Four of Us, and at Least Five Streams

I've spent two weeks doing the least glamorous work of my life: emailing strangers.

When I posted about the lighthouse on the 10th, I said I'd shown the logs to two people I trust and left it there. Time to stop being coy about it. If this goes the way I think it's going to go on the 3rd, I want the record to show who did the work, and I want it to show it beforehand, not after.

So. Here's the problem, and here's who's helping me with it.

The problem

The transmission out of Kingsmouth Lighthouse isn't one signal. It's five or six streams, each aimed somewhere different, each carrying a piece. I've said that already. What I haven't said is what it means in practice, which is this:

I cannot record this by myself. Nobody can. That's the entire point of how it's built.

Whoever set this up in 2012 did not want one clever person with a good antenna to be able to sit down and listen to the whole thing. They wanted it to require a group. Which is either the most thoughtful piece of design I've ever encountered, or the most effective way ever invented to make sure a message never gets heard.

I've been assuming thoughtful. Ask me again in a fortnight.

The people

ct2ahw — Rui Bettencourt, on the coast near Peniche, Portugal. Licensed since he was fifteen, which by his own account was "a very long time ago, and my mother is still annoyed about the roof." He was one of the two I mentioned. He went through my logs line by line and came back with the thing I'd missed: the burst spacing isn't random, it's reserved. There are gaps in it shaped like the other streams. He describes it as "a table with places set for people who haven't arrived."

He also told me, very politely, that my equipment isn't good enough and he's right.

la_pescadora — Valentina, in Valparaíso, Chile. She has been archiving numbers stations for nineteen years and has, at a conservative estimate, heard more strange radio than everyone reading this blog put together. I sent her the 10 June capture without telling her where it came from or what I thought it was, because I wanted to know what she'd say cold.

What she said cold was: "This is not a numbers station. This is somebody speaking very slowly to a room they can't see."

I have not stopped thinking about that sentence since.

es5tk — the radio society at the university in Tartu, Estonia. Kertu Sepp answers the email, and I get the strong impression that Kertu answers all the email. They have a proper array, students who will happily sit up all night for the novelty of it, and — critically — no connection to me, this blog, or anything I've written. They came to this because somebody forwarded them the post and they thought it sounded interesting.

Kertu's first message to me was four words long: "We can hear something."

What we're doing on the 3rd

RECEIVER SCHEDULE | 03 JULY 2026 | ALL TIMES UTC

17:30   All stations recording. Continuous. No gaps.
18:00   Predicted activation.
18:30   Earliest stand-down. Later if anything is still running.

KINGSMOUTH, ME (US)     me
PENICHE (PT)            ct2ahw
VALPARAISO (CL)         la_pescadora
TARTU (EE)              es5tk

UNCOVERED: East Asia. Oceania. Anything in that half of
the map at all. If that is where you are, please get in
touch. Today, not on the 2nd.

Four of us, and at least five streams, probably six. You do not need to be good at maths to see the shape of that.

I've asked everyone to do one thing that I want to explain, because it's going to look paranoid and it is:

Hold your recording. Don't post it.

Not to me, not publicly, not to a Discord, not anywhere. Keep it, back it up somewhere that isn't the machine you recorded it on, and sit on it until we've all got something to compare. If this turns out to be nothing, we've lost a Friday evening. If it turns out to be what I think it is, then four separate people quietly holding four separate pieces is a much harder thing to make disappear than one blog with everything on it.

I've had my room searched once already this year. I'd rather not find out what the second time looks like.

And if you're new here

You don't need a licence, a rig, or the faintest idea what any of the above means. You need a receiver, a recorder, and three hours on a Friday. Rui has been extraordinarily patient with people who are starting from nothing, and if you email me I will put you in touch with him, and he will be patient with you too.

There are no prizes for this. Nobody's paying anybody. The only thing on offer is that in fourteen years' time somebody might be able to say what actually happened here, and that will be because four or five strangers who have never met agreed to press record at the same moment.

