Like any good student of the internet, you know what numbers stations are. They’re part of the unexplained oddity canon, the “mystery spots” on the vast trunk of recent history available for close examination via the internet.Mostly, they are broadcasts of strings of numbers—and some words, some sentences. Nothing we can decipher. And even if we could, the information would probably still be meaningless to us: totally decontextualized spy stuff in spy jargon. They are rarely if ever acknowledged by their supposed government parent and seem to exist in a weird autonomous zone simply because we don’t know enough about them to ask about them.“Shortwave Numbers Stations are a perfect method of anonymous, one way communication—spies located anywhere in the world can be communicated to by their masters via small, locally available, and unmodified Shortwave receivers,” says the Conet Project, an organization that’s been collecting numbers station transmissions, eventually releasing them in a 4 CD box set in the late-’90s.They are weirdly hypnotic and even musical, but mostly eerie and disembodied. A series of tone pulses, a few loops of weird ice cream truck-style chimes, a young girl reads numbers in German. A crude synth melody loops several times, a woman reads coldly in Czech. It’s about as close as we’re ever going to get to hearing actual alien trasmissions.Thanks to Archive.org, you can hear the whole thing right here:Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.