This Paranormal Life - #255 Ghost Radio - The Mysterious Number Stations

Episode Date: March 22, 2022

In the mid-1970s Number Stations captured the imagination of thousands of radio enthusiasts around the world. Mysterious sounds and messages broadcast from seemingly untraceable locations around the world begged the question: who's sending these messages? And who are they for? As Kit and Rory investigate, they find that number stations aren't the only mysterious paranormal signals detected throughout history...Buy Official TPL Merch! -  thisparanormallife.com/storeSupport us on Patreon.com/ThisParanormalLife to get access to bonus episodes!Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and YouTubeJoin our Secret Society Facebook CommunityAdvertise on This Paranormal Life via Gumball.fmEdited by Kami TomanResearch by Amy GrisdaleIntro music by www.purple-planet.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do octopuses have eight arms or eight legs? And what about for spiders? Answers to these questions and more on this episode of This Paranormal Life! Welcome back to This Paranormal Life, the weekly comedy podcast where every Tuesday, me, Kit Grimmelvenna, Rory Pars, who's sitting across from me, we both investigate a different tale and get to the bottom of whether it's truly paranormal or not. How are you doingner, Rory Pars, who's sitting across from me. We both investigate a different tale and get to the bottom of whether it's truly paranormal or not. How are you doing today, Rory? Sorry if I was a little delayed coming in on the introduction there. That sentence really

threw me because I don't think it is a proper sentence. What about for spiders? Did you not listen to the first bit? Well, I know, but it's just a weird that's a weird sentence, right? So we need to know whether octopus have sure eight arms, eight legs. And what about for spiders? You must listen. You must be able to hear what you're saying and understand how weird

that sentence is. What about for spiders? Am I the only one that thinks that's a weird sentence? Do they have eight arms or eight legs, bud? Just legs, right? Do you know that for sure? I think they're referred to as spider's legs. But don't they walk on them? Sure, like legs.

Yeah. But they also like grab shit with them, like arms. Now you're throwing me. Are the ones at the back legs and the ones at the front are arms? We need to break into the Museum of Natural History, grab the nearest guide we could find and say, what about for spiders? What about for spiders, asshole? And he calls for security, says not again.

We really need to set the record straight because people are furious about this one. We think you're having a stroke. That's not a real sentence. What about for spiders, guys? Maybe I am having a stroke. That's not a real sentence. What about for spiders, guys? Maybe I am having a stroke. I thought it made sense. That hurts to hear that it doesn't, given that I need to present words for the next hour.

That's right. It is another episode of This Paranormal Life where we are going to jump into a new paranormal case. Roy, today's case takes place in January 1983 in Rotterdam in the Netherlands. 29-year-old Ari Boinder was a financial consultant. It was the weekend and he was unwinding late into the night listening to the radio. Wasn't much else you could do in 1983. Truly a different time.

Yeah, that was all the entertainment they had. That's kind of making me feel claustrophobic that's the only way you can unwind uh but hell maybe in 40 years when we're starting to gray maybe our children will look back and be like jesus i can't believe they had to just flick between snapchat tiktok instagram and twitter what a sad shit little existence right they'll be like did you know that uh back in the 2000s and 22s, my granddad used to come back from a hard day's work

and just scroll Pornhub for hours. That was the only entertainment they had back in the olden days. I guess it already sounds sad. So yeah, I guess they probably will think that. Yeah, it doesn't matter the year. The radio is starting to sound

pretty wholesome and cool, actually. He was turning the dial, looking for some banging music. If you want some banging music, can I direct your attention to Pornhub.com? Well, surely you go there to see the banging, not to hear the banging music. There's some good tracks on there,

I'm not going to lie. This is a show for families. We need to keep this clean. I apologize. Let's just bear that in mind as we go forward that this needs to be. We'll just keep the Pornhub references to the top of the show. Yeah. Okay. Sorry. Now, before Ari could land on a good station, an unusual broadcast attracts his attention.

What the hell is this? It was unlike anything he'd heard over the airwaves before. He couldn't stop listening to it. The rhythmic pulsing was hypnotic. What the hell is this? It was unlike anything he'd heard over the airwaves before. He couldn't stop listening to it. The rhythmic pulsing was hypnotic. But more than anything, it was mysterious. He glanced down at the frequency his radio was tuned to. Grabbing a pen, he scribbled it down.

4,625 kilohertz. He didn't want to lose this channel. He looked at his watch, timing a minute, 25 beeps in 60 seconds. He did it again, but he wasn't sure why. There was something just so intriguing about it. That's because around this time, there were probably two channels on the radio. One was just talking about world news and the other was just non-stop jazz playing for 24 hours a day. So if you can find one that's playing borderline medieval dubstep, you're going to rock out. You're going to want to remember that frequency. That's it. Everyone was looking for that new sign that they hadn't heard yet, namely, new metal.

But sadly, Limp Bizkit were years off at this stage, so he had to make do. He had three main questions. Who was transmitting this? Where in the world were they stationed? What was the purpose of it all? As we say, Roy, this was in the age before the internet, so there wasn't a book on this topic in the local library, no forum to search. So it was hard to gather niche information.

