Clyde Lewis revives the Black Cube experiment, links fast radio bursts to strange phone calls, and lets listeners put questions to the box.
At a glance
Guest: None, a call-in and monologue episode, with Roger Cluton in studio running the Black Cube
Topics: Black Cube experiment · Fast radio bursts · Strange phone calls · Black Knight satellite · TRAPPIST-1 · TV static and the Big Bang
Also discussed: Nikola Tesla · John Keel's Our Haunted Planet · Abraham Loeb · Marconi · Thomas Edison · Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson
A Voice That Knew His Name
Mike from Maryland is describing a cheap shortwave radio he bought from Sportsman's Guide for about thirty bucks. Strictly one way. No microphone, no way to answer back. More than a decade ago, trying to pick up one of his shows, he stopped on a voice. A disembodied woman's voice, repeating his name. "Michael, Michael, Michael, Michael." He tells Clyde Lewis it sounded like his dead mother, and he gives the detail that makes the studio go quiet: she never called him Mike. She always called him Michael.
Lewis has an answer ready, and it is not an explanation. It is a memory. His aunt kept the same kind of radio, and at Thanksgiving the family would listen to planes coming in, police chatter, the Russian buzzer, the woodpecker. Strange sounds lived on those frequencies, he says, and some of them were voices. That is why he does this show. On this night, the voices are the whole show. The subject is the phone call that should not exist, the one Lewis believes is replacing alien abduction as the way the unknown introduces itself. Phone companies call it packet loss or crosstalk. Lewis has a machine on the desk that he says suggests otherwise.
The Cube Answered With Neptune
A month before this broadcast, Lewis and Roger Cluton ran the experiment that gave the episode its charge. The device is the Black Cube, which Lewis describes as a transmogrified ghost box, rerigged to sweep cell phone bands rather than the usual AM and FM scan. With an Australian didgeridoo and a Native American flute, they sent a signal out, aiming at the Black Knight satellite, the anomalous object Lewis says NASA wrote off as a hoax even though, he claims, cameras have caught it twice near the International Space Station and the Moon.
Lewis is careful about what he claims happened next. "There was absolutely no proof that we were hearing aliens," he says on air. What he will say is this: when they asked where the messages were coming from, the word "Neptune" came out of the box twice. He places the stunt in a lineage he takes seriously. Tesla intercepting signals in Colorado Springs in 1899. Marconi hearing intelligence in the static while inventing radio. Edison believing a strong enough transmitter could reach the dead. He reads from John Keel's Our Haunted Planet, the line about ultra-terrestrials: "We cannot, even with positive assurance, assert that some of them might not be present here in this, our world."
A Needle in the Static
A Popular Mechanics article that landed after the experiment turned a one-off stunt into a full episode, Lewis says. He quotes it: scientists at Harvard have proposed a united global network of cell phones to help detect fast radio bursts, the high-energy flashes astronomers have been logging from deep space. Six more bursts had just been detected from the same source, a faint dwarf galaxy three billion light years away. Lewis notes the bursts register at frequencies in the neighborhood of cell phones and Wi-Fi, which is why, in his telling, your handset might catch one.
He goes further, to Abraham Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who said "an artificial origin is worth contemplating." Lewis reads from a paper posted by Cornell University arguing that beams used to power giant light sails could produce parameters consistent with fast radio bursts, and he mentions NASA's estimate that a light sail craft could reach Mars in three days. He concedes the mainstream read, that FRBs come from cataclysms like supermassive black holes, then waves it off as speculation of its own. He closes the loop with a fact anyone can test: the snow on an old analog television is partly the cosmic microwave background, the afterglow Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson won a Nobel Prize for identifying. The universe, Lewis argues, has been talking through our screens all along.
The Phones Ring Anyway
Then the show gets personal. Lewis plays a call that came to his own unlisted landline two Septembers back, on the 17th, a number he says nobody had. The recording is flat and bureaucratic and wrong: "You have no unheard messages." A pause. "First safe message. Safe Wednesday at 2." Around that time, he says, his cell phone was dialing by itself and texts were arriving a day late, and with North Korea rattling sabers he wondered about intelligence agencies. He plays another one, lifted off his answering machine after a stretch of harassing calls. In the gibberish he hears a whisper: "get me on the air." He admits he did not catch it until he broadcast it. A caller thinks it sounds like a train whistle. Lewis hears a voice asking for a microphone.
