At 4625 kHz, a dull mechanical buzz echoes endlessly – day and night, winter and summer, across borders and decades. The sound is steady, almost hypnotic. Sometimes it falters. A brief pause. Then a voice emerges through the static: “I am 143. Not receiving any response.”
Then – silence. And the buzz resumes.
No one has officially claimed responsibility for the transmission. There are no station identifications, no explanations, and no confirmed purpose. But it’s been broadcasting, almost without interruption, since the late 1970s. Radio enthusiasts around the world call it ‘The Buzzer’.
Over the years, the signal has inspired a growing mythology. Some believe it’s part of a Soviet-era dead man’s switch – a last-resort nuclear system designed to retaliate automatically if Russia’s leadership is wiped out. Others think it might be a tool for communicating with spies, or perhaps even extraterrestrials. Theories range from the plausible to the absurd.
Echoes from the Deep
Like all good Cold War mysteries, its real power lies not in what we know – but in what we don’t.
Like the Kola Superdeep Borehole – the real Soviet drilling project that inspired urban legends about ‘sounds from hell’ – The Buzzer lives in that fertile twilight between fact and fiction, secrecy and speculation.
In the West, Cold War history is often well-documented and declassified. But Soviet-era experiments remain buried under layers of myth, rumor, and deliberate silence. That opacity has given rise to a unique genre of post-Soviet folklore – eerie, atmospheric, and deeply compelling.
And few stories illustrate that better than the one about a drilling rig in the icy Siberian tundra, a descent into the Earth’s crust, and a scream from the abyss.
Hellbound and Down 