 Stories and content in Weird Darkness can be disturbing for some listeners and is intended for mature audiences only. Parental discretion is strongly advised. Of all the world's unsolved mysteries, those with the paranormal twists are probably the most difficult and the most controversial. Are they really mysteries? Is there anything to solve? Or are these tales simply that? Tall tales. For the Reed family of Massachusetts, their stories of unexplained encounters are anything but tall tales. Instead, they are encounters that span three generations and entire decades, punctuated by terrifying instances of lost time, encounters with alien creatures and perhaps even worse, ridicule and harassment from those who heard the stories. The previously obscure case reached a whole new audience when it was featured in the first season of Netflix's Unsolved Mysteries reboot in July of 2020. Will anyone come forward to shed a light on just what has been happening to the Reed family? Or will it simply continue to happen to them? Are they destined to keep having mysterious and unexplained encounters? Or is there a rational explanation for what's been happening to them? For more than 50 years, I'm Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness. Welcome, Weirdos. This is Weird Darkness. Here you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved and unexplained. Coming up in this episode of Weird Darkness. On the southwest corner of Carfax in Oxford, a small inconspicuous inscription on the side of an old building marks the site of one of the bloodiest barfights in history. And I'll tell you the story. On June 28, 1914, while riding in a limousine, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie were killed by an assassin. As if that were not horrific enough, the incident triggered World War I. Ever since, the limousine is considered cursed, and few people who have come into contact with the car since then have survived. But why? The radio station is officially known as MDZHB in Russia. It's been continually broadcasting since 1982. And no one knows why, because you see, nobody works there. So who is doing the broadcasting? But first, on September 1, 1969, about 40 people in Berkshire County, Massachusetts reported seeing a UFO. And one boy named Thomas Reed claimed that he and his family were all taken aboard. We begin with that story. While you're listening, you might want to check out the Weird Darkness website at WeirdDarkness.com. You can sign up for the newsletter. You can find paranormal and horror audiobooks I've narrated. A free 24-7 streaming video channel of horror movies and horror hosts. You can find my other podcast, Church of the Undead. Plus, you can visit the Hope in the Darkness page if you're struggling with depression, anxiety or thoughts of suicide. And you can also shop the Weird Darkness store where all profits I receive go to support depression, awareness and relief. You can find all of that and more at WeirdDarkness.com. Now, bolt your doors, lock your windows, turn off your lights, and come with me into the Weird Darkness. On the evening of September 1, 1969, strange lights descended on the town of Sheffield, located in the southern Berkshires. Many who saw these lights said they were attached to a UFO. According to witness accounts, the UFO in question was a disc-shaped craft that performed acrobatic maneuvers in the sky above the Berkshires. It's unclear exactly how long the phenomenon lasted, but many witnesses have alleged UFO encounters describe losing track of time. The Berkshires is a region of rural highlands in western Massachusetts. It encompasses large swaths of wilderness, making it a popular tourist destination for hikers and nature lovers during the summer. The Berkshires are also made up of mostly small towns, which in the case of curious extraterrestrial beings makes it an ideal spot to visit. However, the seemingly brief UFO encounter was apparently powerful enough to leave a lingering sense of mass confusion in its wake. Schoolchildren were drawing UFOs in class, while adults called in to the local radio station to explain what they had seen. We had listeners call the radio station that evening, said David Icy, general manager of local radio station WSBS. At the time, they didn't know it was a UFO, they just, you know, called the station to say something bizarre has happened. Many people who saw the strange light vessel that night were left bewildered. Nobody seemed to know what they saw, but they knew that they saw something. The incident has since been dubbed the 1969 Berkshire UFO. It was later estimated that about 40 people reported seeing the UFO. Some of them who were children at the time still live in the area today. Children coming into school talking about the event, said Robert Krull, the director of the Great Barrington Historical Society in 2018. An old student of mine, one is a local shop owner whose father was the police chief in town, so these are reliable people, these are not self-promoters. The witness accounts were so plentiful and compelling that the local Great Barrington Historical Society recognized the encounters as the first off-world UFO case in U.S. history about 45 years later. But did