The callers stack up with their own tapes. Ray from Utah hears "updating Black Knight" inside one of the recordings. George from Oregon has been called three times by a garbled voice from an eight-digit number that does not exist when he dials it back. James from Texas has been getting angry, metallic, transformer-like sounds on his phone since 2013. Lewis plays the one that chills him most, a wash of noise that resolves, for a second, into a plain request: "I need your name."
The Box Takes Questions
In the last stretch, Cluton fires the Cube up live and Lewis opens the lines. They call out to TRAPPIST-1, the newly found system of seven planets around a dwarf star, and ask for a name and a location. The box coughs back what everyone in the studio hears as "Trappist-1." Cluton is audibly rattled: "My hair stood up on my bald head." Michael from Washington calls in just to ask what TRAPPIST-1 even is, and Lewis walks him through it.
Then the audience takes over the oracle. Tom from Oregon asks if humans will survive ourselves; after a delay Lewis flags as strange, the Cube says, "They do." Sandy in Georgia asks if the Death Star is in Jupiter's orbit; the box says "It's here," and the room has to sort out that she means Mimas, the moon with the crater, not Enceladus. Edward from Texas asks about future black swan events, and the Cube answers "attack in California." Lewis goes quiet, then says it plain: "I hope nothing happens in California." Jay from Florida wants to know if the whole thing is satanic, citing his brother's bad turn with a Ouija board in Vegas. Lewis denies it, and then the box, asked if it is Satan, seems to mutter "I might be Satan," which Lewis waves off as scrambled cell chatter. His own verdict is deflating on purpose: the Cube is a highly electronic, sophisticated magic eight ball.
He never claims more than the tapes. No proof of aliens, he keeps saying, only recordings that should not say what they say. The unresolved part is the part he leaves ringing: a voice that knew a man's name, a box that answered back, and a Harvard proposal that treats the phone in your pocket as a telescope.
Questions this episode answers
What happened during Clyde Lewis's Black Cube experiment?
Lewis says he and Roger Cluton used a device called the Black Cube to beam a signal toward the Black Knight satellite and scan the cell phone bands for a reply, one month before this episode aired.
The signal went out on an Australian didgeridoo and a Native American flute. Lewis claims NASA has dismissed the Black Knight as a hoax, but asserts the object has been photographed twice, near the International Space Station and the Moon. When the box was asked where the messages were coming from, he says the word "Neptune" came back twice.
Lewis states his own limit on air: "There was absolutely no proof that we were hearing aliens." He frames the experiment as scrying across the frequencies, in the tradition he ascribes to Tesla, Marconi, and Edison, all of whom he claims believed strange signals could carry intelligence.
What is the Black Cube, and how does it work?
According to Lewis, the Black Cube is a transmogrified ghost box built by Roger Cluton that scans frequencies from 800 to 1900 megahertz, sweeping cell phone chatter for anomalous voices.
A standard ghost box scans AM and FM radio; Lewis says this unit was rerigged for the bands where, a Popular Mechanics article suggested, fast radio bursts from space might surface on ordinary phones. During sessions it produced fragments like "deep space, a star," "first," "receive us," and "God is a gatherer."
Lewis himself undercuts the mystique, calling the Cube a highly electronic, sophisticated magic eight ball. He acknowledges much of the output is garbled and that the device sometimes needs tuning before a clear phrase comes through.
What are fast radio bursts, and could they be artificial?
Fast radio bursts are high-energy flashes from deep space, and Harvard-Smithsonian astrophysicist Abraham Loeb has said an artificial origin is "worth contemplating," a position Lewis amplifies on air.
Lewis cites a Popular Mechanics report that Harvard scientists proposed a global network of cell phones to catch FRBs, and notes six bursts were detected from a single source pinpointed to a faint dwarf galaxy three billion light years away. He says the bursts register at frequencies overlapping cell phones and Wi-Fi.
He also reads from a Cornell University paper arguing that beams powering large light sails could match FRB parameters, and repeats a NASA estimate that light sail craft could reach Mars in three days. The established leading hypothesis, that FRBs come from explosive events such as supermassive black holes, is one Lewis dismisses as speculation; the artificial-origin idea remains unproven.
