// 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
-
The Golden Record
Every story on this show so far has been us, down here, listening to the dark.
-
The Reply
In nineteen seventy-four we shouted one sentence at the stars.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
-
The Hum
Most people in the world have never heard it.
-
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
-
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.
-
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
-
The Lincolnshire Poacher
Somewhere a tape deck clicked on, played a few bars of an old hunting song, and then a woman started counting.
-
Seventy Two Seconds
The universe has said exactly one word to us, and it said it in the summer of nineteen seventy-seven.
-
The Intrusion
There is an hour of the night when the television stops talking to you and starts talking to itself.
-
The Long Echo
Some nights you talk to the sky.
-
The Buzzer
Somewhere in the forests west of Moscow, a machine has been clearing its throat for fifty years.