the 1969 Berkshire UFO incident actually happen? Whether or not you believe the witness stories, the Berkshire UFO in 1969 was no doubt a remarkable event for the town's people of Sheffield. While many have admitted to seeing the UFO vessel or its strange lights, the most prominent eyewitness is by far Thomas Reid. According to Reid's account, he saw the UFO when he was nine years old on September 1, 1969 while he was in the car with his mother, grandmother and brother. As Reid recalled, the family was heading home from their restaurant village on the green and he was busy giving his brother a little fireball candy. Suddenly they noticed a mass of glowing lights peeking out from behind the lush trees on the empty road. The strange lights continued to spill out from behind the trees as the family crossed the covered Sheffield bridge, but they didn't know what to make of the site. We all looked at it because it was kind of a self-contained glow, Reid said. It rose up a little bit. It looked like it followed the dirt road, which I'm sure it probably didn't, but it appeared that way because we could see it through the trees. The light started to bleed through once we broke into a little bit of a clearing. We could see inside the car so the light was flooding inside the car. After an amber glow emerged on both sides of the road, Reid recalled being taken to a hangar-like area that was bigger than a football field. We encountered something, Reid said. It was definitely not of this world. We had a black-and-white television at the time and the imagery that we saw on this thing was unbelievable. There were lights that looked like fluorescent tubing inside this hangar. This hallway we had seen was circular, with a Y configuration almost to control the flow of traffic. This one room had a bowed-in wall that was rounded. That was not something that you would have seen in 1969 anywhere else. I have no idea where I was, but I know that what I saw was very different than anything I've ever seen today 50 years later. Glimpses of this strange place muddied his brain until he realized they were back inside the car. His grandmother and mother had switched seats. More astonishingly, there were no more glowing lights, Reid said. Everything got really calm. It was like being in the middle of a hurricane. There was like a barometric change in pressure. It was just like a dead silence. Then there was an eruption of crickets and frogs and it got really loud and that was it, Reid said, adding that it was all quite confusing. Reid had been the most vocal witness to the 1969 Berkshire UFO. He helped convince other witnesses to pool money together to erect a 5,000-pound concrete monument which was built by the covered Sheffield Bridge where he saw the UFO with his family. Benching and lighting decorations were also placed around the monument after it was erected. Later, Reid formed the non-profit UFO Monument Park, Inc. to maintain the plot of land where the monument stood. Word of the 1969 Berkshire UFO reached beyond Sheffield. In Roswell, New Mexico, the location of another infamous UFO encounter, the International UFO Museum put up a display of the alleged Berkshire craft. Although the town of Sheffield seemed to embrace the Berkshire UFO incident at first, the novelty of the story has worn off among some residents in recent years. Disagreements between those who believe the UFO monument marked a significant event in the town's history and those who saw the monument as an eyesore began to boil over. In 2019, just about four years after it was erected, the town removed the Berkshire UFO monument. The town's attorney's assessment that the monument had been erected on town property quickly paved the way for lawful removal. According to Reid, there were no issues with the town officials during the plans to build the UFO monument, but officials painted a different story. It's kind of on town property and no one decided it could go there, said town administrator Rhonda Labombard. The town has bylaws, and if we let one place put something up, then why can't someone else? I don't want that to happen. According to a town land survey, the monument's location was on a town right of way and had to be removed. To add insult to injury, other parties withdrew their public support for the monument as well. In 2018, a spokesperson for Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker, whose signature was sealed onto the UFO monument, told the Boston Globe that the signature had been issued in error. The Great Barrington Historical Society, which described the mass Berkshire UFO sighting as a significant and true event in 2015, backpedaled on its support too. I think the Historical Society regrets that our words or our decision has been taken out of context, said Kroll, who added that the incident was significant to the town but the organization shouldn't have focused on one individual, an obvious reference to Reid. In 2019, after there were no efforts by Reid and his colleagues to remove the structure, the town hauled away the UFO monument for good. The monument was removed at considerable expense to the town, said selectman Martin Mitzoff, who could not give the precise cost to the removal. Unfortunately, the