In New York City, a digital billboard featuring an alien language popped up over the CVS at the corner of Broadway and 49th Street. Similar advertisements around the world. A subway advertisement at Green Park Station in London. England. Another at Jamsil Station in Seoul, South Korea. And a digital crawl during a football match at the Estadio Monumental in Santiago, Chile. All with the same alien text, and a message to go to AlienRadio.FM to learn more.

Alien Radio: Tuning into Frequencies
The Alien Radio website is relatively sparse: after advancing through a screen where the outdoor advertisements flash by in rapid progression, the website shifts into a static-filled night’s sky with a minimalistic, rotating globe in the center of the screen. Visitors’ cursors are turned into a four-pointed star, and moving it across the page “tunes in” the frequency along both X- and Y-axes to reveal multi-lingual messages, with subjects ranging from the anatomy of baseballs and advertisements for the Scottish highlands for satellite launches to excerpts from Sherlock Holmes’ Adventure of the Dancing Men and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

The only area that stands out amidst the multilingual chatter: an area in the upper right corner of the screen near 95 MHz x 55 MHz, which triggers a series of tones and scrolling text at the bottom of the screen in what appears to be Baudot (International Teleprinter) code. This message, which the players have taken to calling “signal.svg”, is currently unsolved.

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