Card Stations

You might be familiar with number stations already. These are short-wave radio broadcasts used for espionage. Spies for various countries have been using these since World War I as ways of receiving coded information. They’re called “number” stations because they use codes that use numbers. They broadcast these strange messages in a loop.

You might not be as familiar with card stations. Similar to number stations, card stations were first noticed in the 1960s and 1970s and mainly originated in rural America. Instead of reciting a string of seemingly random numbers these broadcasts sounded like they were instructions for a card game. “Discard the Ace of Spades and keep the Queen of Hearts.”

At first it was assumed that card stations were like number stations, a way to transmit clandestine information to spies. However, there are some strange things that happen when listening to the card stations combined with Black Noise. The U.S. government’s official statements are that these are some elaborate hoax, but I’m not so certain. Are they the result of some mad scientist’s mind control experiments? Space aliens?

Try it out here.