No pornographic websites to browse in your free time okay i mean it sure i like i know i respect that you didn't say porn hub this time which i just did uh but we'll just try and keep like the porn references it's just a little sure it just paints us in a weird light if we just keep talking about it so yeah it's like you know like like we don't want to seem like freaking sex fiends who just can't switch off that part of our brain. And as you said, it's like a family show. So it's like, keep it PG.

Keep it f***ing clean. Yeah, keep it clean. You're right. I didn't need to swear there. That was unnecessary. I'm glad you recognized that. That seemed weird. I'll just shut the f*** up then over here.

He may have been the first, but Ari wasn't the only person to have stumbled across the channel. Throughout the early 80s, fans of shortwave radio wrote into newsletters and magazines. Titles like Popular Communications and Monitoring Times were suddenly inundated with reports from, I mean, At this point, it's a sad state of affairs that because there's no Pornhub,

we have to start reading popular communications magazines. All right, well, now you're bringing up the hub, all right? So that's not on me. I'm just saying it might be not such a bad thing. Sorry, I'll cut that from the show. Reports are coming in from curious readers of these magazines from around the world. Soon, radio publications were following the phenomenon of this weird station,

and before long they'd given it a name. UVB76. Catchy. It quickly became known as... The Buzzer. Oh, that is catchy. More and more people all over the planet were stumbling across the frequency and paying rapt attention. Theories abound about what this mysterious channel could be.

Was it an accident of some kind? Surely not. Is it some form of communication? If so, from who? Could it be of extraterrestrial origin? Interesting theories. Now, I don't really understand how radio frequencies work. Presumably this isn't something that you can tune into

in any location in the world. Or can you? Is that how radios work? That's a really good point. I think it just depends on the strength of the frequency. Right. If it's only broadcasting

in a certain area. I would imagine that local radio would broadcast at a certain frequency and strength because it only has to at a certain frequency and strength because it only has to reach a certain area, whereas I guess that's why we have absolutely f*** off space telescopes

that can broadcast across many light years. Right, right, right. So it all comes down to power of the signal. I would think so. Okay. I would think so. Well, that makes it even more mysterious if this strange signal can be reached from a very far distance away

because it means someone is putting money and power into this thing. even more mysterious if this strange signal can be reached from a very far distance away because someone is putting money and power into this thing yeah like it would be weird if it was some kid with a like build your own radio kit that accidentally hooked it up to the power grid and it was reaching like sri lanka from dorset yeah little timmy hooked his walkie-talkie up to a car battery and suddenly scientists in Antarctica are hearing about him going poopy time. After a while, it became clear to Ari and the radio gang that it wasn't the exact same thing over and over again. The buzzer was switching it up from time to time. Sometimes the frequency of the beeping increased from 1.9 seconds apart to a huge 2.2 seconds apart.

There really wasn't a lot going on back in these days. Even something as small as that was enough to prompt hundreds of nerds to write into their favorite magazines to put forward theories. People were tuning in for hours on end, making detailed records of what they heard. This is like the closest thing to a live stream. Right, they're all tuning in, yeah, okay. Anything can happen, happen man the buzzer can go from 1.9 seconds to 2.2 this is this is insane this is what happens when you don't have

enough forms of entertainment you start to go loco and hyper fixate on just tiny weird little bizarre circumstances if i if I came home from work one day and I was like, Hey, I'm going to go check the internet. Cool. Internet's down. I guess I'll just play on my Nintendo switch. My switch is dead. Well, I can still browse on my phone. Oh, my phone is bricked. I would last about three minutes before I'd be vibrating in my chair, needing something to do and it probably would come out in a weird form like this where i'd just be like i wonder what happens if i put my head in the oven okay i wonder what happens if i lick my toaster you just start doing weird

shit you start doing experiments and you start examining random radio frequencies that you can pick up with a tinfoil hat. You're absolutely right. And this is exactly why governments want to keep us sedated with porn hub and sexy videos. That's why Biden personally runs porn hub to keep the American people. He personally curates the videos to keep people most sedated. When the people start rising up, they drop a new genre. They drop a new category.

And everyone's sedated once again. Because if people don't get distracted, they start plotting against the government. You think there would have been a French Revolution if they had had access to the category of Pornhub? Right. Do you really think that? Of course. How many revolutions do you think were stopped when they dropped

as a category? The only reason we made it through COVID as a as a species is because the internet didn't go down.

It's true. So these enthusiasts, they listened out for discrepancies in the buzzer's frequency, changes in the tone, or pauses in the broadcast. Before long, listeners began contacting one another directly to try and get to the bottom of this mystery.

But one day, the plot thickened, yet still raising more questions. The buzzer was suddenly interrupted by talking. Whoa! If you're in the middle of documenting the micro-frequency changes of the buzz, and then a podcast starts, you're going to be pretty f***ing startled. That's terrifying, because I was going to say, you know, let's address the elephant in the room. You'd think that maybe the beeping was some sort of Morse code.

