UVB-76 has stopped (actually kinda creepy)

[Evilshy 5,089]

UVB-76 is a Russian radio station (4625 kHz). It's been repeating a short, buzzing tone 24/7 since 1982. Occasionally, somebody would interrupt the buzzing and issue coded messages in Russian, repeat them several times, and then resume the buzzing. Also, one could sometime here conversations in the background, behind the buzzer, suggesting that it's simply an open microphone with some sort of device being placed next to the mic. As far as I know, nothing heard in the background has given any clue as to what the purpose of UVB-76 is.

 

Nobody knows what the station's purpose is, nor where it is broadcasting from. The previous location is known (a now abandoned military base), but it moved in September of 2010, possibly as part of a large-scale restructuring of the Russian military.

 

In 2010, a bunch of weird stuff happened. I'll just copy/paste from the wiki article:

 

On June 5, 2010, UVB-76 went silent for approximately 24 hours, resuming the normal buzzing pattern on the morning of June 6. On June 10, at approximately 2130 UTC, a series of Morse code beeps emitted along with the buzzer for just under four minutes.

 

At 1335 UTC on August 23, 2010 a voice message was broadcast: "UVB-76, UVB-76. 93 882 NAIMINA 74 14 35 74" (Recording of August 23rd transmission)^[16][17][18] Two days later, on August 25 at 0713 UTC, the signal went silent again, followed by a series of thumping sounds apparently in the same room as the open microphone. It was followed by a hail of electronic noise, which then faded again into the buzzer broadcast. Later that same day, voices were heard conversing loudly behind the buzzer.^[19]

 

At 2225 UTC On September 1, 2010, the buzzer was interrupted by a 38-second fragment of "Dance of the Little Swans" from Tchaikovsky's ballet Swan Lake. A Morse code signal accompanied the fragment.^[19]

 

On September 5 at 1230 UTC, a female voice was heard counting from one to nine in Russian; just over an hour later, at 1339 UTC, the buzzing silenced for a muffled male voice to read a voice message.^[19]

 

The next voice broadcast was made at 0548 UTC on September 7: "Mikhail Dmitri Zhenya Boris. Mikhail Dmitri Zhenya Boris. 04 979 D-R-E-N-D-O-U-T. T-R-E-N-E-R-S-K-I-Y." It was the first of 25 voice messages that would be broadcast by September 30, with another 56 to follow between October and December.^[19] Each of these, with one exception on September 10, replaced the familiar "UVB-76" call sign with "Mikhail Dmitri Zhenya Boris," suggesting that the station had changed call signs from UVB-76 to MDZhB.

 

On November 11, 2010 intermittent phone conversations were accidentally transmitted and recorded by a listener (at 1400Mhz) for a period of approximately 30 minutes.^[1] These conversations are available online, and seem to be in Russian, but have not been publicly translated yet.^[20] The phone calls mentioned the "brigade operative officer on duty", the communication nodes "Debut", "Nadezhda" (Russian for "hope", both a noun and a female name), "Sudak" (a kind of river fish and also a town in Crimea) and "Vulkan". The female voice says "officer on duty of communication node Debut senior ensign Uspenskaya, got the control call from Nadezhda OK".

UVB-76 2010-11-11 14.00 UTC Translation
3.18 to 3.22-- "Did you get the call?", "Yes, yes, yes, yes"

 

A further 14 voice messages followed between January 5 and February 5, 2011.^[19]

 

As of earlier today, it has stopped. No voice or anything has been heard, although apparently, if one stripped away the static soon after it stopped, some weird sounds could be heard

 

Now I don't know about you, but to me, a Russian military channel of unknown location and purpose broadcasting a single tone nonstop for 30 years (interrupted from time to time to broadcast coded information) is somewhat creepy. The fact that it has stopped without any "normal" sounding stuff being broadcasted for 9+ hours (I don't know when it stopped, but the earliest I've seen anybody saying it stopped was a post on an electronics forum from ~9 hours ago) is also creepy. Worst case scenario is that it's part of some military dead-man switch or something, and now that it's gone silent, serious shit is going down in Russia. There is reason to believe that Dead Hand (Russian network to launch nukes automatically in case an attack takes out the nuclear chain of command; it's back from the Cold War days) is still kept operational. I know I sounds like a lame conspiracy theorist, but you never know.

