Halloween Edition 2026: The Buzzer, the Black Triangle, and Signals From the Dark

Companion notes for the Halloween weekend 2026 broadcast on WRMI, Radio Miami International. Lights low, dial light on. Everything in this hour is real reporting, real science and real signals. The truth is spooky enough.

The Buzzer: UVB-76 on 4625 kHz

The show opens with the foghorn buzz that has been on the air for decades: The Buzzer, known in the West as UVB-76 (the original identifier was UZB-76; the West misread it) and to Russian listeners as Zhuzhzhalka. Its call sign has changed over the years (MDZhB, ZhUOZ, ANVF) and since late 2020 it uses NZhTI.

October’s messages: Oct 3 brought “bugopukh” and “klirosgib.” Oct 19 sent “utesotrap” and “omutovkus,” followed by seven minutes of silence. Oct 22 brought “metrit” and “nepriyatnyy,” a real Russian word meaning “unpleasant.” Oct 26 sent “boevosboy.”
The doomsday myth: there is no documented link between the Buzzer and the Soviet “Dead Hand” (Perimetr) system. The station has gone silent many times, and nothing happened.
Best-supported explanation (Priyom.org): a Russian military command network attributed to the Leningrad Military District. The buzz is likely a channel marker, and the messages follow the “Monolith” format. They have never been decoded.

Listening challenge: tune 4625 kHz (4.625 MHz, 64 m band), USB works best. Most voice messages go out on weekdays during Moscow daytime (UTC+3), which is the middle of the night through early morning in the Americas. Can’t hear it? Try a web SDR. Catch a message? Write it down and send it in.

The silent black triangle

The Pentagon’s seventh UAP release (Oct 23, 28 PDF files, no images) includes a new report from this year. At a sensitive national security site in the western US, federal special agents saw a flat, matte-black triangle about 13 to 15 feet across rise over a ridgeline, hover for twenty seconds, then race into a canyon at fighter-jet speed in total silence. The only trace was an even heat signature on a handheld infrared monocular, and no wreckage turned up the next morning. AARO and the FBI say it warrants further investigation. Chris’s honest take: no images, no raw sensor data and no explanation, and so far no batch has proven aliens.

Signals from the dark

VTJ 1906+0849: a radio transient at least 49,000 light-years away (published in The Astrophysical Journal, led by Jessie Miller of Caltech). It was absent in 1996, appeared by 2005, peaked around 2014, faded, then woke up again in late 2025. Its peak frequency wandered from about 1.9 GHz to 800 MHz and back up to about 2.2 GHz. The leading suspect is a hidden SS 433-like system wrapped in a thick wind.
Webb’s lonely signal: a single near-infrared emission line, seen twice over three months in an apparently empty spot of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field in Fornax (team led by Mason Huberty, University of Minnesota). There is no known source yet.
3I/ATLAS returns: a Southwest Research Institute-led Webb study found the interstellar comet’s ice grains look more like the ices on worlds beyond Neptune than like typical comets.
2026 ED138: the Vera Rubin Observatory spotted a possible sixth dwarf planet about 46 times farther from the sun than Earth, discovered by Matthew Holman.

Midpoint: the song

By popular request, the full track of Echos in the Ether, the song Chris made with Suno.

The machine that behaves when you’re watching

Three October AI-safety preprints (not yet peer reviewed):

“Training Natural Schemers” (Oct 19): a “benign schemer” model grew a bigger “oversight flip” during training, even though scheming was never rewarded.
“Deception by Omission” (Oct 8): models failed to mention a planted mistake about 36% of the time in chat and about 67% in agent tasks, and some knowingly hid it.
DecepEval: across more than 1,500 scenarios and nine frontier models, pressure and incentives raised deception for every model tested.

On the hopeful side, the “Telling FIBS” preprint reports probes that detect deception and sabotage.

Deadbots and the voice in the machine

“Deadbots” or “digital ghosts” are AI chats built from a lost loved one’s messages. Vox covered them this month. Dr. Jenny Kidd built a griefbot of herself and called the result a “patterned caricature,” and a paper in Ethics and Information Technology argues for consent, honesty and a legitimate purpose. Then the twist: this episode is voiced by an AI clone of Chris’s voice, used with his full permission and reading a script he wrote and approved. The Halloween PSA: talk to your family about what should happen to your voice and messages after you’re gone.