Right, right. You know, discreetly being broadcast through the airwaves. But then if all of a sudden it stops and a voice is just like, all right, you guys weren't getting it, but it's Morse code. And I'm just going to say this shit now because you're taking too long. You're taking too long. It's a viral marketing campaign for the newest mission impossible. You happy?

You happy, you goddamn nerds? No one cracked it. That's really interesting. Wow, what a terrifying moment that must have been when someone starts talking to you through the radio. The speech was always live, only ever in Russian, and followed by one of three fixed formats, each so distinctive the buzzers' fans gave each its own name.

The first they called Monolith. These messages opened up with a four-digit call sign read out twice. Then the voice would read out five numbers or letters followed by a code word and eight more numbers. Huh. Let's check out an example recording of this. Olga, 7, Olga, Kostytn, 80, 17, 81, 54. Oh my God. This is the 1980s version of having to submit a verification code to get into your Gmail account. Right, yeah. Google was like, we just sent you a four-digit code. Can you broadcast that to us back on short-form radio?

This is a captcha, absolutely. It's like three, seven, alpha. There were zero pictures of the crosswalk. There were two bicycles in the top frame. Please let me access my Gmail account. There was another very similar format called Usor. And lastly, there was Komanda. Komanda transmissions are the least common, but maybe the most intriguing. Like the other formats, they open with a double call sign and with a four to five figure number, but in the middle are two words. Am lamina commander. The direct translation is team announced,

but I have no clue as to the significance of the phrase. Hmm. All right, well, if we break this thing down, it's safe to assume that the numbers and the letters and the code word at the beginning of each announcement is some sort of like verification process so that the person who's receiving the message or is intended to receive the message to check that it's in line with whatever secret code needed to be announced before the message to verify that it is an authentic message. Do we know that though? I mean why else would you just

say a bunch of random letters and then a secret code word at the start? As so many people were tuned in all over the world, there's an extensive record of weird and unusual signals that were transmitted over the years. It wasn't always Monolith, Usor, or Commanda. At one period, the buzzer was replaced with intermittent snippets of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. Okay. There have even been reports of the sound of a woman screaming caught on mic. In fact, I think we can listen to it right now. I don't know if I want to.

Did you catch it? I did catch it, yeah. That sounded more like a squeak to me than a person screaming. I don't know. But... I don't know. Now, none of this clearly points to a single, simple explanation for what's going on. Up to this point, the most popular theory was that this was a secret government presumably russian government channel being used to communicate with spies or agents around the

world right hell even sleeper cells got it got it and these codes are activating them i mean it would explain uh the mysterious coded messages it would explain the fact it's being broadcast over such a large radius like you said yeah but how could that explain the fact it's being broadcast over such a large radius, like you said. Yeah. But how could that explain the classical music or the sound of someone screaming, potentially, in the background? It would be really terrifying if you were, you know, a kid who had emigrated to the UK or America at a very young age. You grow up, you go through school, you have a wife, kids, beautiful house, great job.

And then one day you come home from a busy day at work and you're just going, huh, I wonder what's on the radio. And you just tune to this frequency and hear four, seven, apple, foxtrot. And then all of a sudden, your pupils roll back in your eyes and you stand up, pull two Uzis

that you've had apparently in your bucket for 14 years to the sky and go try and assassinate the president. Your wife is calling up like, sweetie, dinner's ready. And you're like, no time. Wife must destroy capitalism. Some thought this could just be some kind of boring test signal for any number of things. Others thought maybe just intercepting a variety of internal Russian military communications. Or maybe, most dangerously, some thought that the transmission is linked to a Russian missile system. That the buzzer is a dead hand signal that, if it's interrupted, would trigger a nuclear launch. Whoa. I don't know what a dead hand signal that if it's interrupted would trigger a nuclear launch whoa i don't know what a dead hand

signal is you get the gist i guess i do yeah it's uh very similar to i've brought up many times in the show before the tv show lost i believe it's not really a spoiler because the show is very old that well i've never seen it so tread. They discover an underground bunker and there is a command console in the bunker. And basically there's like some kind of hieroglyphic doomsday clock. And every like 17 minutes, a piece of code needs to be entered into the computer. Otherwise, the clock will go to zero and God knows what will happen. Got it. Taking that idea to UVvb 76 someone's broadcasting

the signal yeah and if it's ever stopped all hell will break loose that's a bad idea that's straight up a bad idea even based off my experiences the amount of cups of coffee i spill over shit is astronomical right no coffee allowed near the uvb 76 computer yeah who's to say that someone is just like all right tuning in for another day at the old radio station yep making sure everything's going uh but put feet up on the board sure and just mashing keys exactly i feel like uh there's a whole bunch of reasons that things could go wrong and end that signal. So it's not a good idea. It's very fair.

