I wasn’t even supposed to be going through that stuff…
My uncle used to work in media archiving – nothing exciting, just digitizing old tapes, cleaning up records, that sort of things… And after he passed, we were clearing out his things and I ended up taking one of his old external hard drives. Mostly out of curiosity, and a little bit of grief, for not being there for him.
It was labelled in this really faded handwriting:
“ARCHIVE – DO NOT TRANSMIT”
I chuckled a little, and thought, of course he wants to play pranks on people even after passing on… I thought they were going to be news clippings or something, or maybe some video that makes a buffoon out of the curious viewers.
I wish it was something like that, I just wish…
It wasn’t.
Well, at the start, most of the folders were normal – local broadcasts, test patterns, boring static recordings… Nothing that piqued my interest. My mom was calling my name from the kitchen, the dinner was ready, and I was bored out of my mind and was about to close the drive when all of a sudden… One folder, named “NULL” caught my attention.
I clicked on it, inside it were a few videos. The thumbnails were “Log X” where X was a number, starting from, you guessed it, 1 of course. So I clicked on the first one that said “Log 1” on it’s thumbnail.
The video opened, it was grainy, like a VHS tape recording, the voice was almost monotonic, like a broadcast. But the content of the video was what was unsettling. It was about an outbreak, a water contamination. But no where was it mentioned about the location of broadcast.
I was kinda creeped out, but my curiosity urged me to click on the next video. This one was “Log 2” and it was weirder than the previous one. It had the same bland broadcaster voice narrating in the background, but this one was different. It was grainy, and very glitchy. I checked the VGA cable to my monitor, it was holding on fine…
Before I could click on the next videos, my mom’s angry voice made me shut everything down and run for dinner…
After dinner, I came back up, and sat down at my monitor, and started looking at the videos… Now, I don’t know how to explain this part without sounding insane, but the longer I watched it, the more it felt like the audio was telling me something… Like there was something underneath the broadcast tone.
Something trying to contact us… So I decided the best course of action would be to upload one of the files here because I honestly don’t know what I’m looking at, and I need someone else to tell me if I’m overthinking this:
https://youtu.be/r9yO6ry-yhE?si=RadTdbl-4isEpPzQ
If you watch it, pay attention to the audio more than the visuals.
And if your screen glitches for a second around the middle – please tell me if that’s just on my end.
There are a few more files in that folder. I haven’t opened it, and I’m not sure if I should even do so.
Continue here: I found a set of broadcast files on an old hard drive. None of them… were meant to be seen. Here’s an interesting article from https://reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/1s0m38i/i_found_a_set_of_broadcast_files_on_an_old_hard/: I wasn’t even supposed to be going through that stuff… My uncle used to work in media archiving – nothing exciting, just digitizing old tapes, cleaning up records, that sort of things… And after he passed, we were clearing out his things and I ended up taking one of his old external hard drives. Mostly More here: I found a set of broadcast files on an old hard drive. None of them… were meant to be seen.