Sunday, September 05, 2010

UVB76 Leaves Air, Human Species Survives

There's been a lot of Internet buzz surrounding UVB76, the supposed call sign of a mysterious, Russian station whose marker is The Buzzer (formerly XB, now S38). It's usually on 4625 kHz. Conspiracy sites have gone crazy since it broadcast a voice message on August 25, and then left the air shortly before 0000 UTC on September 1.

Right now, the only verifiable fact is that the station is still off-air, except maybe for a weak carrier. There have been a lot of pirate transmissions, some of which indicated a familiarity with the "numbers" hobby. A couple of these even addressed two well known Internet mailing list members, by name.

Mary Villano in L.A. reports that even "Adult Swim," a Cartoon Channel program block after the kiddies are in bed, did a bumper with a scope screen type of graphic and words about how UVB76 was off-air and we should all be afraid. This is fun stuff.

Also interesting is the very dark cloud shadow on Google Earth over what is purported to be the UVB76 transmitter building. It's almost as if the site was deliberately redacted. If the surrounding area wasn't more dank than a gloomy Russian novel, and if the images weren't from 2009 and earlier, even I might think someone said something. But I don't. It's just more strangeness from a seemingly endless source of same.

We'll try to sort all this out in the November column. I don't usually advertise, but you'll want to read THIS one.