And to be sure, not necessarily what's actually happening. Of course, no point in speculating. The only way to know for sure is to track the signal down somehow and find out. That's why in 2011, a group of urban explorers went looking for it. I don't know if you can track radio signals. Maybe you can. It's a great point, which is probably why they were helped by many rumors surrounding where it was being broadcast from. I don't know if you can track. Maybe there is a way based on following the strength of the signal. Maybe there's a way of measuring that strength and then tracking it down. That's what I was thinking. It was rumored over the years to be broadcast from

several locations in Russia, moving over time for some unknown reason. Supposedly at this point it's broadcasting from outside Moscow. This group managed to track it down where they snuck inside the building they thought it was coming from. What? They say they found an abandoned military base that had a radio log confirming the transmission at the magical 4,625 kilohertz. Exactly the broadcast frequency Ari had discovered and they were looking for. But this place was completely dilapidated and very creepy. They said, As we descended into the basement of one of the buildings and ventured to a door that led outside of the area of the building,

when we opened it we were hit with a very vile chemical smell. It smelled acidic, I guess. Not prepared to die of poisoning, we turned back. In the room that was underground the building itself there was not much of interest a few desks and filing cabinets filled with more useless papers a few broken electronics and a bunch of other general crap do you want to see some photos of the place roy yeah i would love to i was going to say there was a lot of talk there about you saying these people claimed that they found it. So I was worried for a second that we weren't going to get any photographs.

So this is this is exciting. All right. Oh, well, no, here we go. OK, sorry, I'm not being very descriptive at all. So immediately when I started looking at these pictures, I'm like, OK, disused military base. You found a hut, guys. You found an old car garage with shit just smashed up

around the side of it. Then, the further down you scroll, sure, there's an underground bunker. This car garage is a pretty, pretty, pretty steep, pretty long staircase going into the center of the earth. And yeah, there are doors with massive valves

that would create some sort of airtight seal to protect whatever's inside with Russian inscription on the doors. And yeah, sure, there's dark pools of red liquid filling up the floor in mysterious darkness. Pipes and tubes and strange machinery poking out of the walls. Yeah, it looks like the place from my nightmares. Looking at these images is kind of like, wow, the new Resident Evil 9 looks great, man. This is very terrifying. Oh, shit.

That looks like a room from an insane asylum. Honestly, this is super bizarre. I would be pretty weirded out if I'd found this place too. Looks a lot like the Paran paranormal commune, I gotta say. This is pretty much exactly where you would expect the noises we just heard to come from. Yeah, yeah. Maybe the creepiest part of this group's story though is that on their way out of the base, they were interrupted by a middle-aged woman with a pram asking what they were doing there. Except,

there was no baby in the pram. Yeah, I figured. Yeah, I figured. Yeah, I figured as much. They believed she may have been part of a surveillance team that had been mobilized to keep an eye on intruders in case they found anything of significance. If you go to that blanket to see if the baby resembles its mother, it's the barrel of a gun.

It's a four-star general with a pacifier in his mouth, gun raised, saying, you should leave here. Now, that accusation might sound like quite the leap, but the anonymous explorers said the whole thing struck them as very odd.

After all, quote, who goes to an abandoned military base with an empty stroller for a walk? Yeah, that's a really good point. Now, Rory, in case all of this wasn't clear, the buzzer is still going today. What? It's broadcasting this very second. We can actually tune in to a YouTube live feed of the buzzer.

Oh, my God. That's crazy. There's literally a youtube live chat on the right hand side here a lot of cyrillic a lot of russian just people shit posting wow wow i didn't know it was still going to this day highly mysterious stuff uvb 76 in the modern age has come to be known as a number station a mysterious radio channel of unknown source. And I guess they're named for the fact that they often read out weird numbers for no apparent reason. UVB-76 is far from the only number station on earth, though. There are at least two more examples in Russia alone, one called the P and one called The Squeaky Wheel. They also broadcast

repeated signature signs and coded voice messages. It's also worth pointing out that there is a British one. Really? Which is called The Lincolnshire Poacher. Oh, for God's sakes, of course it is. Named after the jaunty little tune it plays before a voice reads out some numbers. One, five. Three, nine, seven.

One, five. I don't know why that shitty little flute tune is the most British version of this possible. It's so embarrassing. It's like, oh, there's this mysterious Russian signal called, you know, it's got its own code, but we call it the buzzer. And it's a secret number station. That will launch a nuclear weapon. There's also a British version nicknamed the piddly wink piddle wink little bottom and it's a mysterious flute

that plays at tea time and supper time and we think it's counting down the days to the Queen's Jubilee. Nonsense. But Rory, all of this got me thinking. It seems that clearly, despite a lot of fun theories, none of these number stations have paranormal sources, right? Yeah. But has there been any mysterious radio signal like this that did turn out to be paranormal? This led me to the wow signal.

Oh, I've read about this before. Rory, our second story of the episode takes us to August 15th, 1977. Jerry R. Emmen was at work at the Big Ear Radio Telescope, one of the largest on earth at Ohio State University. He was sipping on coffee, pulling readouts from the computer of the previous day's recorded telescope data. Sheets of thin line paper chugged out of the printer in a scattered mosaic of ones and twos, and the occasional three or four. So these numbers correspond to the intensity of a signal that's picked up out there in space. Yeah. So if zero is just the background noise of the universe after the Big Bang, one is a bit louder blip of background noise. Space is so wild that I wouldn't have been surprised if it was like

zero is the regular frequency at which the universe operates. One means it's all over, folks. It's the end of the world. We don't know what just happened, but it's coming to an end. We've never seen a one before. Yeah, you're like getting a tour of the big ear and you're like, wow, this is interesting. What happens if it ever hits one? It hit one?

