// on demand
The Fringe
Real signals. The ones nobody has explained.
A short piece, read on air, about something that genuinely happened on a frequency somebody was listening to. The Buzzer has been clearing its throat outside Moscow since the seventies. A television broadcast in Southern England was interrupted in 1977 by somebody who said he was not from here. None of this is the invented half of the station. That is the point of it.
// 14 in the archive
Every Episode
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The Golden Record
Transmissions from the Fringe: every story so far was us listening to the dark. This one goes the other way, the Golden Record on Voyager and what we sent back.
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The Reply
In 1974 we shouted one sentence at the stars from Arecibo. Twenty-seven years later, something wrote an answer in a field of wheat. Transmissions from the Fringe.
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The Child Voice
Of all the coded voices that lived on the shortwave dial, the one that frightened people most sounded like a little girl.
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The Bloop
In the summer of nineteen ninety-seven, the bottom of the Pacific Ocean made a noise so big it broke every rule we had for what is down there.
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It is not an Aircraft
A young pilot flew out over the water at dusk, started describing something to the man on the radio, and got about as far as a person can get before t
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The Hum
Most people have never heard the Hum, and the ones who have cannot make it stop. A low drone from Taos, Bristol and Windsor, on Transmissions from the Fringe.
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The Hessdalen Lights
There is a valley in central Norway where the lights come down into the hills, and for once the scientists went up to meet them instead of laughing th
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Vrillon
On a Saturday evening in southern England, the news was running, and then for about six minutes the news was not in charge of the channel anymore.
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The Ghost Ship
Out in the Strait of Malacca, between Sumatra and the Malay coast, two ships caught the same distress call on the same night, and what it said was wor
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The Lincolnshire Poacher
A tape deck plays a few bars of an old English hunting song, then a woman starts counting in groups of five. A shortwave mystery on Transmissions from the Fringe.
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Seventy Two Seconds
The universe has said exactly one word to us, and a radio telescope in Ohio caught it in the summer of 1977. Transmissions from the Fringe, on GZS 197.7.
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The Intrusion
In 1987 a man in a Max Headroom mask hijacked a Chicago news broadcast. The hour of the night when television talks to itself, on Transmissions from the Fringe.
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The Long Echo
In 1927 a Norwegian engineer heard a radio signal come back three seconds late. Some nights you talk to the sky and it talks back. Transmissions from the Fringe.
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The Buzzer
Somewhere in the forests west of Moscow, a machine has been clearing its throat for fifty years, on 4625 kilohertz. The Buzzer, on Transmissions from the Fringe.
