At the risk of beating this Hotel-Oscar-Romeo-Sierra-Echo to death…
I realize that most or all of the truly sensitive information gathered by authorities upon discovery of a numbers station (such as one time pads, coding techniques, real names, and other intelligence that might hurt further investigation if it was made public) would not be made available to the average Joe Internet.
But it seems to me—and I may be quite wrong—that mundane, non-sensitive information about a numbers station discovery would most likely get out if for no other reason than authorities like to brag about such coups and, after enough time facts leak out or are declassified. These things have existed since WWI or before.
If such an operation had ever been discovered I expect there would be, at the very least, a harmless, watered-down, detail-starved statement that basically said no more than ***“Yes, we found a numbers station.” ***
Maybe something like this:
**
*"We have discovered a numbers station that was used by a major Central American drug cartel to distribute coded information among the cartel’s members. This information was given to us by a senior member of the cartel that we recently arrested.
“We have located the site where the coded messages were prepared as well as a separate site where the transmissions themselves originated. Evidence gathered at these locations confirm the cartel’s coded message operation.” ***
But, from what I have read (not much), there is no public record that anyone has ever busted a numbers station.
Conspiracy theory debunkers always like to point out that so many people would have to have knowledge of such an operation that someone would eventually blab. But no one has.
Most of the “detail” is hearsay, second-hand reports, “apparentlys” and embellishments some time after the incident. General’s stars do not make an individual an exceptional observer. Nor are most pilots trained in observing or recognizing anything but the focus of their job - air traffic and markers for civilians, IFF for military.
The skeptical explanations may be a little glib, but given the number of identical “exceptional observers and tons of data and no possible other explanations” cases that pretty conclusively were Venus… I have trouble putting this one in even the “maybe” column.
The mid-1970s were also a peak in UFO hysteria/reports, IIRC. So a certain predisposition to think/see/interpret might have been present.
Do a search for “Coral Castle Wikipedia” (sorry, having trouble creating links).
One single man made a castle of out huge coral/limestone blocks in very southern Florida. Then, he MOVED the thing to just outside Miami, Florida.
Kinda like a one man version of the Pyramids. Probably didn’t actually involve aliens and or anti gravity devices, but still you look at it and think “damn, that’s pretty impressive”.
What I recall about this was a gosh-wow TV show about it that showed, for example, the two-ton pivoting door block that could be opened and closed with one hand. My Gosh, How Did He Do That!?
Well… in part by standing it on a truck axle with mofo roller bearings. The scale and amount of work is impressive, but there was no mystery about how the door worked. Unless you didn’t show that part and implied it was floating on grav-fields or used the Lost Secret Lube of the Mayans.
Short version: in 1988, a young woman gets the birth cert of a dead child and uses it to get ID in the child’s name. Then she legally changes her name to Lori Erica Kennedy. She goes to college under that name, marries, has a child. When she and her husband get divorced, she begins to unravel mentally and finally kills herself. It’s only afterwards, when they’re going through her stuff, that her husband’s family find the name-change documents and discover that they have no idea who she was.
I found it derivative, and lacking in the originality of their earlier works. Clearly The Beatles have passed their high point and will go down as just another semi-has been band, playing 'last world tour" live concerts over and over.
But of those - especially the Taman Shud / Somerton Man Case - are total nightmare fuel. I’m a grown man in my thirties, but after spending the better part of a weekend reading up on the case - and even trying to work out my own “interpretation” of the hand-scribbled “code” - you’d better believe I was spooked.
Since it looks like I may never finish The Staff Report That Keeps Expanding, I’ll give it in a nutshell:
The latest mtDNA test does not eliminate the possibility that Kaspar was the son of Grand Duke Karl and Grand Duchess Stéphanie de Beauharnais of Baden, exchanged as an infant with a sickly baby by the Countess of Hochberg, the second wife of the late Grand Duke Karl Frederick, to guarantee that her son would ascend to the throne instead of Kaspar.
Kaspar did not spend all of his youth in his “dungeon.” As he almost instantly picked up reading and writing (and because of one of his claims) it is apparent he did spend some time in school. The likeliest possibility is that he lived on a farm in Darkest Bavaria until he was about eight or ten. He was then isolated somewhere where he developed psychosocial short stature, caused by stress and extreme emotional deprivation. When found he was not nearly mute, as some stories claim, but spoke with a limited vocabulary in an thick, old-fashioned, Alp-Billy accent. He was clearly traumatized when he was found, though, and didn’t talk much at first, preferring to keep to himself.
Rumors noting his resemblance to the Grand Duke started almost immediately. These made their way to Baden, and may have caused the Countess to think about assassinating him. On the other hand, Kaspar became one of the first international media sensations, and his injuries and “assassination attempts” correspond to times when interest was waning. All I know is that the medical examiner believed signs pointed to murder and not an accident or suicide.
Researching this has led me to believe that the Napoleonic Wars and emigration had so depleted the population of Europe that everybody knew everybody. Duchess Steph was Napoleon’s niece/adopted daughter, while Kaspar’s champion, Lord Stanhope, fathered Wellington’s penpal. It happened right when the modern world was being created, and I wish I could find all my files because I don’t feel like translating them again.
