I recently discovered what is perhaps the creepiest collection of recorded audio in the history of recorded audio. The Conet Project is a four-disc compilation of "numbers station" broadcasts.
Numbers stations are basically shortwave lo-fi radio broadcasts of seemingly random information/sound. Sometimes, the audio consists of just feedback, machine noises, and other such ambience. Other times there is spoken audio, generally performed by women or children, generally distorted, and generally reciting a series of numbers or letters in any variety of languages, including English, German, Russian, and Polish. Sometimes there is musical accompaniment and sometimes it's just a voice.
No one knows for sure where these numbers stations are broadcast from or what their purpose is, but they've apparently been around since World War I and it's assumed that they broadcast encoded messages for spies "in the field", although no government agency has admitted to this. It's more fun, to me, to think of them as mysterious transmissions from beyond the grave, intended only for a select handful of people to understand and interpret.
The Conet Project has been released on CD by British label Irdial-Discs, which has also made the collection available for free download. If you're brave and interested in being scared shitless, then please go download it, put it on your iPod, and then listen to it whilst driving at night, possible while along a dimly-lit empty stretch of road.
Links:
The Conet Project on Wikipedia.org
Download The Conet Project
Numbers Stations on Wikipedia.org
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this is creeping me out already just reading about it.
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