party responsible was not responsive. Meanwhile, Reid said that he and his colleagues would fight the removal. Despite the human drama surrounding the event, the 1969 Berkshire UFO sighting continues to fascinate UFO enthusiasts from all over the world. Perhaps the unsolved mysteries reboot will bring us just a little bit closer to answers. And resolution. On the southwest corner of Carfax in Oxford, a small inconspicuous inscription on the side of an old building marks the site of one of the bloodiest barfights in history, and I'll tell you the story. Plus, how could a limousine cause World War I? Well, what if I was to tell you it was cursed? That story is up next when Weird Darkness returns. Remember staying up late on a Friday or Saturday night, either at home or at a friend's house and watching your local TV stations' horror host presenting a terrible B movie with aliens, monsters, ghosts, alien monster ghosts, vampires, werewolves, and all other kinds of crazy creepy characters? Those were fun nights, weren't they? Well, that's what the Weirdo Watch Party page at WeirdDarkness.com has to offer. All day, every day. Thanks to our friends at the Monster Channel, you can visit WeirdDarkness.com slash Watch Party right after listening to this episode and immediately be entertained by a horror host and horrible movie. Or should I say horror-ribble movie? And not only can you watch the B movies and horror hosts streaming there 24-7, but once a month we all gather together to watch a movie and talk about it in the chat room on that same page. Get your frights and funnies on the Weirdo Watch Party page at WeirdDarkness.com. It soon became obvious. Something was very wrong. Few people who came in contact with this very strange car survived. Is it really possible that certain objects are cursed? Are we dealing with supernatural forces or a series of remarkable coincidences? Can a new theory about energy shed more light on why this particular car brought so much tragedy? I'll present to you the mystery, but I'll let you decide what to think of these bizarre incidents and rest assured these events will give you plenty to ponder. When Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria visited Sarajevo, former Yugoslavia, he wanted a magnificent car that would make an impression on people. A political instability in Europe was one of the reasons why the Archduke considered it necessary to arrange huge parade. On June 28, 1914, while riding an limousine, an open touring car, the Archduke and his wife Sophie were killed by an assassin who was a young nationalist by the name of Gavrilo Princip. This event triggered World War I in which approximately 20 million people died. According to the legend, the limousine carries a curse from that fateful day. The car was not put away or set on display. Instead, it became the property of General Portyrek, one of the original riders on the assassination day. The car did not bring Portyrek much luck though. After an embarrassing military defeat, the general was summoned to Vienna where he was deeply humiliated. Soon after that, he began having mental problems and died in an insane asylum. The next owner was an army captain. While he was driving the car, two peasants walked out on the road in front of him. He swerved but hit them and crashed into a tree. Everyone was killed. After the end of the war, the governor of Yugoslavia acquired the car and restored it. However, the car was involved in four accidents over the course of four months and the governor lost his right arm in one of the mishaps. He considered the car bad luck and wanted to get rid of it. His friend, Dr. Srykus, who did not believe in curses and said this notion was silly, bought the car and drove it for six months until the car overturned and killed him. The next car owner was also a doctor but when his superstitious patients refused to visit him, he sold the limousine to a Swiss racing driver who later died in an accident involving this same vehicle. According to some sources, he met his death by being thrown over a stone wall. Then a wealthy farmer bought the car. One day the car would not start, he asked his neighbor for help and they hitched it to a wagon to tow it. Suddenly the car started and fell on the farmers, killing them both. Tiber Hirschfield was the last owner of this frightening car. One day he was on his way to a wedding party with five of his friends. The driver tried to pass a long row of cars. Suddenly, without any obvious reason, the car mysteriously spun out of control and crashed. Four people, including Hirschfield, were killed. Only one person survived the accident. Finally, this deadly limousine was transported to a museum in Vienna. A man called Karl Brunner who was responsible for the car, he used to tell stories of all accidents and people who died when they came in contact with the car. He forbid visitors to even sit in the limousine. During World War II, the museum was hit and ruined by bombs. This was the end of what was once the limousine of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Australia. The car was destroyed and Karl Brunner died during the attack. Curses can be both spoken and written. Some incidents