No, false alarm, false alarm. I'll just ask you a question. Sorry, you can't say shit like one around here, bud. You're going to give everyone a heart attack. Three scientists sepulchro in the hallway in front of you. No, no, it didn't hit one. You look around the janitor and pulled a f***ing pistol. Thank you.

Man, put your weapons away. It's not a code one. Don't worry. F***ing hell, that's code one. What's code two two stop drinking so much coffee i know also be careful with that coffee be careful with that coffee because i imagine if that spills and the big ear goes down several nukes from across the the world will launch i'm imagining the big year is relatively sensitive to coffee. Yes. Like I say, ones, twos, the occasional three or four.

Now, in theory, this scale goes up to nine. And then anything above line would be represented by a letter. Jerry is scanning the paper as he always does. One of his volunteer shifts is printing out in a scattered row of numbers. It looks a bit like a game of Minesweeper. Two. One. Three.

Two. One. One. Four. Four. Four. Five. Four.

Three. Five. What the hell? He says to himself, Six. E. Q. U, J, five, six. Flame emoji, flame emoji. Alien emoji, demon emoji.

Jerry dropped his mug of coffee. Cat JPEGs, cat GIF! Cat GIF! Hot Joe and ceramic fragments flying everywhere. He grabbed a pen and circled the last six digits in red and wrote next to it, Wow. Wow. Oh, yeah. You gotta show me the wow.

Oh, yeah. Just showing Rory the actual picture of the printout. If you haven't seen this before, it's definitely worth taking a look at. In the paranormal world and the world of incredible mysterious space events, this is famous. I've even seen people who have this as a tattoo.

Oh, that's cool. Yeah, it's really cool. They have the wow. Which is kind of neat because his handwriting is really nice. It is really gorgeous. Also, it looks like the dot at the bottom of the exclamation point

was a little smiley face. I think that was accidental. It kind of looks like a face going, wow. It does. But yeah, this is a super iconic image. Very cool. It is very cool because it as you say i guess it's kind of come to signify something bigger than the moment itself it signifies that there could be something out there yeah it's like spotting the pattern amongst the noise you know

it's pretty cool that even the mysteries of the universe are broken down into numbers and math. That sounded like I was making a joke, but I genuinely think that is quite cool. You know, like the most incredible thing that human beings ever experience in their lives can be broken down to like, it was 10 and now it's 20, which is unheard of. You know, I don't know there's something quite cool about that it definitely it always strikes me as uh it would make sense in the movie right like you always talk about it on this show that um if there is life out there it's going to be so much more insane than we could possibly imagine as you say up is purple the sky is loud uh it's impossible to try and imagine what

these alien worlds and systems might look like and in that same way of course aliens aren't going to communicate with us through text message or the english language they're going to use the language of physics and mathematics. That's a predictably, believably kind of strange thing. Yeah. That's why they say math is the universal truth. Right. Because it's a constant essentially throughout the universe. But also the sky is loud. We can't stress just how loud it is.

So if you're operating with a big ear, that's going to be a big problemo. We're really lucky that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin came back and had some pretty understandable things to say about outer space. They could have come back and said, the moon was blue. The moon is loud. Let me tell you. Can you imagine if they came back from space and they're like, it would be so worrying if they departed the craft. They're shaking hands with the president. The president is like, welcome home, son.

And they go, what? I can't stress enough how loud it was up there, sir. This is a f***ing whisper on the moon. This is a whisper up there. And that was only the sky. Don't get me started about down. Yeah, people always talk about the famous words that he spoke when he took the first step. They didn't talk about the volume at which he screamed them. One small step

for man! Are you getting this? It feels like I'm whispering. No one ever says that, that the sound of a comet is very similar to a f***ing voo-voo-zella. A planet? It sounds like an air horn going off constantly.

I don't know why I find that so funny. Because the whole understanding of the universe is that it's in a vacuum so there is no sound. Completely silent. But the thought of like disembarking and landing on the moon and it's just like 5pm traffic. Like cars honking. Sounds like standing in the middle of the 405. Yeah. Needless to say, the big year had captured something very strange that day.

A signal of unknown origin that lasted the full 72 seconds that the telescope had been pointed at that area of sky. In short, the signal did not match that of any known natural object, no star, black hole, quasar. Instead, it seemed deliberate. A signal of this intensity is exactly the kind of thing these researchers live in hope of. But it was the next piece of information that would have made Jerry fall over in his seat. The signal had a frequency of 1,420.3556 megahertz. In his mind, this was the smoking gun. You see, in 1959, physicists at Cornell University determined that hydrogen naturally emits a radio signal at the frequency of 1,420 megahertz.

Slow down, Mr. Scientist. Because hydrogen is the most common element in the universe, this frequency would be familiar to any extraterrestrial life out in the universe. Therefore, if they tried to communicate across the galaxy, they might use this frequency. Right. To the point where this frequency is known as the waterhole. This is where life would congregate to talk. Got it. So this is like the equivalent of if you were sending a text message to a random person on Earth, you would use an emoji because smiley faces are universal.

