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In this episode of "Lost," we learn that Hurley heard secondhand of a transmission from Lost Island of 8 numbers and used those numbers to win the lottery. This transmission of numbers seems to be connected to (or inspired by) a long history of shortwave spy communications, some of which are cataloged on The Conet Project - a 4-cd boxset recently reissued on Irdial. One of the biggest advocates of The Conet Project, and probably its largest American distributor, is Aquarius Records. In order to explore the connection between "Lost" and The Conet Project, I decided to ask Allan at Aquarius (who reportedly keeps the whole boxset on his IPod) some questions about the recordings and their history.

fakejazz: What is The Conet Project?

Allan: Whew... well briefly put, it's a four-cd compilation of "Numbers Stations" broadcasts, collected by various amateur radio enthusiasts all over the world and put together by Akin Fernandez of Irdial Records in England. Numbers Stations are mysterious, seemingly encrypted shortwave radio transmissions that are believed to used by government agencies to contact secret agents in the field. Usually they consist of a monotone voice reading off a string of numbers (hence the name).

For more info, a full review is available on the Aquarius website.

In Episode 18 of "Lost," two sets of people - Leonard and his Navy partners and Rosseau and her team - hear a transmission from a radio tower on Lost Island in the middle of the Pacific. They date this transmission to 16 years ago, which happens to be just before the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of the Cold War. Do you think Lost Island was a numbers station like in The Conet Project?

That's the implication, I suppose. Not having seen that episode of "Lost," but going by the description of the show that a customer provided us with, it certainly seems likely that the writers of "Lost" were inspired by the phenomenon/mystery of numbers stations, which most likely they became aware of from exposure to or publicity about The Conet Project.

I doubt that the "Lost" writers are going to be trying very hard to depict numbers stations with a great deal of historical accuracy (whatever that would mean anyway, since not that much is known about them) and instead are simply using The Conet concept in a fictional way for their own purposes. Chances are, they'll end up bringing in aliens and UFOs...

Were numbers stations active at this time and place (late 80s, middle of the Pacific)?

Um... that's classified, sorry.

Well, apparently numbers stations have been in operation since WWII, all throughout the Cold War and to the present day... so yes, active in the '80s, sure. Dunno about the middle of the Pacific, but first off, you can pick up shortwave broadcasts over great distances. So even if they weren't being broadcast in the middle of the Pacific, they might have been audible there. There's not quite as much of a rationale for operations in the middle of the Pacific than, say, Eastern Europe or the Middle East, but who knows?

Leonard said that the frequency they were listening to was just static for a long period of time before the numbers were suddenly broadcast. Do numbers station tend to actively broadcast on a frequency, or is this short term use of a frequency believable?

Numbers stations I think would generally be broadcast on a regular frequency (the same "station" at the same frequency) but wouldn't be constant, so you might hear static for hours before the numbers broadcast starts up. I'm not really sure though. I know you'll find tracks on The Conet Project with little musical intros (like a music-box tune) that were presumably meant to clue the spy listeners in to the fact that the broadcast they were waiting for was about to start.

The numbers broadcast were 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, and 42. Do these numbers mean anything to you? Is there any sequence like this in The Conet Project?

Well, I'm sure they mean something to someone... not to me, though. Consult a mathematician perhaps, or an numerologist... and whether any track on The Conet Project duplicates this number sequence, I can't tell you. I haven't memorized it! Plus, a lot of the tracks are in foreign languages. However, I'd guess that they're just arbitrary numbers chosen by the writers of Lost, with no further significance (although maybe in a later episode they'll be explained). In actual numbers stations transmissions, each number would correspond to a word or letter, that could only be deciphered if you had the key to the code.

One theory is that these are latitude and longitude coordinates for Lost Island, if you rearrange and concatenate the numbers (Hawaii is approximately 20 degrees N, 155 degrees W, and Lost is filmed in Hawaii). Would a numbers stations ever transmit bare data like that?

I doubt it... but I also wouldn't know.

The charm of The Conet Project is in how the messages are presented: the spooky voices, the repetition, the odd noises. While there are bits of composed music, like "Swedish Rhapsody," do you consider The Conet Project as a whole "music?"

That depends on your definition of music, doesn't it? Compared to some of the stuff we listen to in the store, that is made by self-described "musicans" then yeah it's music! Sometimes people will come in here and think someone's vacuuming upstairs, y'know, and it's actually some drone record we like... Of course, it's not intentional, so it's only music if you can accept that, say, lawnmowers or tree frogs are music. I bet John Cage would have thought it was music...

In any event, "music" or not, that's semantics. To this listener, it's an enjoyable, audial aesthetic experience. As well as being interesting on other levels as well.

Conveniently, J.J. Abrahms' other show, "Alias," has a lot to do with spies. In the show, a 15th century inventory Milo Rambaldi is often riffed upon. One of Rambaldi's inventions was a music box that encodes a series of numbers that describe a zero energy fuel source. Do you think the more composed pieces in The Conet Project are themselves data?

No, I don't. It would seem that the numbers are sufficent. The usefulness of these encoded numbers stations transmissions to spies is that it's a simple medium. Shortwave radios are easy to come by and don't automatically excite suspicion. And the codes simply require the spy to listen, jot down the numbers, and consult his or her code pad (which perhaps could be committed to memory). Lo-tech and easy. Somehow encrypting data in the form of music seems a lot more complicated and would probably require some sort of technology to decode it... easy enough with a computer perhaps but that's not necessarily equipment spies would have, or want to have, in the field.

Who owns the copyright to a field recording of birds: the birds, the guy who recorded it, or the guy who first released the recording?

Well, it would seem that Wilco found out that it's the guy that first released the recording... even though to you and I it might seem like the birds do. An intellectual property lawyer might be of better help with this question...