviously very creepy. This is a very neat subject, so kudos to you for tossing this one out there. Well, I've been waiting for it to publish. I'd seen it in the calendar coming up and coming up. I'm like, come on and publish, and I think it published on Friday, greatest Tuesday. Get out of the oven.

Yes. And we're talking about it just as they are completing their decline. So we are on top of this. Well, I think that, well, we'll get into it. I think that's what makes it even more interesting is that it's still happening. All right. Numbers, stations. Numbers stations.

Yeah. Like you said. Both words are pluralized. It's a little clumsy. And numbers stations are, we should just come out and say. Their shortwave radio transmissions or transmitters making really weird, baffling is the best word for it, transmissions, and have been doing so apparently since at least World War I.

Oh, really? Yeah. Supposedly the first mention of a numbers station came from a German magazine in World War I. In World War II, they were in full swing, but apparently they somehow popped up first around World War I, which makes them some of the earliest shortwave transmissions in the world because shortwave radio didn't come around at least into commercial use until about 1920.

Yeah. World War I was a few years before that, if you'll remember correct. Yeah. That's why I didn't even think that that was possible. But like you said, World War II was when they were full swing. Yeah. They were in the Cold War and they've been dying out slowly ever since. But I think one of the neatest things is they are still, if you have a shortwave radio,

you can tune into a frequency and hear, beep, one, two, seven, five, eight. It's usually like some sort of tone. We should mention to Jerry of the future, you're supposed to leave that beep in because it's part of the numbers station. Yeah. It's a signal when we want something edited, but yeah, a number station, it's not always a beep. It'll just have some sort of, sometimes it's a bit of a song.

Yeah. Like this Swedish Rhapsody or the Lincolnshire Poacher, a British English, UK-ish folk song. Yeah. And I'm so scared of them whenever I see stuff like that. And the reason that they, the transmission starts off with a tone or a beep or a song is so you can, it alerts like, here comes the transmission. Right. And then hone in, make sure you get some good reception because the secret code is about

to be revealed. And that's exactly what everyone is pretty much in consensus on, that what comes after this and what is broadcast over these numbers stations are secret codes. Yeah. Again, like for the Swedish Rhapsody station, it is a little girl in speaking in German, reading numbers and letters, random, seemingly random numbers and letters, and then the transmission is over. And that happens like, or it used to happen, that's a defunct numbers station now, but

it happened on a fairly regular schedule. There's other ones, the Atencion station is a woman saying Atencion and then reading Spanish numbers and then repeating them over and over again and then going on to the next set. And everybody, no one can say for certain, but virtually everyone in the world from Cecil Adams at Straight Dope to the head of the UK's trade and industry agency say these are secret transmissions for spies. The whole basis of them was for espionage.

Yeah. And the reason why everyone is speculating that that is absolutely the case, which it almost certainly is, like we said, is because no government to this day has come forward and admitted this or owned this. It is all still technically speculation because you cannot point to a factual statement. The closest we've ever come is they finally got someone from the United Kingdom, a spokesperson. That was the dude from the trade agency. Oh, really?

Yeah. The exact quote is, people should not be mystified by them. They're not, shall we say, for public consumption. Yeah. And that's the only thing on record that any government has ever spoke about what these transmissions are. Right. So the idea that they are government transitions is the reason we have to speculate is because

the government's never claimed them. On the flip side, the reason everyone thinks that they are government-backed clandestine transmissions is because these are pirate radio frequencies, pirate radio transmitters. Yeah. My first thing was, like, just find one of these and look it up and find out what the deal is. Yeah, you would think so. They're totally unlicensed.

Nobody knows exactly where they are. They're illegal, technically. Yes, they're very illegal because they transmit over air traffic control frequencies. Well, that's a big one. And no one investigates them. There's no investigation into these number stations whatsoever. So the fact that the government won't say anything about them and the fact that the government isn't investigating these very blatantly out in the open weird baffling transmissions

suggests that, yeah, everybody's right, that these are government-backed transmissions used to communicate anonymously and in one direction to spies embedded in foreign countries. Yeah, I was about to call it a conversation, but it's really not. It's on the BBC documentary I saw. They called it a monologue. Right. You're just sending a one-way message. Exactly.

All right. Right after this break, we're going to talk a little bit about shortwave radio technology, the secret key to sending these messages. After this break. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikulur and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life.

