THE MYSTERY OF MY FATHER

My Dad was a seemingly humble bloke of working class origins who left school at sixteen. After a stint in the navy as part of his national service, he worked as a photographer at RAF Farnborough some time in the 1950s, then later as a cameraman for the BBC in London, which is where he met my mum. He ended up in the audio-visual department of Bath University while getting a degree through the Open University.

OK, nothing strange about any of that, but let’s fast forward to the early 80s, when a teenage me started listening to shortwave radio as a nerdy hobby. Shortwave radio was the only medium which reached around the world in those pre-internet days. Many countries broadcast programs in English for a global audience, so you could learn about them, and in addition, you could file a reception report with them, detailing on what frequency and when you heard them, and what the signal was like. In return, the radio station would send you a card with their logo on it, and these were fun to collect. Again, nothing unusual here, but then the legendary ‘numbers stations’ began to make their presence felt on my radio.

Perhaps you’re not familiar with numbers stations, although they have become something of a cult favourite and legend in certain quarters. I discovered them by accident while scanning the radio dial for my usual stations such as Radio Moscow, NHK Tokyo and so on. Between the registered radio bands I sometimes came across these bizarre broadcasts which consisted of strange, vaguely sinister, synthesised voices repeating strings of numbers in various languages. Prior to the broadcast there would be a short melodic phrase as a call sign. The creepiest of them all was a child’s voice doing the numerical sequences. You got the eerie impression of some poor might held hostage in a basement, doing these broadcasts at gunpoint. The whole thing was baffling and creepy. There was definitely something dodgy about these stations, since they were broadcasting illegally in frequency bands where they were not supposed to be.

And this is where my dad comes in. One day I mentioned to him about these strange broadcasts, and played him the recordings to tape I had made. I asked him what he thought they were. Without hesitation or any surprise, he immediately told me that they were spy stations run by various governments to send encrypted messages to their operatives abroad. He even told me in detail how it worked. He said that the operatives had a ‘one time pad’ with the cypher key, which, as the name suggests, changed for every broadcast. After decryption, the spy would memorise the message and destroy the relevant sheet on the pad.

I just accepted this answer from my dad at face value, and being young, didn’t think to ask him the obvious question - how the hell did he know all of this? (Remember folks, this is pre-Internet).

Years later, I’d forgotten about the whole thing, and in the 2010s as I got interested in scepticism and debunking pseudo-science, I started listening to Brian Dunning’s Skeptoid podcast in which each week a particular conspiracy theory, urban myth or quack medical treatment would be investigated in with rigorous scientific methodology.

One week, to my great surprise, he tackled the number stations, and my memories of it all came flooding back. I was expecting Dunning to show that it was all nonsense, but astonishingly, after describing exactly the one-time pad system my dad had mentioned, he then concluded after going through all the evidence, that this was one case where the favoured fan theory was most likely to be correct. As far as I know, this is the only time in ten years of shows that this has happened. Occam’s razor applied here leaves us firmly with the idea that governments have or do use this very method to contact operatives in the field.

I mentioned that regular shortwave radio stations used to send out cards to listeners who reported on reception. One time I got a card from an Eastern European station. My dad, as he handed me the letter, casually informed me that it had been steamed open and then reglued. He said that MI5 were most likely responsible. Again, he said this with some authority. On closer inspection, it was pretty obvious that it really had been glued down again.

So was my father more than just a humble photographer at RAF Farnborough? It is known that this base was where experimental aircraft were tested - were other activities of a more clandestine nature going on there too? Perhaps people just talked, and that’s how he had information about these matters. However, the concision, veracity and detailed nature of his explanations to me would seem to suggest something else. Unfortunately, since he is long gone, we will never know.