One Fateful Day in 1998

Under the headphones, on the other side of a cord, you will hear a message that was broadcast to one of the largest audiences in radio history.

In 1998, this was roughly seventy million. It wasn’t on a station you’d ever have heard of, however. It was on a station, in fact, that literally no one had ever heard of. How is that possible? Well… read on.

Not everyone knew it at the time. In fact most didn’t… and even more people don’t today. Almost all of the possible radio audience, across many American markets, didn’t know how to access the broadcast.

See, it was somehow obscured. Any equipment to track it, at least of the time, would indicate it originated from a never-before-seen wavelength between 88.9 and 90.0 FM.

Those who did end up hearing it either had a new digital tuner or some form of studio equipment.

If you heard it, you most likely fell into the trap. Feeling the pride of uncovering a mysterious broadcast, you soon discover that there’s actually another mystery beneath the first one!

Listening for a couple seconds, it’ll be immediately clear to you that the content of the broadcast was just as confusing as its origins.

What does the continuous voice say? Random letters and words. Literally random… or so it seems.

If you listened for longer, you’d eventually realize there’s a chime as well. It’s a chime that sounds periodically, every 2 minutes or so.

Maybe after an hour you’d discover that none of it is random at all. Everything between two chimes is a message. The same message. The same repeating message.

Young people across cities and towns would become instantly obsessed with the message, and do whatever they could to solve it.

For the participants who knew of each other, it became something of a friendly rivalry. They were all invested in this secret knowledge and the quest to get to the bottom of it.

During one sunset in late October, around thirty of these participants in the average-sized town of Blayboro solved it at once! No one really knows how. There was even a row of eight apartment buildings that happened to account for nineteen of these.

Only a few of them got to even experience the joy of this accomplishment. Because, for one thing, the result was not something to be celebrated.

^^^ “R. C, Cat. H. I. A. T, Tom. U. H. W. O. A. V, Van. N. B, Boy. Y. H. T, Tom. I. Q. Y. J. H. N. T. O. I. H. O. T. Q. Y. H. I. R. O. Z, Zed. Y. H. X. U. T. W. I. R. B, Boy. R. U. Y. H. L. A. P, Pal. H. Y. I. R. F. I. D, Dog. G, Go. H. F. Q. O. H. M. I. X. H. Q. T, Tom. C, Cat.” ^^^

Don’t feel bad if you can’t get anything from that. The average participant took 10 whole weeks to crack it. And that was after realizing there was a message to crack in the first place.

They found that the words were just there to clarify the letters before them. The message was deciphered through a simple pattern.

All one had to do was to identify every nth letter.

Once those letters were separated, they could instantly tell where the word breaks came in.

One short sentence that changed the world. No one looked at mysterious codes the same way again.

It would take the police over a decade to truly understand why most of these winning participants afterwards hurled themselves directly into death.