World5 min(s) read
A Russian military radio station that has been emitting the same monotonous buzz 24 hours a day since the 1970s stopped buzzing on Wednesday and a voice started reading out coded names and numbers instead.
Then the buzzing started again. Nobody has explained what the message meant.
The station is called UVB-76. Online, it is known as 'The Buzzer' or 'The Doomsday Radio'.
It broadcasts on 4625 kHz shortwave and has done so without interruption for roughly half a century.
The signal is a short, sharp tone that repeats about 25 times a minute, every minute, every hour, every day. It never stops.
Except when it does - and when it does, people pay attention.
Between August 24 and August 28, shortwave radio enthusiasts who monitor the station around the clock recorded multiple coded voice transmissions interrupting the usual buzz.
The messages followed a familiar pattern.
A male Russian voice reading out a sequence of names, numbers, and call signs.
The names are believed to represent letters in the Russian phonetic alphabet.
The numbers have never been publicly decoded. After each transmission, the buzzing resumed as though nothing had happened.
Musician and radio enthusiast Benn Jordan posted a spectrogram video of one of the transmissions on X on Thursday, showing the moment the buzz cuts out and the voice begins. His caption summed up the general mood online.
"Yesterday, out of nowhere, UVB-76, the Russian military's mysterious 'Doomsday Buzzer' shortwave transmitter, stopped buzzing and delivered a cryptic message. Anyways, have a great weekend everyone!"
The post has been viewed millions of times.
Nobody knows for certain. The Russian government has never publicly acknowledged the station, confirmed its purpose, or explained the buzzing.
What is known is that it has been broadcasting from somewhere near Moscow, and possibly later from a site north of St Petersburg, since at least the late 1970s. It uses thousands of watts of power. The signal reaches in all directions.
Professor David Stupples, who teaches electronic and radio engineering at City University of London, has said it is 'almost certainly the Russian government that is using it'.
He told Popular Mechanics that its purpose was 'probably not a peaceful one' and suggested it could have direct military implications, possibly related to air defence or some other form of military communication.
The most dramatic theory links it to the Soviet-era 'Dead Hand' system, an automatic nuclear retaliation mechanism designed to launch missiles if central command was destroyed in a first strike and could no longer communicate with its forces.
Under this theory, the buzzing is a heartbeat.
As long as it continues, the system knows someone is still alive and in control. If it stops for good, the assumption is that nobody is left.
There is no confirmed evidence for this.
But nobody has been able to disprove it either, which is why every time the buzzing is interrupted by a coded message, the internet briefly considers the possibility that something very bad is about to happen.
The burst of activity began roughly 24 hours after CIA Director John Ratcliffe visited Moscow this week and met with his Russian counterpart, Foreign Intelligence Service chief Sergei Naryshkin.
According to Ynet News, the station was interrupted at least 25 times on Thursday alone.
Among the words reportedly heard were 'waitress', 'spray', and 'existence'.
The last time UVB-76 was this active was February 12, 2025, the day Trump and Putin spoke for the first time since Trump returned to the White House.
Even Kremlin-linked media outlets reported on this week's unusual burst.
Politico reported that Ratcliffe used the Moscow visit to urge Russian officials to reduce military and economic support for Iran.
Trump denied a Wall Street Journal report claiming Ratcliffe had warned Russia against attacking NATO. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Putin did not meet the CIA director personally.
Whether the UVB-76 transmissions have anything to do with Ratcliffe's visit is unknown.
The correlation could be coincidence. But a Russian threat to strike British military targets was issued the same day, with Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova warning that 'any British military facility and equipment in Ukraine and beyond may become a target'.
Latvia's president sought to calm fears by writing on X that the risk of direct Russian invasion remained low, but cautioned that 'acts of sabotage, cyberattacks and hybrid operations' were possible.
Doomsday maps showing the safest places to be if WW3 breaks out have been trending all month.
The Doomsday Clock was moved to 85 seconds to midnight in January, the closest it has ever been.
And a 1960s mathematician's prediction that the world would end on November 13, 2026, a Friday the 13th, is now 76 days away.
Previous transmissions have included sequences like 'Nikolai, Zhenya, Tatyana, Ivan' alongside numbers such as '38, 965, 78, 58, 88, 37'.
Code words like 'NZhTI' and 'HOTEL' have been clearly spelled out.
In April, four single words were transmitted: 'Neptune, Thymus, Foxcloak, and Nootabu'.
Over the decades, listeners have also reported hearing Swan Lake playing through the signal, the sound of footsteps, and on one occasion what sounded like a woman screaming.
The station has been broadcasting for roughly 50 years.
It has never explained itself. It has never been claimed. It has never stopped for more than a few minutes at a time.
And every few months, a voice comes on, reads out something nobody can decode, and the buzzing starts again.
Have a great weekend.