In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology,

my whole world came crashing down. The situation doesn't look good, there is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, the key to this whole thing is sending a short way, like you might think in this day and age, why not just send a telephax?

No, why not send an email or, you know, surely there are safer ways to send espionage, this information, highly classified instructions to go kill the leader of a country perhaps. That's right, like if you want to activate Reggie Jackson to kill Queen Elizabeth. Kill Norberg? Yeah. Yeah. How would you do it in this day and age? You'd think an email would do it.

No. And you want to know who proves definitively that that is not safe or secure? Who? Jimmy Fallon. Edward Snowden. Yeah. If you use a computer, you leave a trace. It's virtually impossible to erase anything on a computer.

Yeah. If you think you have, then you haven't. Plus if you are, say, emailing somebody, you're transmitting what's supposed to be highly sensitive, even encrypted information over a network. That stuff can be captured, like go listen to it as your employer's spying on you episode. You can't do it. Like you can communicate like that, but you're leaving digital traces everywhere. The beauty of the shortwave radio transmission is that, again, it's anonymous and it's one

directional, but if you get caught with a shortwave radio, at least say back in the 60s or the 70s or something, it wasn't weird. It didn't prove that you were a spy. Yeah. You done just tuned an end to my stories. Exactly. I'm just listening to the BBC World Service. Shortwave energy, radio energy, it's all determined by the power of your transmitter.

If you've got a humongous transmitter, you can send, and it didn't need to be that big, but you can send a message, one way message to the other side of the world. The reason it can travel across the planet is because it's bouncing off of, it literally is bouncing off the ionosphere of the earth. Right. Well, yeah, of the earth. 50 to 375 miles up above our surface to the upper atmosphere and solar ionization creates an electrical charge, and that charge reflects that signal right back down to earth.

It's called a skywave or skip. Skywave. Skywave. Yeah. And that's why you can, with a seemingly pretty simple piece of equipment, I can send a message to the South Pacific. Yeah. From my bedroom.

Well, I don't know if I'd have one big enough for my, my bedroom's pretty big. I wanted to see how big these things were actually. You know, like if they say really big ones to send them further and further, like how big do they get? They get very huge. They can cover scores of acres. Oh, okay. A big shortwave antenna, which is why it can get very expensive.

But, so that's bigger than my bedroom. You can also use ones that are the size of your bedroom. It depends not only, like you said, on the size of the transmitter. It depends on the atmospheric conditions, too. Yeah, sure. The shortwave transmissions are received best at sunrise and sunset and no one's 100% sure, but it has to do with the ionosphere. And because that's where the northern lights are happening, that's where solar rays hit

the, hit the Earth's atmosphere and they, the atoms lose their electrons, I believe, so they become ions forming the ionosphere. And because this is constantly changing, you can't predict exactly how a shortwave radio wave will act, but you can kind of guess, well, this time the sun's least active or most active, whatever, it has some impact on that sky, what's it called, the sky, what? Sky wave. The sky wave. Yeah.

Effect. So you can communicate with somebody in a foreign country, right? Yeah. And not only can it not be tracked, it's very difficult to trace who sent that, where that transmission's coming from. It's impossible to trace who's receiving it. That's right. So you have no idea who in your country is getting this, which means that you're broadcasting

to anybody and everybody who feels like listening to this. A secret code, but the fact is, if you use the right kind of secret code, no one can crack it. So that brings up an important point because you would think also, you can hack into the most secure computer system on the planet if you're good enough as a hacker. So how in the world could sending a coded key like it's 1955 and you're trying to get your decoder ring from the red, was it the red rider? No, no, no, that's way off.

No, what was it? It was a little horse banana. No, no, no, I'm talking about in the Christmas story. Yeah. It was the little orphan Annie. That was the show? Yeah. I didn't think it was...

He didn't care about pirates and all that jazz, pirates and smugglers and all that jazz. He listened to little orphan Annie. And little orphan Annie... I'll take your word for it. I remember now. Do you? No, but I'll take your word for it. Dude, I'm telling you, it's little orphan Annie.

I will... Let's say I'm taking your word for it. Eat my hat. I don't have a hat on right now, but I would eat it if I were wrong. At any rate, you're not little Ralphie decoding the message from little orphan Annie, but it is actually the most secure way that you can send a secret message, is by creating a unique code that you know and have written down on a piece of paper, and your buddy knows who has it written down on a piece of paper.

You only use it once. That's kind of the key here. And then you destroy it afterward. That is still the most... It's unbreakable. So, what it's called is a one-time pad. The old one-timer. Because you only use it once.

