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Developer recreates creepy Cold War numbers stations using just 1KB of code [1]

['Ellsworth Toohey']

Date: 2025-07-25

Developer Terence Eden created an eerie digital version of Cold War-era numbers stations using nothing but built-in browser features and 1KB of JavaScript code. His creation speaks random numbers and words in various languages with unsettling pitch and speed variations.

The project, built for the js1024 "Creepy" competition, uses the browser's native Text-to-Speech API instead of pre-recorded audio files. "Most modern browsers have a built-in Text-To-Speech (TTS) API," Eden explains in his blog. By manipulating the speech rate and pitch with random values, Eden achieves disturbing vocal effects ranging from "high pitched drawls" to "rumbling gabbling."

To generate the spoken content, Eden tapped into an unexpected source of vocabulary: the browser's own internal property names. "Object.getOwnPropertyNames(globalThis) gets all the properties of the global object which are available to the browser — over 1,000 words!" he writes. The system then pronounces these computer terms, such as "Event," "Atomics," and "Geolocation," in random languages with varying accents and speeds.

"If you pass the TTS the number 555 and ask it to speak German, it will read out fünfhundertfünfundfünfzig," Eden says.

Previously:

• The 'numbers station' of YouTube

• Strange Russian 'numbers station'

• Listen to spies' shortwave radio broadcasts

• Numbers stations on Twitter and other spook-y tweets

• CONET Project: spy 'numbers stations' preserved at Archive.org

• The CONET Project: spy station recordings reissued

• The most mysterious radio signal in the world

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[1] Url: https://boingboing.net/2025/07/25/developer-recreates-creepy-cold-war-numbers-stations-using-just-1kb-of-code.html

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