A May 5, 2006 news broadcast about Number Stations.

Number stations, according to Wikipedia, “are shortwave radio stations of uncertain origin. They generally broadcast artificially generated voices reading streams of numbers, words, letters (sometimes using a spelling alphabet), tunes or Morse code. They are in a wide variety of languages and the voices are usually female, though sometimes male or children’s voices are used.”

In 1997, The Conet Project, a four-CD set of numbers stations recordings based on the work of Akin Fernandez, was put out. You can download the MP3s here.

Number station recordings can be heard in the song “Pause” on Stereolab’s Transient Random-Noise Bursts with Announcements, an album I’ve been listening to for over 15 years, and inspired the title of Wilco’s breakthrough album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. 

All totally insane.