And it is old. It's from the 19th century. Yeah. And it's still uncrackable. It is. And the reason why it's uncrackable is because you each have, like you said, you each have a copy of this code. But it's randomly generated, right?

So let's say you have the sheet of paper and the other person has a sheet of paper. And the sheet of paper says it's just like strings of random numbers, like four or five numbers long, and it's just totally random, and it just covers, you know, several sheets of paper. Well, you guys start at the same place. And when the person transmitting the message wants to encrypt it, they run their message. So say you guys have agreed, like, zero is A, B is one, C is two, et cetera. So you take that and you...

That'd be really bad. I know, dude. It is mind-boggling. Like, this is about as simple as cryptology gets in. It makes me bleed from my ears. Well, because all you have to do is agree on what's what. Right. You know, it could be anything.

Right. So you're agreeing on what's what, but you also have this randomly generated code. Sure. Key, right? So let's say I want to say, what up, Chuck? That's W-H-A-T-U-P-C-H-U-C-K. So that's 11 letters, right? So if you have your key and you're encoding it, you would use the first 11 numbers to

encode what's already encoded. So the W is, say, it's the number 22, right? And then so on. So there's a number assigned to each letter. Yeah. So you have that. And then you run it through this code, this randomly generated code. Yeah.

So you add that. And then so you have 20, 20, what did I say, 22? Yeah. And then, say, the first letter or the first number of this code is seven. So you have 29. Yeah. So that's what the little German girl reads on the air. 29.

Yeah. 52. 37. 18. So it means nothing to anyone else in the entire world except for you and the person who has the other copy of this code, since there's only two copies and you're only using it once. And you're going to eat it afterward.

Yeah. And the key is that it's randomly generated numbers. Yeah. Then it'll, theoretically, it will never be broken. Yeah. But I mean, that's just one example. So you could, you could have five precode rules to confuse someone trying to crack this code.

Right. Yeah. And they don't, it's not like the simplest code is this letter represents this number. This number represents this letter. It gets more complex than that. You could both have agreed upon a book. You have to kill a mockingbird. I've got to kill a mockingbird.

Right. Four, eight, 12, 90, 13, four means go to page four, 13 means now you're really going to page 13, ignore the four, then look at the 12th line, then look at the eighth word on that page. Right. What a, what a one-time pad would do is take that already agreed upon code and encrypt it even further. Yeah.

But the point is it doesn't have to represent letters. It can represent full words in a text that you've agreed upon. True. It can be like thumbing through this book, picking out all these various words to make a sentence. Right. The problem is that's its vulnerability as well. Like to, to get a copy of the randomly generated key that's used to encrypt this message.

Right. Yeah. You have to have some sort of contact with somebody. Yeah. So that's one vulnerability of it. Yeah. The thing is, is like depending on how long this is, as many numbers as there are, is as long as, is, is as many transmissions as you can transmit.

Yeah. Does that make any sense? No. Say it clear. So, so I said, what up Chuck? Yeah. That's 11. That uses the first 11 numbers on this key.

Right. But say there's 50,000 numbers on the key. Right. Well, we have a lot more messages we, I can send to you. Yeah. That, that we're going through the pad. Eventually though, we're going to use up this pad and we need to meet again so I can give you another randomly generated key.

At Kinko's. Yeah. That's the vulnerability of it. Yeah. Well, the other, well not a failsafe, but the thing that makes it even safer is a lot of times they would send and presumably are still sending dummy messages. So you don't even know if it's real to begin with and there are only so many person hours you can dedicate as a government to code crackers and they might be working on a code

that's not even real. Right. So you don't even know which transmissions are, are legit. And that, that is a proposal by a group called Enigma and we'll talk about Enigma right after this message because they're pretty awesome. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and

dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Mangesha Tickler and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. Lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast.

Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, cancelled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get

your podcasts. So Chuck, we were talking about enigma. I mentioned enigma. And enigma is this group of basically amateur radio people. Shortwave radio enthusiasts, they really get into this. Yes. It's a thing. And they started, this is pre-pre-internet days.

