Numbers stations in popular culture

==Pop music==
[[Image:LadySpy.png|right|120px]]

*In an episode of the USA Network series '''Covert Affairs''', a child genius deciphers the numbers being transmitted from a station, and goes to the CIA for help.  The episode contained the [[Lincolnshire Poacher]] as the fictional station's interval signal.
* Two songs, "Even Less" from the band ''Porcupine Tree'' and "A Half Built House" from the band ''We Were Promised Jetpacks'' feature a number station broadcast prominently. "No Station" by ''65daysofstatic'' is an extensive remix of the [[Lincolnshire Poacher]] station. 
* ''The Submarines'' song "Submarine Symphonika" and the ''Stereolab'' song "Pause" both use the [[Swedish Rhapsody]] Numbers station.
* American band [[Wilco]]'s record ''[[Yankee Hotel Foxtrot]]'' (2001) was named after a series of letters in the phonetic alphabet that singer/songwriter front-man Jeff Tweedy had heard on the Irdial box set [[The Conet Project]]: Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations. On the fourth track of the album, "Phonetic Alphabet - Nato" a woman repeats the words "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" numerous times; a clip from this track was placed in the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot song "Poor Places." Irdial sued Wilco for copyright infringement, and a settlement was reached out of court.
* Scottish [[Electronic music|electronic]] duo [[Boards of Canada]]'s track "Gyroscope" from [[Geogaddi]] contains samples of a numbers station sampled by Sean Booth of [[Autechre]], as confirmed by a representative of [[Hexagon Sun]] on the WATMM forum.

==Cinema and TV==

* The Soviet TV miniseries ''[[Seventeen Moments of Spring]]'' (1973) features the protagonist spy [[Stirlitz]] receiving orders through numbers broadcasts and decoding the messages using a book.
* The television show ''[[Lost (TV series)|Lost]]'' features a storyline in which the character [[Hugo "Hurley" Reyes]] wins the lottery.  The numbers he used ([[4 8 15 16 23 42]]) came from a fellow patient at the mental hospital in which Reyes had previously been admitted.  That patient had been stationed at a military listening outpost many years earlier.  He heard the numbers from a radio transmission (albeit a long-wave transmission, not shortwave) which was repeating the numbers on a loop. The transmission came from the island itself.
* The BBC show ''Spooks'' has Russia's Federal Security Service transmitting a secret broadcast through a numbers station to a [[sleeper agent]] who targets Grosvenor Square in London, which is home of the US embassy.<sup>(1)</sup>
* In the film ''Vanilla Sky'', Cameron Crowe used samples of recordings from [[The Conet Project]] in certain scenes of the film. He said he used the station recordings to create a sense of confusion.
* In episode S03E06 of ''Fringe'' entitled "6995 kHz," a mysterious transmission from an unknown numbers station causes a group of enthusiasts to immediately develop retrograde amnesia. The number station used in the start is a remake of the famous Swedish Rhapsody. Hidden in the transmission is a pulse frequency that causes the amnesia. This is part of the overarching storyline. The series of numbers broadcasted are coded as well giving the coordinates of pieces of a large machine called the Vacuum. 
* In the TV series ''Fringe'' the use of number stations were mentioned in an episode on season 3, with the numbers being cracked by one of the Fringe team discovering that the numbers were made by a race of people that were alive before the dinosaurs and had been a "Lost civilization". the numbers were coordinates to locations on the earth where strange technology was found.

==Video games==
[[Image:Call of Duty - Black Ops.jpg|right|200px]]
* In the video game ''[[Call of Duty: Black Ops]]'', the Campaign storyline features numbers stations as part of the plot.

==References==
# BBC (2008) Spooks. Series 7 Episode 8.

==See also==
* [[Spy Numbers Stations]]


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[[Category:Spy stations]]