Cosmic LibrarianA Mysterious Signal Began Transmitting as the Iran War Erupted—Now Someone is Jamming It
In the early hours of the U.S.-Israel war with Iran, a mysterious shortwave radio signal began broadcasting from an unknown location.
The broadcasts feature a man speaking mostly in Persian, although with the occasional inclusion of English language words, as a series of random numbers are conveyed, followed by the word tavajjoh, meaning “attention,” spoken three times before each transmission ends.
An artifact of the Cold War, the short radio dispatches that began just twelve hours after the onset of the conflict in Iran represent what radio experts refer to as a numbers station—a form of shortwave radio transmissions that broadcast random number sequences with the likely purpose of conveying information to intelligence officers in foreign nations.
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