I think it was in the 80s, the late 80s, early 90s, that enigma first came around and kind of coalesced. And enigma stands for European Numbers Information Gathering and Monitoring Association. And basically, it was just a group of these people who had all, who had all, I think they reverse engineered that one, but they had all kind of started to talk or find each other and say, have you heard this weird transmission? And they're like, yes, I've heard that one. And you should check out this frequency on Tuesday nights at 8 p.m. because it transmits

this. And they suddenly realized there's this whole community of people out there. So they set up a newsletter. They started a naming convention. And they started assigning, collecting and assigning names to these different things. So like E designated an English-speaking numbers station. Right. S was Slavic.

V is Various, which encapsulates everything from French to Spanish. And enigma really took this thing and put it into understandable terms. And they are basically eavesdropping, or they were, eavesdropping on the spy community. Are they not doing that anymore? So enigma disbanded, I think, in 2000. And then almost immediately, another group came and said, well, we're in enigma 2000. We're going to carry this on. And that's pretty fortunate because they were around to put all this on the internet.

Before it was like you had to like subscribe to newsletters and have a shortwave radio. Now it's like you can just go on the internet and listen to all sorts of archives of these defunct numbers stations as well. Yeah. I mean, they're creepy sounding. I don't know. Like, it's kind of cool. I've got one for you.

We've talked about it before. Do you remember the Yosemite Sam transmission? Yeah. I'm convinced that that's just a person having fun. Well, let's play it. I like that one. I think it's full of info. It's cool.

It's coming from somewhere out in Albuquerque, in the desert in New Mexico. And it's been going since, what, like 2004? And what makes this one interesting is that it's not a code, it is just Yosemite Sam saying that thing. Well, then it's followed by that data burst, which they think is some sort of compressed information. Yeah. See, I don't believe it.

I think this is a shortwave enthusiast having a good time. Well, he's been doing it like, it's pretty sophisticated. It does it like over and over again, I think for 40 seconds and switches to the next frequency and it just goes through the band. Yeah. And then he's got a computer doing it for him. Maybe. If it is just some dude.

But either way, I like the Yosemite Sam. No, it's cool. But it's pretty, it's exemplar of a numbers station, of a numbers transmission. There's something that indicates that this is about to happen. And then there's the happening, the transmission of the secret code, whether it's digital in nature or whether it's spoken. And then there, it is ended by Yosemite Sam again or something like that. Yeah.

It's saying, here's the beginning, here's the information, here's the end. Now go kill Nordberg. Right. One of the other cool things about this is, and you know, when we were talking about surely there's better ways, and the government could theoretically shut down the internet. They could zap satellite transmissions, they could shut everything down. This is almost unstoppable. You can't shut down shortwave radio, I mean, I guess you'd cut power maybe.

Yeah. Well, no, supposedly, no, I mean, yeah. And then I guess if people have batteries though in their shortwave radio, the one way to combat it is called jamming, frequency jamming, and basically it's just broadcasting on the same frequency that these other transmitters, the number stations are transmitting on. And so if you're broadcasting within your country, you're probably going to reach those shortwave radios better than somebody on the other side of the planet's transmission well. And so apparently Russia spent billions, or the Soviets spent billions of dollars during

the Cold War jamming frequencies from all sorts of different transmissions. And they'd play things like the sound of seagulls or random beeps or whatever. And it was just to prevent people from transmitting into Russia. But even with all of that money and technology mustered or marshaled against it, they still weren't entirely successful, like shortwave radio transmissions get through. It's just too big to fight. Yeah, you can't jam the entire frequency of all shortwave, like every single frequency. If you have ever heard the Wilco, remember Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, that album?

That was on the album at some point, I can't remember what song it, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot in a Woman's Voice, and that is a famous code. Was that from the KONNET project? No, I don't think so, but we should talk about that for sure. That was a project, and it was also, I guess in the Wild West days where you're talking about pre-internet, if people wanted to hear this stuff. Some people got together and put together a greatest hits sort of on CD with a lot of accompanying material about what you're listening to, and none of them obviously can't break

these codes. That's the thing I find interesting is people sit around listening to this stuff. But with no aim of cracking the code. I think some people do attempt to crack the code. It's impossible. Well, it's not impossible, and we should say with the reason why it's not impossible is because if you're using a computer-generated random number, a computer's not capable of truly generating a truly random number, because computers run on algorithms, and the algorithms

are designed to follow patterns, so they're just incapable of it. You could, especially today, a hacker could conceivably crack one of these, especially old transmissions. Yeah, but you still don't know what those numbers stand for, even if you find a pattern of numbers. Right, they're still an agreed upon thing that you would have to figure out, but it makes it possible. If you could crack that one-time pad key, then you have a real chance at deciphering

the message itself. Well, yeah, if you know what they stand for. But I still maintain if only you and I know what those numbers represent. Right. To kill a mockingbird page. Yeah, exactly. Well, you were saying the Connit project thing. Yeah.