 

Also, coincidence that this happens the day before the world is supposedly going to end?? In that case, it's either a huge nuclear launch, or the greatest trolling in the history of mankind.

[~Master~ Button Mash 2,307]

UVB-76...haven't heard that name in months. I used to be really into numbers stations and other mystery radio stations, and UVB-76 was always near the top of my list in terms of creep-factor (next being the Swedish Rhapsody, even though it's defunct now). So this thing suddenly going off the air is definitely piquing my interest.

[Evilshy 5,089]

I only found out about it a few months ago, during one of my many Wikipedia crawls. I thought it was pretty cool, but forgot about it until I heard about it stopping in a passing comment on an AM radio station as I was driving home from the store tonight.

Edited December 21, 2012 by Evilshy

[Spring Storm 276]

 

Pretty creepy stuff. Interesting to read about - it'll probably cause a lot of conspiracy theories and whatnot. Also sounds like it'd make for a decent creepypasta.

[Prince Midnight 817]

a dead man swtich? a little too far arent you? i doubt the russians would trust that shit to a computer, nukes are too watched these days, i for one wouldnt trust my nukes to a computer.

in any case, UVB comes from a military base in the ural mountains, as for what it does, it sounds like a old truck horn through a cheese grater, i personally think the voices are just a military conformation code.

and another thing about the nukes, you would think with sattelite tech these days, we would be warned ahead of time, LONG before the nukes are able to hit.

 

also, this x3, i love cracked to death, and ironically the first part of the artical is about UVB 76

 

http://www.cracked.com/article_18381_the-5-creepiest-unexplained-broadcasts.html

Edited December 21, 2012 by SKSBrony

[Jadefire 2,796]

inb4 Never Gonna Give You Up starts playing in Russian. x3.

 

Still pretty spooky. Wonder if there's anything going on in Russia at the moment.

[Evilshy 5,089]

a dead man swtich? a little too far arent you? i doubt the russians would trust that shit to a computer, nukes are too watched these days, i for one wouldnt trust my nukes to a computer.

 

I said "worst case" didn't I?

 

And I mentioned Dead Hand, it's very real and was active during the Cold War. According to form KGB, it's maintained, and even updated with new hardware and software. Also, it's not completely autonomous, it still requires at least someone to push the button; it says something along the lines of "hey, we just got the shit nuked out of us, click here to retaliate". Somebody can get on the phone/check the news/look out the window and confirm, and the push the button.

[Alex Kennedy 1,228]

While I was reading this, I couldn't help but think: what if the whole purpose of the station was just to mess with people, and they decided that the joke was finally getting old?

 

Highly unlikely, but it would be awesome if it were somehow true.

[sLORT 28]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2EKWgTNEYU

 

I just listened to UVB-76. I don't know why but sent chills down my spine. That BUZZZZZZZZZZZ-BUZZZZZZZZZZZ sound is just really unsettling to me. Still better than most shit on American radios, that's for sure.

[A Blithering Div 247]

UVB will probably come back provided the Lincolnshire poacher didn't get to it first. I doubt it has anything to do with the Dead Hand though. From what I've read, it'd be more like if NORAD had retaliation silos than something to do with international espionage. It could simply be that Russia doesn't have a use for it anymore. After all, whats the difference between one time numbers over radio or one time numbers on a prepaid cell purchased with cash?

[MagmaKnight 17]

Well thats creepy I've never herd of the radio station UVB 76 but the chances are ill only remember it when im about to go to sleep. 

[AegisReflector 886]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YatKCf42TrM

 

The audio in question.

 

I'm really interested in hidden government conspiracies and spy material so this is, to me, a goldmine of interest rather than creepy. However, "the buzzer" does have that discomfort factor. :/

[Nicolau 0]

think right about what we can not proceed moves away from something that seems false but true acretide this is a real video with nothing in particular at least that's what I think

[Doz2nd 294]

The second video clips message may refer to this (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/protein/74143574) research done during that time period.

Mentions cDNA cloning of animals.