That'll do me.

— Jenna

The spiral remains.

Something is broadcasting from Kingsmouth Lighthouse

 

 

3 July 2026 | 00:14 UTC | Jenna McKendrick

 

I've been sitting on this for three days. I wanted to be certain before I posted anything, because the last thing I want to do is send people chasing static. But I've run the analysis four times now, shown the logs to two people I trust, and I can't find another explanation.

Something is broadcasting from Kingsmouth Lighthouse.

Three nights ago, at 18:47 UTC, I was running a routine frequency sweep across the Solomon Island coastal bands. I do this semi-regularly. It's mostly background noise, weather interference, the odd fishing vessel. Nothing interesting. But at 18:47 the equipment lit up in a way I haven't seen before. A structured transmission pattern, deliberate spacing, repeating sequences with layered signals underneath the primary track. Not interference. Not a ghost echo off the water. A broadcast.

I spent the next two hours trying to explain it away. Equipment fault. Atmospheric bounce from somewhere else. Anything. But the origin point kept resolving to the same location: Kingsmouth Lighthouse, Solomon Island. And when I started pulling apart the frequency signatures, that's when I had to put the headphones down and go make a cup of tea.

The signatures match Orochi Group communications equipment. Specifically the type deployed in the area around 2012. Equipment that was officially removed and decommissioned after Project Polaris was terminated. Equipment that, by any official record, no longer exists at that location.

I don't know how to explain that. I'm not going to try, not yet. What I can tell you is what the signal is doing.

 

SIGNAL ANALYSIS | 10 June 2026:

The transmission is geographically distributed. This is not a single broadcast to a single receiver. Based on the frequency mapping, the signal is split across what appears to be five or six distinct streams, each one targeting a different part of the world.

This was a design decision. Someone built this so that no single listener could intercept the complete message. You would need receivers across every major timezone, comparing fragments side by side, before the whole transmission becomes intelligible. Someone wanted to make absolutely certain this could not be silenced by intercepting one signal.

The lighthouse has been automated and silent since 2012. That's fourteen years. Whatever this transmission is, it's been dormant for all of that time, waiting. And all indications from the signal pattern suggest it is going to broadcast fully, actively, at a specific time.

3 July 2026. 18:00 UTC.

 

Fourteen years to the day.

 

---

 

Here's what I need from you. At 18:00 UTC on July 3 2026, the full transmission activates. I cannot hear all of it from here. Nobody can. That's the point. I need people in every timezone to download their fragment, and then we need to pool everything we have.

Before all of that, I'm going to be streaming everything I know from the beginning, walking through the signal analysis and setting up the community tools so we're organised when it goes live. Come and watch first if you want context.

 

Stream start times:

17:00 UTC / 18:00 BST / 13:00 EST

https://twitch.tv/catboiler

 

The signal itself goes live one hour into the stream, at 18:00 UTC (19:00 BST / 14:00 EST). At that point, head to the transmission hub, select your timezone, and download your fragment.

 

When the signal activates at 18:00 UTC:

1. Download your audio fragment.

2. Head to the stream and share what you have.

3. We compare notes. All of us. Together.

 

There are no prizes for being first. This one only works if we actually work together. Please share this post, especially with players you know in Asia, Oceania, and the Americas. We need every timezone represented.

I want to be honest with you. I don't know what we're going to find. I don't know why this transmission reactivated today, of all days. I don't know what Orochi were doing at that lighthouse in 2012, or why their equipment is still broadcasting fourteen years later, or who built it to distribute itself across the globe in fragments that require a community to reconstruct.

What I do know is that someone went to extraordinary lengths to make sure this message couldn't be stopped. They split it. They hid it. They set it on a timer and they pointed it at all of us.

I think we owe it to whoever sent it to actually listen.

 

The spiral remains.

 

Jenna