So it's a 4CD compilation, and apparently I read an article from the time when it came out, which is the 90s. It was like perfect timing, because there was Y2K going on, there was millennium angst, there was the X-Files, and this thing came out in 1997. And Salon wrote an article on it, and this guy who wrote it was like a music-concrete aficionado. Oh, man. So people appreciated it, not just for the fact that it's like recordings of real live

spy transmissions. Yeah. But some people liked the kind of avant-garde noise that it had going on, too, in the compilation. The flaming lips are currently planning an album composed of nothing but messages from number stations. Number eight? There's a movie that exists that I had never heard of called The Number Station. I hadn't heard of it either.

Yeah, I don't think it was released. It set us from 2013. Yeah. I know most movies that are released, it probably went straight to video or something. I watched a trailer today, it's John Cusack and Malin Ackerman, and they work at a number station, and he's to protect the number station, but something bad happens, and they're compromised, and is who he says he is, and is she who she says she is? Right.

Who knows? You'll have to rip that turkey to find out. Did it look bad? Yeah. Sure. It looked pretty bad. Sorry, John Cusack. Yeah.

So, I think one of the most interesting things about number stations is that, like you said, they peaked during the Cold War right when the Berlin Wall fell, and then in the few years after that, the number of transmissions supposedly just dropped off dramatically, although I did see in at least one place that supposedly they increased, but I didn't see that supported anywhere else. But the idea that they're still around at all in 2014, that there are still number stations transmitting gibberish really says a lot, so it says a couple of things, and you've already mentioned one.

It's possible they are just transmitting gibberish to throw off anybody listening. Yeah, this one. To basically just kind of sap their resources. Right. Like, keep them, Rusky's busy listening to our gibberish. Right. Sure. And they're keeping them going in case they need to use them again.

I think that's totally the reason. In which case, that's pretty smart because you're not showing your hand like where all of a sudden an inactive radio station suddenly starts up again, indicates activity, or it's been doing the same thing for 10 years, and on year seven, it actually transmitted a real secret message, but it seemed just like everything else in those 10 years. Yeah. You're doing some pretty good spy craft there. Yeah, or just to keep that, like you may not be actively using it, but just to keep

that a method relevant, like if you quit doing something, it's going to die off, no one's going to know how to do it anymore. Sure, yeah. So, just keep those people working, and they may not even know if they're transmitting real messages or not. I would guess if you're just saying, oh yeah, yeah, if you just hand them a sheet of paper and it's just, yeah. In fact, that may be a pretty safe way to do things.

Sure. It's like the person with the nuclear key. Yeah. Just a test. Who knows. Is this war games? We'll find out in 30 minutes. There are also other theories that they are, and I think some of this does go on, maybe

drug runners, using stuff like this because some of them are less than professional, apparently the ones from Cuba or Cuba, sorry, Jerry, are a little comical. Well, they were renowned for just having really bad slip ups, especially during the Cold War. Like you'd hear people talking and laughing in the background or an accidental transmission of a radio station. Right. Radio Havana, right? Yeah.

So, they were kind of known for not being too skilled at it, but I imagine the drug runners are the same. Yeah. It's virtually the same thing. I mean, there's absolutely no reason why drug runners couldn't also use this alongside the espionage community, too. Yeah. There's might be A's, one, B's, two, and they get the message says, Chipman of Kilo's

coming in Miami Beach tomorrow night. Right. Let's go get him. Kill one. I'm one. But I do think there may be a little bit of that. I think it's a mixed bag of why they're still being broadcast. I think there are enthusiasts that are probably just doing their own thing for fun.

Yeah. That'd be fun, man. If I was in Guam and I could send you a private message via shortwave. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I thought you meant people who are just doing it just to mess with like the enigma community or something like that. I think that probably happens, too. I bet you it's all kinds of things.

Yeah. I'm sure you're right. There's one guy out there, trust me. There have been some actual spies who have been busted in this century long after the Cold War who had shortwave radios and one-time pads in their apartments or houses. Apparently in 2011, in Germany, a couple who'd lived there since 1988 and were spying for the Russians were caught in the act of receiving a number's transmission in their home when they were apprehended and busted for spying.