indicate that objects can be cursed and affect anyone who owns the object. People who possess a cursed object can experience bad luck and misfortune. They can become ill and even die. According to a rather new theory that most mainstream scientists still question, it is possible that humans can pick up good or bad energy from a place or other people. Basically, what we sense is linked to our perception of positive or negative chemo signals left over in that particular environment. This means that if you enter a room where something horrible causing fear has happened, you may actually feel bad vibes. Those who were present in the room left negative chemo signals that you pick up. What is unknown is how long such chemo signals are present in the environment. It is also unclear how the human brain processes chemo signals, and while a reaction evolves quickly, it is undetermined how long it lasts. Having this theory in mind, we may ask whether bad energy was somehow still present in this dangerous car. Could people who entered the car have picked up bad vibes? Most listeners would agree that the story about Archduke's red limousine is rather strange. One does not necessarily have to believe in curses and the involvement of supernatural forces to understand something was wrong with this car from the beginning. But was it a curse or pure coincidence? That is up to you to decide. On the southwest corner of Carfax and Oxford, a small inconspicuous inscription on the side of an old building marks the site of one of the bloodiest pub brawls in history. Before this building was sold to the Abbey National Building Society, it was occupied by the Swindlestock Tavern, a popular watering hole among Oxford University's students and the townsfolk alike. On the 10th of February, 1355, the entire town was celebrating the feast day of St. Scholastica. Some students were drinking at Swindlestock Tavern when two of them complained about the quality of the wine served. The landlord and the tavern's owner, who also happened to be mayor of Oxford at the time, allegedly responded to their complaint with stubborn and saucy language, whereupon a student threw his drink on the owner's face, followed by the empty wine jug that landed straight on the tavern owner's head. A fight erupted and other customers present in the tavern, both locals and students, joined in and soon the fight spilled out of the tavern and onto the streets. Somebody rang the bell at the town's church to summon assistance and the students rang the bells at the University Church in response. When the Chancellor of the University tried to intervene, arrows were fired at him and he had to retreat. The next day, about 80 townsmen armed with bows and other weapons ambushed the St. Giles Church in the north part of the town and killed at least one student and badly injured several others. The students attempted to close the town's gates to prevent outsiders from coming to the aid of the townspeak, but by afternoon some 2,000 men from the countryside had broken through the gates. The men raided all hostels and inns and either killed or maimed any student found. The carnage continued the next day. Clerics and scholars were scalped and their corpses buried in dung hills left in the gutters, dumped into cesspits or thrown into the river. By the evening of the third day, the passions of the townspeak had been spent, but not before some 90 odd people were dead. The students suffered the most with more than 60 dead although some historians put the figure at 40. Casualties among the townspeople were no lesser, about 30 or so may have been killed. The town's mayor paid the price for the violence. He was sent to the dreaded Marshall C. Prison. Four months after the riot, the king issued a royal charter that not only secured the rights and privileges of the university, but vastly extended them. For example, the university was allowed the right to tax bread and drink sold in the town and the power to assay the weights and measures used in commerce. While this might sound like an unfair amount of privileges for an educational institute, one must understand that medieval universities were very different than they are now. Scholars were akin to a religious order and when a university took residence in a town, the chancellor negotiated favorable terms on their behalf for facilities such as lodging and lecture halls. The universities received monetary benefits from the Catholic Church and this financial freedom from the municipality in which they reside gave universities considerable independence from civil authority. The Catholic Church made sure that scholars' rights were protected and in many disputes between townspeople and the students, the church always took the side of the universities. The townspeople resented the scholars and regarded them with disdain. Some students openly encroached local laws with impunity knowing they were immune from civil authorities. Violent confrontations between town and gown were commonplace in university towns and Oxford was no stranger to riots. In 1209, two Oxford scholars were lynched by the town's locals following the death of a woman. A fight ensued and several scholars were forced into exile. Some of them