This Station Has Buzzed for 40 Years. Last Year It Said a Name.

Somewhere in Russia, a radio transmitter has been making the same sound for more than forty years.

It is a short, harsh buzz, about one second long, repeated over and over, around twenty-five times a minute, day and night, on the shortwave frequency 4625 kHz.¹ Radio hobbyists call it UVB-76, or simply The Buzzer. It has been heard since at least the early 1980s.²

It almost never stops. And a few times a year, without warning, the buzzing breaks off, and a man's voice reads a short message in Russian. Usually a few numbers. Usually a word or a name that means nothing to anyone listening.³

Then the buzzing starts again.

No government has ever officially explained what the station is for. Most experts believe it belongs to the Russian military, a way of keeping a channel open and ready, a signal that says we are still here to someone who needs to know.⁴

Hobbyists around the world listen to it constantly. They write down every message. They argue about what the words mean.

Mārtiņš Ozols listened for seven years. Then the station said his name.

His landlord found the logbooks when she cleared the apartment in Riga. They were stacked in a biscuit tin, wrapped in a plastic bag, the lid taped shut. Seven years of entries in small, careful handwriting. Date, time, message. Hundreds of them. Numbers. Strange Russian words. Brontosaurus. Lightning rod. Sea gull.

The early pages were the work of a happy hobbyist. Little jokes in the margins. Notes about the weather. A drawing of his cat.

Then, about three years in, the entries changed.

Beside each message, he had started writing a second column. Not what the voice said. What happened afterward.

Message: 4 9 1 7. Next day: a ferry sank in the Baltic. Four dead.

Message: "Ironwood." Next day: a factory fire in Ironwood, Michigan.

Message: 6 6 0 2. Next day: an earthquake. Magnitude 6.6. Two hours later, a second shock.

He had circled the last one so many times the pen had worn through the page.

At the bottom, in larger letters, he had written:

It does not report what happens. It is giving orders. Something somewhere hears the message and makes it so.

And under that, in red:

If it ever says something you know, turn it off. Do not write it down. Writing it down is the reply.

The receiver was still on the desk when the landlord, Ilze, came in. Still switched on. Still tuned to 4625. The buzzing filled the empty room, one second at a time, like a heart monitor in a hospital.

She turned it off. Later, she would remember that the buzzing seemed to continue for a moment after the dial clicked. She would tell herself it was her ears.

There was one cassette in the tin. A label: 14 JANUARY. Mārtiņš had recorded one of the voice messages. She played it on her son's old stereo that night, because the logbook ended on January 14, and because she wanted to know what had made a gentle man who drew pictures of his cat stop paying rent and disappear.

The buzzing. One second. Two. Ten.

Then it stopped, and a calm man's voice spoke, close to the microphone, in Russian, and then, very clearly, in Latvian.

A name. Mārtiņš Ozols.

Then numbers. 1 4 0 1.

The fourteenth of January.

Then the buzzing began again.