And it doesn't matter what language they speak, they'd be able to understand that message. Sure. There's a bunch of analogies i mean this is well pretty much nailed it with that one so we don't need to this is akin to if you're trying to communicate with uh extraterrestrials using reddit you're gonna start with our general okay because you're not gonna start with our porn hub because we don't know if they watch porn all right we know that they're gonna see what's on the the what's made the top posts on general that day i was just we

promised we were going to keep the porn chat to like the start of the podcast sure so to be this deep in and talking about it is it's going to be hard to cut from the episode yeah and this was quite a family-friendly segment too so that that sucks to hear. Also, I already did a very accurate analogy that pretty much summed up the situation, and you felt like you had to do another one that included porn? I'm just saying, if you want to make sure someone in the universe

sees your radio signal, you're gonna do it on 1,420 megahertz. I agree. And this is exactly the frequency that the WOW signal used. As one researcher put it, when we go looking for evidence of life in the universe using radio telescopes, this is the holy grail of what we're expecting to hear. The only problem was when they looked for it again, it was gone.

No other telescope was able to find and replicate it, making it impossible to study further. They did manage to pinpoint where it was coming from, though, about 122 light years away. Its closest star is Tau Sagittarii, which is apparently a bit cooler than our sun, but there are at least six other sun-like stars distantly related to this one. So it's not impossible that there's an alien planet or a craft in that area of the galaxy emanating this signal. Okay, okay.

It's not a completely dead bit of sky, that's for sure. There is a sun there, as I say, a bit colder than ours, but there's stars there for sure. Yeah, so it's not an empty void of space. But sadly, if there was any chance of these aliens hitting us up again on this frequency, it's long gone. Because in 2012, to celebrate the 35th anniversary of the Wow signal, they fired up a radio telescope, aimed it at where Wow came from,

and beamed 10,000 tweets using the hashtag chasing UFOs and included videos of celebrities talking to the aliens, including Stephen Colbert and the 2011 Miss Universe. Why does the human race think that aliens want to hear from these people? I don't even watch the Colbert show. What a deterrent to ever interact with the human race. That aliens want to hear from these people. I don't even watch the Colbert show. What a deterrent to ever interact with the human race. I'm sure that the people who sent the messages are lovely people and they're very well intentioned. But let's just say what we're all thinking, folks.

They should be beaming this paranormal life into the void of space. That's how you're going to get aliens to interact with us. Would you like to see what Stephen Colbert said to the aliens? Sure. Greetings, intelligent alien life forms. I am Stephen Colbert, and I come to you with an important message on behalf of all the peoples of the Earth.

Yeah. We are not delicious. In fact, we're kind of gamey, and we get stuck in your teeth. It's really embarrassing at a job interview. If you want something good to munch on, go to the nearby crab nebula and bring a bib. Seriously, all you can eat. Also, enough with the probes.

We have medical records. If you want to know something about our biological makeup, just call a primary care physician and have them fax over the files no need to like wand us oh one other thing can you explain the movie prometheus to me why was that old guy hiding on the spaceship it's his spaceship what was the point it was made by there was no reason for those two guys the scientists who got trapped in the tunnel and didn't know which way he's using a bandwidth with the signal with every word available really important message here steven kind of red balls that flashed around and everything they didn't have a compass makes no sense anyway that's it

nanu nanu live long and prosper dynamite oh christ so i feel like that was the first take and they just didn't do another little disappointed that that's what we chose to beam to the tau sagittari star system yeah big time it has the real energy of the time my friend got his Xbox 360. And right when he got to the point where he was setting up his Xbox gamer tag and wanted to think long and hard about what he would choose the tag to be, he thought he would make a snack and think about it. And while he left the room, his older brother came in and changed the gamer tag to hung like a horse 69 which he was stuck with for years afterwards that's what happened here yeah the scientists looked away for five seconds and comedians took over the the telescope unbelievable which is why you need honest paranormal investigators like us to be the ones sending the message. I do love the idea of him doing this whole speech,

reading out these jokes, having a good time. And then afterwards he walks off set and there's two men, black suits, sunglasses on, and they just go, forget what you said. There is no crab nebula. Like, that part was real? You've stumbled into something much bigger than yourself steven i suggest you take it back sign this contract and we'll pretend like this thing never happened claws they have claws he's like this scuttle away sideways like this is

because the crab nebula is named for what the star system looks like. Not that there's actual crabs. It's like if we discovered life on another planet and the whole world is like, we need to assemble a team of scientists to board a rocket so we can interact with this new species. And America's like, don't worry about it. We got Jimmy Fallon already halfway there. Going to talk to him about his new monkey NFT. Christ.

Well, that's a depressing way to start rounding up the show. I actually don't have anything bad against Stephen Colbert. I think he's one of the nicer, better late night talk show hosts. But an irresponsible use of a message to another species, Stephen. I'm disappointed. I will give it to him. I was on board during the humans aren't delicious bit. Yeah.