settled in Cambridge and they started what is now the University of Cambridge. Eventually, tensions developed between the scholars at Cambridge and the townspeople forcing the king to grant special privileges and protection to Cambridge University which helped enormously in the survival and future success of the university. Again in 1248, a Scottish scholar was murdered by the citizens and King Henry III fined the town's authorities. Between 1297 and 1322, 29 counts of violence was recorded between the town and the students. Of these, 12 arose due to murders committed by students. Many of these went unpunished by the university. In one incident in 1298, a citizen was murdered by a student and in response the townspeople also killed one student. The townspeople responsible for killing the scholar were excommunicated and the town was fined but no punishments were given to the students. The St. Scholastica Day riot was by far the worst but the consequences of it were predictable. The town was punished and the students were pardoned. The king even went so far as to humiliate the new mayor and the bailiffs into an annual penance where they were required to attend the town's church for mass on each St. Scholastica Day and swear to uphold the university's rights forever. This ritual continued for an astounding 470 years until it was repealed in 1825. By the mid-15th century, things started to change when it was realized that universities were growing too powerful. An effort was made to end student power within the universities. People legates were ordered to reform the universities and restrict student boycotts and strikes. Over the centuries, the relationship between town and gown improved. Eventually, towns began to take pride in their universities rather than look upon them as adversaries. The radio station is officially known as MDZHB in Russia. It's been continually broadcasting since 1982, and no one knows why. Because, you see, nobody works there, so who is doing the broadcasting? That story is up next. Seen. And now, you can search for Bigfoot every month in the Find Bigfoot calendar by Timothy Wayne Williams. Each month, you'll be captivated by an original Timothy Wayne Williams painting. Beautiful and captivating. But within each painting hides a monster. Bigfoot is hiding. Somewhere in each painting. Search for Bigfoot and invite others to do so as well with the new Find Bigfoot calendar available now at WeirdDarkness.com slash Bigfoot. That's WeirdDarkness.com slash Bigfoot. In the middle of a Russian swamp land, not far from the city of St. Petersburg, is a rectangular iron gate. Beyond its rusted bars is a collection of radio towers, abandoned buildings and power lines bordered by a dry stone wall. This sinister location is the focus of a mystery which stretches back to the height of the Cold War. It is thought to be the headquarters of a radio station, MDZ-HB, that no one has ever claimed to run. 24 hours a day, seven days a week for the last three and a half decades, it has been broadcasting a dull, monotonous tone. Every few seconds, it's joined by a second sound, like some ghostly ship sounding its fog horn. Then the drone continues. What you're hearing behind my voice is the actual signal from radio station MDZ-HB. Once or twice a week, a man or woman will read out some words in Russian such as dinghy or farming specialist. And that's it. Anyone anywhere in the world can listen in, simply by tuning a radio to the frequency 4,625 kHz. It's so enigmatic, it's as if it was designed with conspiracy theorists in mind. Today the station has an online following numbering in the tens of thousands who know it affectionately as the buzzer. It joins two similar mystery stations, the Pip and the Squeaky Wheel. As their fans readily admit themselves, they have absolutely no idea what they are listening to. In fact, no one does. There's absolutely no information in the signal, says David Stuples, an expert in signals intelligence from City University London. So what's going on? The frequency is thought to belong to the Russian military, though they have never actually admitted this. It first began broadcasting at the close of the Cold War when communism was in decline. Today it's transmitted from two locations, the St. Petersburg site and a location near Moscow. Bizarrely, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, rather than shutting down, the station's activity increased. There's no shortage of theories to explain what the buzzer might be for, ranging from keeping in touch with submarines to communing with aliens. One such idea is that it's acting as a dead hand signal. In the event Russia is hit by a nuclear attack, the drone will stop and automatically trigger a retaliation. No questions asked, just total nuclear obliteration on both sides. This may not be as wacky as it sounds. The system was originally pioneered in the Soviet era, where it took the form of a computer system which scanned the airwaves for signs of life or nuclear fallout. Alarmingly, many experts believe it may still be in use. As Russian President Vladimir Putin pointed out himself in 2017, nobody would survive a nuclear war between Russia and the United States. Could the buzzer