Riding shotgun at night through the darkened pines of southern Virginia and western North Carolina with your wife asleep in the back seat and your brother-in-law driving, the only way to keep awake is to scare yourself.
We tell the obligatory ghost stories. We talk about alien abductions. We discuss a particularly harrowing account of a cursed house (I should say that I actually do believe that one). But the stories we don’t tell, maybe because they’re SO uncanny that we never remember them, are the stories of unexplained noises.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Wikipedia has a pretty comprehensive page listing modern occurrences of noises that are unexplained. They range from sounds picked up in the ocean by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (like “The Bloop” – “While the audio profile of The Bloop does resemble that of a living creature, the source is a mystery both because it is different from known sounds and because it was several times louder than the loudest known animal, the blue whale,”according to Wikipedia) to the numerous unexplained sonic booms that seem to proliferate around America. It’s kind of nice to recognize that there are mysteries out there beyond ‘why do poor Americans vote against their own interests?” and “why is everything so dissatisfying?”
We can all agree that the strange ocean noises are ancient creatures, older than time itself, waiting beneath the waters for some unknown purpose, only occasionally stirring. The sonic booms are the military experimenting with reverse engineered alien technology. This much is obvious. But my favorite noise by far is the Russian radio channel known by the call sign “UVB-76,” a short-wave station broadcasting at a frequency of 4625 kHz that’s known to radio fans as simply The Buzzer, which is apt — UVB-76 is a constant broadcast of mostly screeching or buzzing. It’s only occasionally interrupted by the sound of voices reading a list of names and numbers. The signal itself is said to emanate from a Russian military base located outside of Moscow near the the village of Lozhki. And although there are various theories as to the purpose of the broadcast, nothing about it has been publicly released. My theory? Art. I think it’s the most bad-ass conceptual art project to ever, EVER, come out of Russia. But why would you trust me?
Become a Patron!
This post may contain affiliate links.
