Can you decode this message?

1 point

9 years ago

I don’t know how many of you remember numbers stations from the cold war. According to Wikipedia, a numbers station is a shortwave radio station that transmits secret messages, supposedly to intelligence services. The transmissions sound weird. They contain nonsensical streams of numbers, letters, song fragments and the like.

In any case, I thought it might be fun to “transmit” an encrypted message and see who can decode it. First person to paste the exact plaintext into a comment on this question wins.

What do you win? Glory and fame? Pride maybe? It's just for fun.

I’ve encoded my message into an mp3 file. It’s a sequence of letters spoken using the Nato Phonetic Alphabet so they are easy to understand. So Lima=L, Bravo=b, etc.

Note that I used an old, really simple cipher for this. I bet you can break it pretty quickly. If people like this game I’ll post a harder one next time.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/encryptedmessages/message1.mp3