I can see that scene. He's got like one headphone up and he's holding it with his hand and he's writing something down in pencil and his wife's trying to eat it really quick, spit it out, spit it out. In 2001, Anna Montez worked for the U.S. Civil Intelligence Agency and she was convicted of spying for Cuba. When they searched her home, they found a shortwave radio and a code sheet. So yeah, I mean, it's still going on, man. I think it's pretty neat.

Yeah, I do, too. Like it's old school, but almost foolproof. Yeah. The big vulnerability is getting the randomly generated key to the spy. Yeah. And they also point out in the article, who wrote this one, by the way? Nathan Chandler. Nathan points out that these days you're likely, your one-timer might be sent to you, maybe

digitally somehow, but it doesn't tip anyone off necessarily. Yeah. I'm not quite sure how. Yeah, I would think if you're being watched, then an email with a lot of random numbers might tip someone. Right. Well, it used to be, they'd print them on the kind of paper that dissolved quickly or burned and left no ash or whatever.

Right. You don't have such a tiny piece of paper yet to use a really good magnifying lens to read it. Yeah. And you could hide them in like a walnut shell or something like that. Oh, wow. Who knows what they're doing now? Yeah.

But they are doing something. Yeah. I'd like to, I thought about getting a short, I was a little bit inspired, but then I thought, oh man, I've got so many other things to do. I don't know if I could do, fall into their rabbit hole. So that's numbers stations. If that piqued your interest, just type in numbers stations into your favorite search engine and it will lead you down the rabbit hole of shortwave radio.

Did you say rabbit holes ever I got that from? I said rabbit hole, but I didn't invent it. No, I know, but it just popped up in my head. Yeah. It wasn't my own invention. And I think if you have a shortwave radio, you probably tune into these anyway because you're just into that lifestyle. But I think there's a website called spy numbers where you can actually find the frequencies

and just go right there and you don't have to search for them. Right. And if you want to read this article, you can type the words numbers stations in the search bar at howstuffworks.com. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this a bit on sushi from someone in Japan. Hey guys and Jerry, he spelled Jerry right as well. Man, it's Jerry's day.

I enjoyed the sushi episode quite a bit and have something to add as a result of modern food production following World War II in Japan and of course the U.S. and elsewhere, the quality and traditional methods of making shoyu, miso and other Japanese food items sadly plummeted. For example, miso can be fermented in age a matter of weeks with the use of temperature controlled tanks where traditional dark miso would age up to two years. Same goes with other fermented products like shoyu. Miren no longer a sweet rice cooking wine is practically sugar water.

Speaking of sugar, modern Japanese food wouldn't exist without it. Umiboshi, the sour, salty, pickled plum is lousy with artificial color, sugar and refined salt. They're still good. As much as I loved Japanese food and culture, it's quite heartbreaking to see these centuries of traditional food processing supplanted by the Japanese version of a Twinkie, chemically made in process. As an alternative, there are good quality Japanese products to be had, particularly those imported

from Eden Foods, which is high quality, organic and widely distributed. Is this the president of Eden Foods? I don't know. Are they based in Alameda, California? Sounds like it. That is from Lear in Alameda, California. I meant to mention to you, I had the worst sushi I've had in my life the other day. Oh no, where?

I'm not going to say it, but I'm not going back. I'll tell you off air. Yeah, please do. I don't think you wouldn't go there anyway. It was the rice was gummy and really gummy to the point where I ate it, just because I was starving and I ate it really fast, and I was like, oh, this kind of gummy. Then afterward I was like, man, that was terrible. Yeah.

Did you say that to yourself and like you smiled and your whole mouth was coated in rice? It was gross, man. I was ticked off afterward after I paid the bill and complained the whole way home to Emily. I should have said something because that was like they should have known they shouldn't have served that rice. Well, why didn't you say something?

Because like I said, I just shoved it in my face hole and left and complained afterward, which is used. That's how I do things usually. I don't like to make a scene. I just like to play the martyr afterward. I've talked about that gummy sushi for two days. Yeah. Oh, it was that bad.

Yeah. The fish and stuff was good, but that rice was just very subpar. They should have known better. Okay. Well, tell me where it is afterward. I will. Okay. If you want to, I guess, inadvertently or quietly, clandestinely promote your business

like Leer did with his eating foods. Subversively. Yeah. Yeah. You can tweet to us at S-Y-S-K podcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com.

For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. I'm Munga Shatikular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas

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