- Many rumors have been circulating around the internet
regarding "alien metallic voices" on telephone calls. For those
unfamiliar with how the phone system actually works, it can create a mystery
and imaginations can run wild. Just as with the internet where few will
accept the fact that routing computers owned by the National Security Agency
IS the real internet.
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- None of the rumors about alien voices on telephones have
ever have explored the possible causes for such distorted audio. It's time
we look at some of the causes for this strange phenomenon. (I will try
to keep the technical level of this to a minimum here and use basic terminology.)
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- To begin with, we must first explore how telephone converstations
work. Telephone conversations consist of two distinct voice paths created
at each end in the phone company, and are not combined together into one
signal until they reach the subscriber loop circuitry in the phone company
at each end of the phone call. This is the current loop circuitry which
powers your telephone at your home or office. Through random data errors
or faulty equipment, one can hear be connected to a dead or unused carrier
which has no real audio, or perhaps only contains just noise. A defect
in call routing can also sound extremely distorted and unintelligible.
The principle of two separate audio channels is important to remember as
we explore further.
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- HOW TELEPHONES AND SATELLITES WORK
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- For many decades, dedicated telephone satellites like
Aurora which served Alaska, and some of the Telstar, Galaxy and others
divided each entire transponder bandwidth (there are usually 24 transponders)
into upper and lower sidebands. Often older cable satellites which are
losing power have been relegated to telephone use for a few years, before
being taken completely out of service. Newer C-band satellites have more
than 24 transponders, but we'll use 24 for our discussion here.) Ku band
satellites have 36 or more transponders.
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- Each of the 24 transponders (which have had just 4 watts
of RF power which usually required a 10ft. dish) supported thousands of
simulataneous phone calls. On a given frequency (channel) for one transponder,
an upper sideband carries one direction of the converstation, and a lower
sideband carries the other direction for one conversation. These are actually
FM signals. When a phone call is placed and computers in the phone system
route the call through a given satellite, touch tone groups are first transmitted
which identify who placed the call, and of course the called party. Touch
tone routing codes are also used by intelligence agencies to record telephone
calls.
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- COMPLETE LACK OF SECURITY ON YOUR TELEPHONE
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- One can actually hear telephone calls and touch tone
codes using a regular shortwave receiver with SSB capabilty, connected
to the unclamped video output of an ordinary C-band consumer satellite
receiver. (These are the older satellite receivers that usually used a
10ft dish back in the early 1980's, which people used for watching cable
and sports for free. If the dish was pointed at a telephone satellite,
the television screen is filled with random white dashed lines and no audio.)
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- However, entire phone conversations could be heard through
the shortwave receiver simply by manually switching from upper to lower
sideband during the call. I saw this demonstrated back in 1983. Note however,
it is illegal to listen into private conversations. This is only mentioned
here to show how unsecure giving your credit card numbers over the phone
can be. Fortunately, C-band receivers and dishes are now basically obsolete
and no one uses them except for professional broadcasters.
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- C-band satellite communications are also weather tolerant,
unlike the higher frequency Ku-band which is used for DirectTV(r) and DishNetwork(r).
Often weather interrupts television programming for 10 minutes or more,
while a local weather front or another front up to 200 miles away blocks
the signal as it passes between you and the satellite. This is because
the size of the raindrops are nearly as small as the Ku band signal itself.
Rain-drops function like thousands of pieces of shredded aluminum foil
dropped from an airplane which interferes with satellite signals. Sufficiently
dense rain clouds will also do the same thing.
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- Satellites using C-band frequencies are much wider, and
are almost completely unaffected by weather. If C-band satellites were
not weather tolerant, thousands of phone calls would be interrupted everytime
it rains somewhere.
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- METALLIC PHONE CALLS
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- For decades, telephone conversations have been digitally
encoded on T-carrier copper and fibreoptic for on-the-ground transmission
between cities and towns. Remember how we talked about two separate audio
channels for each phone call? If there are bit errors, routing errors,
equipment failure or other sync problems, audio can become extremely distorted
or even be heard as just loud noise for one or both directions of the conversation.
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- A "metallic phone call" can also be the result
of normal audio but due to a malfunction in the telephone system, the audio
has extremely narrow bandwidth. Not unlike the tin can telephones with
string chidren make. Normal audio on every telephone in the United States
(and probably also Canada) is restricted to about 3KHz by the FCC, which
is the typical bandwidth of the average human voice. (This is the reason
music sounds terrible over a telephone. There are FCC regulations (known
as Part 68) which regulate the audio in telephone calls. We won't delve
into other technical details here.)
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- Sometimes people are erroneously connected into another
private phone call due to an equipment malfunction or a signal path routing
error, but the other party they are listening to cannot hear them at all
if spoken to. In essence, any innocent conversation can be accidentally
"tapped." One should never assume a that a private phone call
is really private.
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- We can see that numerous techical problems can cause
"metallic voices" in phone calls. Even though one may be open
minded and convinced that these strange sounds are alien contact or voices
from the dead, we must still consider other explanations for these strange
phone calls.
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- Logically, it should make any rational person ponder
one simple question - if YOU were an alien, would you dial a phone to talk
to someone? And why bother to do it, if you know that the person you called
will not understand you? If you were an alien and there was something important
you wanted a certain person to hear, a close encounter of the third kind
would make more sense.
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- Ted Twietmeyer www.data4science.net
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- tedtw@frontiernet.net
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- SIDE NOTE: Vonage and other internet telephone services
are actually uni-directional phone calls made to appear as bi-directional,
by using an automatic switch in the Vonage system. It's easy to identify
someone using one of these - you will quickly get aggravated because until
the other party stops talking, they won't hear a single word you're saying.
And if you start to say something and they talk, they will never hear you.
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