That's a good PSA. By the way, humans are delicious. I don't want to go into any more details about how I know that, but trust me. Okay. So trust you. So to be clear, you didn't read this. Hey, you didn't. I was hoping you might've read this somewhere, but you.

You didn't hear it from me? Uh-huh. But they're pretty good. I have it on good authority. See, I thought the Pornhub stuff was... My own taste buds. Yeah, so you need to stop talking. Because you are incriminating yourself. You know that's illegal, right?

In every country on Earth. Who said I tried them? You. You said your own taste buds knew that humans are delicious i said you didn't hear it from me which means that i am void of all accountability you said but honestly though chipotle sauce and a little bit of garlic mayo just something to think about hypothetically just something to think about this is such a this is is our jobs and it's over because you're a cannibal. You must understand why Stephen Colbert is a better option than you now to talk to another species.

You think this is what the aliens should hear? That humans are delicious? Welcome, my alien overlords. Honestly, we got this thing called Chipotle mayo and we're pretty good with it. If you catch my drift. You didn't hear it from me, but honestly, have a nibble. I won't be offended if you have a nibble. They've never heard it from anyone else.

They've only ever heard it from you. You're the first person they've heard it from. Imagine the first words the aliens hear from humans in history. You didn't hear it from me? But what? That doesn't make any sense. What a strange, sad sad species rory uh today we've had a bit of a weird one i appreciate i wanted to talk about number stations because

it's dope and cool and weird and it's been requested before granted we pretty quickly find out they aren't paranormal yeah it's true I say, as someone who hijacked my own episode with the story of the wow signal, in what must be the shortest investigation segment of any podcast we've ever recorded, I say, f*** it. Why don't we come down on whether the wow signal is paranormal?

Well, before we do that, I don't want to deflate your paranormal balloon, especially right at the end of the show, after a great episode, as you said. I might have to look this up, but I believe quite recently. Oh, don't look anything up. Sorry. Quite recently.

Turn off the Wi-Fi. Yeah. All right. Well, I still have signal on my phone. What? You've just ripped a huge chunk out of your own wall. You must have known phones can work without Wi-Fi.

Sure, but I asked you to leave your phone at the door. Yeah, which I thought was a really weird thing to ask me to do. And I will ask you nicely again. All right, Kit now has a nightstick that he's licking in front of me. Hey, I could be wrong.

I could be right as well, it turns out. I believe that there are now a few different theories as to what the source of the wow signal could have been based on receiving similar signals from different events that have taken place in other parts of the universe. And I almost insist that we make our conclusions before you have time to read those articles. So in the case of the wow signal,

all hands raised for a yes. So there's... Bud. Bud. Don't whisper to me. Bud. I'm not... Everyone can hear you talking in the microphone.

This episode was a train wreck. It really wasn't that bad. It really wasn't that bad. It really wasn't that bad. You're being way too hard on yourself. It's about to be a no, so it's pretty bad. That's pretty common here

to be fair, so. Fine. What have you found? No, look, I haven't found anything. Just theories. Just theories since the

That's what you're derailing my podcast for? Theories? We've had those. People just think that possibly it could be, it could have been caused by some sort of event taking place in the galaxy. Not necessarily a signal created specifically

by intelligent life. You know, I don't know what happens. Space is f***ing nuts, guys. Shit collides with each other. Things collapse in on themselves and then explode. You got atoms broken down into molecules just teleporting randomly across the universe. Who knows what is going on? Some of those things are probably going to send out pretty weird signals.

It could be, sure, intelligent life beaming something to Earth. It could be that a f***ing space potato exploded in the cosmic microwave and that signal went sliding down into Earth and was received by a big ear. It could be that the Tau Sagittarii version of Will.i.am was beaming his new single here to Earth. Yeah, that's their Stephen Colbert coming down. It's just a cosmic screech. You make a good point. It's clear that the scientific community has no consensus

that this is clearly extraterrestrial in origin. At best, they say we can't study it again because it has never happened again. Therefore, case closed. We can't study it. It's very unlikely to be extraterrestrial. Yeah. And it's worth saying that this is a committee of people who definitely do not rule out extraterrestrial life. Oh, no. This is the people looking for extraterrestrial life. I mean, this is widely described as the best evidence ever gathered of extraterrestrial life.

That's very interesting. Because there ain't none. Yeah. Yeah. I remember we did a really interesting bonus episode a few months back on, I believe the title was Creepy Shit in Space. As you can tell, the vibe is a little bit different on the bonus episodes. But we rattled through a bunch of different creepy events and things that people have discovered in space.

And there is a huge selection of them. I remember one of them we talked about was these huge objects obscuring light passing over suns. And I remember that was a Tabitha star, something like that. Right. Maybe. And talk of Dyson spheres and alien megastructures obstructing the sun. You have very similar scientists investigating these saying, hey, we don't know if it's extraterrestrial life. But from our understanding of how the universe works, that's most likely.

Yeah. Which is insane. Rory, at the end of every episode, we do have to come down on a yes or a no, whether the case discussed is truly paranormal or not. I'm going to put the nightstick away because I trust you that you'll come to the right decision. Thank you. In the case of, well, screw it.

