In this land of law & order that me and 46.8% of you live in, there are lots of illegal
sounds.
You can’t, for example, create a sonic boom by traveling faster than the speed of sound.
You also can’t, for example, broadcast the sound “I am going to,” directly before
the sound “kill the president of the United States.”
But it kinda makes sense that both of those sounds are illegal—going mach 1 and conspiring
to kill the president are jobs best left to the US government.
There is one illegal sound, however, that’s not quite as intuitive; it’s just a couple
of simple tones that sound like this…
Okay, well it seems like my editors weren’t willing to go to jail for this, so I’m gonna
have to do an impression of the sound myself.
It’s kind of like… oooo….
ooo… y’know what, let me just explain what it is instead.
The story behind these illegal tones goes all the way back to the Cold War, a silly
antiquated age when everyone was worried that Russia was going to just start a war out of
nowhere for no reason.
Prior to the Cold War, the US government didn’t have any kind of official system to alert
the entire country in the event of an emergency, and relied on news stations to do it for them.
So, in 1951, President Truman introduced the Control of Electromagnetic Radiation System—which
he shortened to CONELRAD, because I guess he wanted to make it sound like the name of
a disgraced lacrosse player.
The way this system worked was pretty simple: during an emergency, Air Defense Control Centers
around the country would begin transmitting a message to certain key radio stations via
special telephone lines.
These stations would then alert other, smaller radio stations, who would either go offline
completely or begin broadcasting the message themselves.
All of the stations broadcasting during the emergency would change their frequency to
either 640 or 1240 and take turns relaying the signal, which made it harder for enemy
bombers to hone in on the source, and easier for civilians to know where to tune their
radios—that’s why most American radios built during the Cold War had special symbols
here and here.
Basically, if your house was being bombed, you could tune your radio to 640 or 1240 and
listen to the President tell you that your house was being bombed—that is, if the system
even worked, which it pretty much didn’t in any of the tests.
Awesome!
As the Soviet Union found faster ways to deliver nukes, the US needed faster ways to deliver
news.
So, in the 1960s, CONELRAD was killed and replaced by a much more comprehensive system
called the Emergency Broadcasting System, and then later upgraded to the Emergency Alert
System.
Basically, the EAS is different from CONELRAD in two key ways; one, it can take over virtually
any radio station or television channel instead of just two radio frequencies, and two…
it actually works.
Now, if you haven’t spent the past three weeks frantically Googling this, here’s
the basic rundown on what happens when the US detects a nuke, or a tsunami, or a nuke
that got swept up in a tsunami and formed the dreaded Nuke Tsunami, which, oh no, oh
God, it’s headed straight for the Liberty Bell!
First, the FEMA National Radio System—headquartered here—will deliver a message from the White
House to the National Public Warning system, composed of 77 radio stations across the country.
Then, these stations deliver the message to nearby radio and television broadcasters,
who are required by the FCC to have special equipment to pick up and deliver these messages
immediately after receiving them… unless the alerts are weather or child-abduction
related, in which case they can opt out if they decide the weather’s not that bad or
the kid’s not that cute.
Now, these messages come in the form of what’s called an EAN—or Emergency Action Notification—which
is broken up into 3 basic parts.
The first is called the “SAME” header, which sounds like this.
Horrible, right?
Well, believe it or not, this sound isn’t intended to make you go crazy and smash your
TV, it’s actually densely encoded with information about where the signal is coming from and
what kind of emergency there is.
Then, before the actual text of the message itself, you’ll hear 8 to 25 seconds of what’s
called an “attention signal”—this, by the way, is that illegal sound I was talking
about all those minutes ago.
It’s composed of two tones being played at the same time: 853 hertz and 960 hertz.
Again, for obvious reasons I’m not going to play it, but you can go over to one of
those bad-boy websites like Wikipedia where they’re not afraid to sample the tones.
After listening to the attention signal you might think, “boy, this is the worst song
I’ve ever heard,” but those tones were chosen specifically because of how unpleasant
they are to the human ear—unlike CONELRAD, where people were knowingly tuned into an
emergency station, the Emergency Alert System needs to get people’s attention so that
they can listen up and find out exactly how they’re going to die.
Now, you’ve probably already figured this out by now, but the reason the attention signal
has been made illegal—at least under normal circumstances—is to protect the integrity
of the system and prevent a “boy who cried thermonuclear warfare” situation.
After all, if every Geico commercial used the attention signal to tell you that there
was a national emergency and that that emergency was that you didn’t get a good enough deal
on car insurance, you would, at best, get desensitized to the sound, and at worst, think
there was an actual emergency.
And, believe it or not, the FCC actually enforces this law pretty stringently—TV networks
and radio stations get massive fines for playing these tones all the time.
In 2020, the radio station WNEW got fined for using it as part of a skit; in 2019, ABC
got a fine for using it on Jimmy Kimmel Live and NBC got a fine for using it on Young Sheldon;
and in 2013, cable providers were forced to pay the FCC a whopping $1.9 million for playing
the trailer of Olympus Has Fallen, which briefly used the tones as well.
So, yeah, even if you’re a massive cultural touchstone like Young Sheldon, this sound
is still strictly off-limits.
But you know who else committed crimes in order to get your attention?
Me!
For those of you who haven’t been keeping up with our ad reads, my new Nebula show—Half
as Interesting’s Crime Spree—follows my adventure around the country where I spend
$5,000 trying to break eight of the United States’ weirdest laws, all while my writing
team tries to track me down.
The third and final episode is out right now, so the series is ready to binge for any of
you who haven’t already started.
Of course, the only way to watch Crime Spree is on Nebula, the educational streaming site
started by me and my creator friends, where you can also watch our videos ad-free, our
trivia show, our brick-themed-comedy-variety show, and tons of other exclusive original
content from your favorite educational creators.
The best way to get access to Nebula is with the CuriosityStream/Nebula bundle, which also
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