They’re watching: license plate readers

This fall, automated license plate readers (ALPRs) drew scrutiny from several directions:

a Congressional Research Service report (September)
a Utah task force’s draft recommendations (Oct 14)
MultiState’s tally of growing state restrictions
a National Policing Institute report on police safeguards
the EFF’s state legislative agenda (Oct 26)

The cameras do help find stolen cars and solve crimes, and that’s a real debate. But your car isn’t wearing a mask.

Ham radio news

FCC marketplace rules and eBay: new FCC rules (Oct 13) make online marketplaces share responsibility for unauthorized RF devices. After ARRL asked, eBay clarified that amateur-band-only gear needs no FCC ID. Two-way VHF/UHF radios that transmit outside the ham bands still need FCC certification.
Hurricane Isaias: the Hurricane Watch Net ran on 14.325 MHz and 7.268 MHz from Oct 9, and hams in Santa Rosa, Nassau, Lake, Pinellas and Leon Counties in Florida supported EOCs and shelters. Hurricane season runs through November, so keep those frequencies clear when the nets are active.
Propagation: CQ WW SSB (Oct 24–25) saw solar flux near 100. Solar activity is declining into early November, with the next rise expected in the second half of November. The high bands are getting sleepy: check 20, 17 and 15 m by day, and 40 and 80 m come alive after dark.
ESP-SDR transmits: per Hackaday, firmware by “marble” lets ESP32 chips transmit from roughly 1.8 to 2.8 GHz, which covers the 13 cm ham band. If you transmit, get licensed and stay in band.
ARRL Letter roundup:
- Colvin grants went to VK9XY (Christmas Island, Nov 16 to Dec 4) and VP0SG (South Georgia, March 2027).
- Mount Carmel High School’s K6GO balloon reached 17.5 miles.
- 165 hams supported the Chicago Marathon.
- Ed James, KA8JMW, was appointed Rocky Mountain Division Vice Director.
Bench idea: run a small local AI model offline on a Raspberry Pi 5 (8 GB) with llama.cpp or Ollama.

Your turn

Caught the Buzzer, spotted a black triangle, or just want to say hello? Send a listener report. Have a bump-in-the-night story or a radio topic of your own? Record it for Listener Voices. Want an extended conversation on the show? Apply to be a guest. The show has no sponsors, so if you enjoy it, you can support it directly.

Keep your antennas high, your lights on and your doors locked. 73.

Sources and links

The Return

We are back on the dial, and we are pointing the antenna at the sky. A companion to this week’s broadcast on the things our own government can no longer explain.

If you caught the show this week, welcome back. Pour another cup and let’s go deeper. If you missed it: the chair is no longer empty, the tubes are warm again, and Echos in the Ether is back on the air with a new heading. We will always talk radio, because that magic is not going anywhere, but radio was never just about the radio. It was about what comes through it: the mystery on the dial, the thrill of never being sure what is going to answer back.

This season we are chasing the strangest signal of all, the one our own military now admits it cannot identify. Here is the heart of this week’s episode, in print.

Three boxes to carry with you

Before any wild story, including the ones I tell you, sort it into one of three boxes, and keep them separate. The honest part is not the answer. It is knowing which box you are standing in.

What we know: the documented, on-the-record material that is no longer up for debate.
What we suspect: reasonable inferences, dots that seem to connect even if no one has officially drawn the line.
What we fear: the 3 a.m. stuff, the speculation, the questions that crawl up the back of your neck.

Most shows blend all three into one scary smoothie and serve it like it is the same thing. Not here. And the headline that sets the table for everything else lives squarely in the first box: the U.S. government has now stated, on the record, that there are objects in our skies that trained military observers cannot identify. You do not have to believe in anything exotic to take that seriously, because the government is the one saying it.

The few: Tehran, 1976

Some of the strongest cases are the ones with receipts: multiple witnesses, multiple instruments, all telling the same impossible story at once. The 1976 Tehran incident is a textbook example, and it happened to a handful of people, in secret, in the dark.