Why not? For sake of argument, number stations and the wow signal. Are you a yay or a nay? The number signals, signals very cool very interesting not paranormal i don't believe man-made human-made fine for some purpose agree there the wow signal on the loud signal side still a night six coming whoa bud put the stick down still a no i think it is uh interesting i think it's mysterious. I don't know the origin behind it, but I don't know if I have enough, like the scientists who investigated it, I don't know if I have enough evidence to suggest that it's from intelligent extraterrestrial life. More than fair. It feels like we're just torching a lot of paranormal history here all in one episode but i think it is two no's

yeah four no's in fact jesus what a massacre needless to say i hope you've enjoyed uh this investigation into both number stations and the wow signal that was a great one you know it's two stories that i think by themselves wouldn't necessarily be enough to warrant a full investigation but i appreciate that you grouped them both together today and we could kind of tackle mysterious signals as a genre, because they are interesting. And we've had a ton of people emailing us about both the wow signal and number stations. Yeah, maybe it's something we do more of in future because there is an awful lot of stories. The lion's share, I would almost argue, of things people suggest to us uh are not big enough for a full length episode of this paranormal life so maybe we've got to find a little way of

cobbling together a few similar stories into something that will get four no's instead of two it's always funny when someone emails in and they're like hey i've got the perfect case for you uh it's the case of the kentucky psycho and'm like, all right, this sounds cool. What's the Kentucky psycho? And I'll Google it. And all I can find is a single news story from 1984 about a guy who put a KFC bucket on his head and ate his family. I'm like, well, that's not paranormal. That's a crime. And I don't want to talk about that on the podcast. Although I will here voice the opinions of the listeners who were quite agitated after the Australia isn't real episode. We had quite a few emails saying, how dare you not do the case I suggested and proceed to do that. Sure.

And the Australia case wasn't even done by our researcher, Amy. That was 100% me. That was a passion project. Yeah, you threw out a pretty hard-hitting case she wrote that week as well. Yeah, everyone was like, you know, there are like breaking cases every day of paranormal activity. The government and the Pentagon are releasing files that have been classified for years that pretty much are solid claims that there is UFO activity, that there are UFOs existing in our world. And I sat back in my little gaming chair and thought,

what if Australia isn't real? Yeah, that'll sell papers. That'll sell papers. And me and Amy tried to explain, we're not in the newspaper business, Rory. We need substance to a story what if a kangaroo is a ghost right what if a boomerang is just a stick it's a fine intro question but 45 minute episode and sure the haters come for me for jeff the mongoose we're not all perfect guys sure but

hey you gotta have your valleys to appreciate the peaks and today was a peak my friend that was a great episode let's hope thank you to amy grisdale for researching this episode. Thank you to Cami Tillman, of course, for editing it. You know, if you're a new listener or an old listener of this paranormal life, there's one thing you may not have experienced, and that's seeing this paranormal life. Whoa, that's a wow signal. In 4K, bitch. Well, maybe not 4K. Maybe at least HD. We are posting clips of This Paranormal Life over on our social media channels, such as twitter.com forward slash thisparalife,

Instagram at thisparanormallife, and crucially, YouTube. If you search for This Paranormal Life, there are clips of us in the flesh in the studio. Some of the funniest moments in This Paranormal Life. There are clips of us in the flesh, in the studio, some of the funniest moments in this paranormal life history available to watch right now. Head on over and hit subscribe. Of course, all the links to our YouTube

and to our social media channels are in the description of this episode. Bit of a boring sell, but that's fine. If you're happy with that, we can move on. All right, Stephen Colbert, what do you have to say? All I'm just going to say is if you actually want to convert listeners into online fans to get them to subscribe to Twitter, to get them to subscribe to Instagram and YouTube.

I'm just going to say right now, I think you need to tone it down because you said you ate human flesh about 15 minutes ago. Don't say it again at the end of the show. That's the hardest bit to cut. Is it? Hey, if you are, yeah. You want me to sell the YouTube? Guys, subscribe to YouTube.

I'm going to be eating human flesh this weekend. We're going to be live on IG. You have to know. Aside from a war crime, YouTube will of course delete our account. Don't do that. You didn't hear it from me but someone we did

someone's gonna be on the This Paranormal Life YouTube channel eating humans I don't know who it could be it's so f***ed it sells

it sells papers my friend I don't know that it does like you said so whatever check it out Check it out. Check it out, I guess. Of course, patreon.com forward slash thisparanormallife

is there's no human flesh eating. Head on over there to get full-length bonus episodes, tasty morsels, if you will, of this paranormal life. I'm just trying to rebrand, repackage what you did into something slightly comedic. That's smart. That's smart. Because then it's like people will be like,

were they joking or were they being serious? It feels almost illegal how delicious these episodes are. Nice, dude. For just $5, £4-ish, you can get access to an entire back catalog instantly. That just about wraps it up for this week. We will

of course be back next week with a brand new Paranormal Tale and over on Patreon for a brand new bonus for this week. We will, of course, be back next week with a brand new Paranormal Tale and over on Patreon for a brand new bonus episode this month. We'll see you back here on Tuesday for another episode of This Paranormal Life.

See you then. Bye-bye.