What did the Black Cube answer when callers asked about the future?
The Cube produced short, attributed fragments, including "they do" on human survival, "it's here" about a Death Star object, and "attack in California" when asked about black swan events, all reported by Lewis as box output, not fact.
Tom from Oregon asked if humans will survive ourselves; Lewis noted a strange delay before the answer "They do" came through. Sandy in Georgia asked if the Death Star sits in Jupiter's orbit, prompting "It's here" and a studio correction that the moon she meant was Mimas, not Enceladus.
Edward from Texas asked about future black swan events, and the Cube's reply, "attack in California," unsettled the host. "I hope nothing happens in California," Lewis said. Allen from Missouri asked what vibrational plane aliens come from; the box answered "always."
What strange phone call did Clyde Lewis receive himself?
Lewis says his unlisted landline, a number nobody knew, took a call in September two years before this episode that said "You have no unheard messages," then "First safe message. Safe Wednesday at 2."
He dates the call to September 17 and says his cell phone had been misbehaving around the same period, dialing by itself and delivering texts a day late. Given North Korean saber-rattling in the news, he says he wondered whether an intelligence operation was behind it.
He also plays an answering machine recording in which he hears a whispering voice saying "get me on the air," a phrase he admits he only caught after broadcasting the tape. A caller on the show thinks the same recording sounds like a train whistle.
Is the Black Cube satanic?
Lewis flatly denies any satanic element, telling caller Jay from Florida that the Cube only scans cell phone bands for space sounds, though the box itself appeared to mutter "I might be Satan" when asked, which Lewis dismissed as scrambled chatter.
Jay raised the concern because his older brother in Vegas had a bad experience with a Ouija board that drew police attention. Lewis answered that nothing occult is involved, comparing the device to a sophisticated magic eight ball rather than a séance tool.
Another caller, Mark, pushed back on the Ouija comparison from the opposite side, saying his deceased brother communicated through a digital recording. Lewis left the theological argument alone and returned to the tapes.
What does TV static have to do with signals from space?
Lewis says the snow on an old analog television is partly the cosmic microwave background, the afterglow of the Big Bang, which is accurate as far as it goes.
The radiation was identified by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery. Lewis uses it to argue that signals from space already saturate ordinary devices.
He extends the point to his larger claim: if the Big Bang's residue shows up on a TV, then fast radio bursts might plausibly surface on cell phones, which is the premise behind both the Harvard proposal he cites and the Black Cube sessions.
Frequently asked questions
What is the Black Knight satellite?
The Black Knight is a claimed anomalous object said to orbit Earth, which Lewis asserts has been photographed near the International Space Station and the Moon. NASA and the mainstream scientific community do not recognize it as a real satellite, and there is no established evidence for its existence.
Can a cell phone detect signals from space?
Scientists at Harvard proposed a distributed network of cell phones to help detect fast radio bursts, an idea modeled on SETI@home, according to the Popular Mechanics article Lewis cites. No consumer phone has been credited with a confirmed FRB detection; the concept remains a proposal.
Did Nikola Tesla claim to hear signals from space?
Lewis says Tesla intercepted strange radio signals in Colorado Springs in 1899 and concluded they might come from beyond Earth, citing a December 8, 1899 letter to Julian Hawthorne and a December 1900 letter to the Red Cross Society. Tesla did publicly speculate about interplanetary communication, though mainstream histories treat his claimed signals as natural radio phenomena.
What happened to the Philae comet probe?
Caller Mark claimed the Philae probe recorded an alien tick sound, shut down, and mysteriously revived, implying tampering. In the established record, Philae landed on comet 67P in 2014 and suffered communication failures due to its rough landing; there is no evidence it recorded alien signals.
Who's on this episode
Guest: None, a call-in and monologue episode, with Roger Cluton in studio operating the Black Cube
Callers: Mike from Maryland, Mike from Florida, Todd, Ray from Utah, Brian from Louisiana, George from Oregon, Jack from California, James from Texas, Cameron in Oregon, Zach in Oregon, Mark in Minnesota, Allen from Missouri, Michael from Washington, Tom from Oregon, Jay from Florida, Sandy in Georgia, Red in Oregon, Bill in Oregon, Edward from Texas.