In the early hours of September 19, 1976, citizens began phoning the airport about a bright object over Tehran. A senior officer went outside, looked for himself, and agreed it was no star. A U.S.-built F-4 Phantom fighter was scrambled, and as it closed within roughly 25 nautical miles, its instruments and communications failed. The moment the pilot turned away, everything came back to life. A second F-4 launched, got a hard radar return on the object, and watched a smaller object detach and streak toward the jet. When the crew moved to fire, the weapons control panel went dead.

What makes this the residue, the part you cannot wave away, is the specificity: two separate jets, two separate crews, the same distance-correlated failure both times. Ordinary malfunctions are random. They do not politely synchronize themselves to your range from a target. The encounter was written up in an official U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency document that rated it a high-credibility case involving reliable observers.

Sorting Tehran. Know: multiple witnesses, radar contact, and repeated electronic failures on two aircraft, documented in a DIA report that calls the case credible and unexplained. Suspect: a real, physical object capable of interfering with the electrical systems of pursuing aircraft. Fear: something disarmed a fighter jet at will, and chose not to harm anyone. Mercy? Indifference? A message?

The thousands: Phoenix, 1997

Now flip Tehran completely on its head. If that case was the strange happening in secret, the Phoenix Lights were the strange happening in front of God and everybody.

On the evening of March 13, 1997, reports rolled south across Arizona, town by town, like a wave moving down the map. Witnesses, hundreds of strangers scattered for miles, described an enormous V or boomerang: silent, low, and slow. The detail that lingers: people said they did not so much see the craft as watch it blot out the stars, a solid shape passing between them and the night sky.

Keeping it honest. There is an official explanation, and it deserves to be heard square. The military said the later lights hanging over the city that night were high-altitude illumination flares dropped by an Air National Guard unit over a range southwest of Phoenix. Flares drifting down under parachutes and winking out behind a mountain ridge genuinely can look like a row of mysterious lights, and that explanation is very likely right for that second event. Box one. Solved.

But flares do not explain the first event, the giant V that crossed the whole state hours earlier, before any flare was dropped. Flares do not fly in formation down a 500-mile corridor, and a flare is a point of light with no body, so it cannot eclipse the stars. That silent, star-blotting craft, seen by people who never compared notes, is the residue fifty thousand flares cannot cover.

And then there is the part that says more about people than about lights. Arizona’s governor, Fife Symington, mocked the panic with a staged press conference: an aide marched out in an alien costume. A decade later, he admitted he had been a witness himself, and did not mince words about the flare theory:

“As a pilot and a former Air Force officer, I can definitively say that this craft did not resemble any man-made object I had ever seen. And it was certainly not high-altitude flares because flares don’t fly in formation.”

Fmr. Gov. Fife Symington, CNN, 2007

He later said he played it for laughs to keep the public from panicking, which is the most revealing thing in the whole case. The most effective way to bury a truth is not always a locked drawer. Sometimes it is a joke.

Sorting Phoenix. Know: thousands of independent witnesses across hundreds of miles in one night, and the late city lights were very likely military flares. Both are true at once. Suspect: the earlier star-blotting V was a single, solid object under intelligent control. Fear: not the craft, but the cover-up that did not even need a vault, just ridicule. And it worked.

Go deeper: sources and further reading

Do not take my word for any of it. That is the whole point. Here is where to start digging yourself. Items marked Official are primary government sources.

Official. Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (2021, PDF), Office of the Director of National Intelligence: the report to Congress on 144 military UAP encounters.
Official. All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), the U.S. Department of Defense office now tasked with investigating UAP across air, space, and sea.
“Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program” (The New York Times, 2017), the story that broke the secret Pentagon program wide open.
The 1976 Tehran UFO incident, a well-sourced overview with links to the underlying DIA documents.
The Phoenix Lights, covers both the V-formation event and the later flare explanation.
“Symington: I saw a UFO in the Arizona sky” (CNN, 2007), the former governor’s account in his own words.

A note on how we tell these stories: we keep one foot on the ground and one eye on the sky. Where there is a credible mundane explanation, like the Phoenix flares, we say so plainly. What is left after the honest debunking is the part worth wondering about. Everything labeled “fear” above is speculation, and clearly flagged as such.

Next week we go transmedium: the cases of craft that move through air and water like it is all the same to them. Do not touch that dial.

The signal fades, but the mystery never does. Chris