be warding one off? As it happens, there are clues in the signal itself. Like all international radio, the buzzer operates at a relatively low frequency, known as shortwave. This means that, compared to local radio, mobile phone and television signals, fewer waves pass through a single point every second. It also means they can travel a lot further. While you'd be hard pressed to listen to a local station such as BBC Radio London in a neighboring country, shortwave stations like the BBC World Service are aimed at audiences from Senegal to Singapore. Both stations are broadcast from the same building. It's all thanks to skywaves. Higher frequency radio signals can only travel in a straight line, eventually becoming lost as they bump into obstacles or reach the horizon. But shortwave frequencies have an extra trick. They can bounce off charged particles in the upper atmosphere, allowing them to zigzag between the earth and the sky and travel thousands rather than tens of miles. Which brings us back to the dead hand theory. As you might expect, shortwave signals have proved extremely popular. Today they are used by ships, aircraft and the military to send messages across continents, oceans and mountain ranges. But there's a catch. The lofty layer isn't so much a flat mirror, but a wave which undulates like the surface of the ocean. During the day it moves steadily higher while at night it creeps down toward the earth. If you want to absolutely guarantee that your station can be heard on the other side of the planet and if you're using it as a cue for nuclear war, you probably do, it's important to change the frequency depending on the time of the day to catch up. The BBC World Service shortwave already does this. The buzzer does not. Another idea is that the radio station exists to sound out how far away from the layer of charged particles is. To get good results from the radar systems the Russians use to spot missiles, you need to know this, says Stuples. The longer the signal takes to get up into the sky and down again, the higher it must be. Alas, that can't be it either. To analyze the layers altitude, the signal would usually have a certain sound, like a car alarm going off. The result of varying the waves to get them just right. They sound nothing like the buzzer, says Stuples. Intriguingly, there is a station with some striking similarities. The Lincolnshire poacher ran from the mid-1970s to 2008. Just like the buzzer, it could be heard on the other side of the planet. Just like the buzzer, it emanated from an undisclosed location, thought to be somewhere in Cyprus. And, just like the buzzer, its transmissions were just plain creepy. At the beginning of every hour, the station would play the first two bars of an English folk tune, the Lincolnshire Poacher. Oh, tis my delight on a shining night in the season of the year, when I was bound apprentice in famous Lincolnshire, to as well I served my master for nigh on seven years. After repeating this twelve times, it would move on to messages read by the disembodied voice of a woman, reading groups of five numbers. One, two, zero, three, six, an eclipped upper-class English accent. To get to grips with what was going on, it helps to go back to the 1920s. The All-Russian Cooperative Society, Arcos, was an important trade body responsible for overseeing transactions between the UK and the early Soviet Union. Or at least that is what they said they did. In May 1927, years after a British secret agent caught an employee sneaking into a Communist news office in London, police officers stormed the Arcos building. The basement had been rigged with anti-intruder devices and they discovered a secret room with no door handle in which workers were hurriedly burning documents. It may have been dramatic, but the British didn't discover anything that they didn't already know. Instead, the raid was a wake-up call to the Soviets who discovered that MI5 had been listening in on them for years. This was a blunder of the very first order, says Anthony Glees, who directs the Center for Security and Intelligence Studies at the University of Buckingham. To justify the raid, the Prime Minister had even read out some of the deciphered telegrams in the House of Commons. The upshot was that the Russians completely reinvented the way messages are encrypted. Almost overnight, they switched to one-time pads. In this system, a random key is generated by the person sending the message and shared only with the person receiving it. As long as the key really is perfectly random, the code cannot be cracked. There was no longer any need to worry about who could hear their messages. Enter the number stations, radio stations that broadcast coded messages to spies all over the world. Soon, even the British were doing it. If you can't beat them, join them, as they say. It's quite difficult to generate a completely random number because a system for doing so will, by its very nature, be predictable, exactly what you are trying to avoid. Instead, officers in London found an ingenious solution. They'd hang a microphone out the window on Oxford Street and record the traffic. There might be a bus beeping at the same time as a policeman shouting. The sound is unique. It will never happen again, says Stuples. Then they'd convert this into a random code. Of course, that didn't stop people trying to break them. During World War II, the British realized that they could in fact decipher the messages, but they'd have to get their hands on the one-time pad that was used to encrypt them. We discovered that the Russians used the out-of-date sheets of one-time pads as substitute toilet paper in Russian army hospitals in East Germany, says Glees. Needless to say, British intelligence officers soon found themselves rifling through the contents of Soviet latrines. The new channel of communication was so useful, it didn't take long before the number stations had popped up all over the world. There was the colorfully named Nancy Adam Susan, Russian counting man, and Cherry Ripe, the Lincolnshire Poachers' sister station, which also contained bars of an English folk song. In name at least, the buzzer fits right in. It also fits with a series of arrests across the United States back in 2010. The FBI announced that it had broken up a long-term, deep-cover network of Russian agents who were said to have received their instructions via coded messages on shortwave radio, specifically 7,887 kilohertz. Now, North Korea are getting in on the act, too. On April 14, 2017, the broadcaster at Radio Pyeongyang began, I'm giving review works and elementary information technology lessons of the remote education university for number 27 expedition agents. This ill-concealed military message was followed by a series of page numbers, number 69 on page 823, page 957, which look a lot like code. It may come as a surprise that number stations are still in use, but they hold one major advantage. Though it's possible to guess who's broadcasting, anyone can listen to the messages, so you don't know who they are being sent to. Mobile phones and the internet may be quicker, but open a text or email from a known intelligence agency and you could be rumbled. It's a compelling idea. The buzzer has been hiding in plain sight, instructing a network of illicit Russian spies all over the world. There's just one problem. The buzzer never broadcasts any numbered messages. This doesn't strictly matter, since one-time pads can be used to translate anything, from code words to garbled speech. If this phone call was encrypted, you'd hear but then it would come out to the other side sounding like normal speech, says Stuples, but this would leave traces in the signal. Descend information over the radio, essentially all you're doing is varying the height or spacing of the waves being transmitted. For example, two low waves in a row means X, or three waves closer together means Y. When a signal is carrying information instead of neat, evenly spaced waves like ripples in the ocean, you're left with a wave like the jagged silhouette of an ECG. This isn't the buzzer. Instead, many believe that the station is a hybrid of two things. The constant drone is just a marker, saying, this frequency is mine, this frequency is mine, to stop people from using it. It only becomes a numbers station in moments of crisis, such as if Russia were invaded. Then it would function as a way to instruct their worldwide spy network and military forces on standby in remote areas. After all, this is a country around 70 times the size of the UK. It seems they've already been practicing. In 2013, they issued a special message, command 135 issued. That was said to be the test message for full combat readiness, says Marys Golbinus, a radio enthusiast who listens to the station from his home in the Baltic States. The mystery of the Russian radio may have been solved, but if its fans are right, let's just hope that drone never stops. Thanks for listening. If you like the podcast, please share it linked to this episode and recommend Weird Darkness to your friends, family and co-workers who love the paranormal, horror stories or true crime like you do. Every time you share a link to the podcast, it helps spread the word about the show, growing our Weirdo family in the process. Plus, it helps get the word out about resources that are available for those who suffer from depression, so please share the podcast with others. Do you have a dark tale to tell of your own? Fact or fiction, click on TellYourStory at WeirdDarkness.com and I might use it in a future episode. All stories in Weird Darkness are purported to be true unless stated otherwise and you can find source links or links to the authors in the show notes. The Berkshire County UFO was written by Natasha Ishak for all that is interesting and Deborah Kelly for grunge. The Bad Beer Brawl is by Kaushik Fatahari for amusing planet. The Cursed Car that started World War I is by Ellen Lloyd for ancient pages. And the radio station run by Ghosts is written by Zaria Gorvet for BBC. And now that we're coming out of the dark, I'll leave you with a little light. The King will reply, truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me. Matthew 25, verse 40. And a final thought, everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives but none about his or her own. Walu Kuello, I'm Darren Marlar. Thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness.