As my friend John and I worked into the fuzzy hours of the night building
commercials for my advertising clients, we had little knowledge of just what
was coming our way, courtesy of an errant sound mixing console.
My agency studio was filled with second hand equipment, mostly acquired from
radio stations. That old broadcast console and the Ampex recorders had some
miles on them, but I had a good consulting engineer go through the place on a
regular basis who kept it right up to specs. Maybe too good.
As I said, it was late, and we were trying to finish up, but as we were
listening to a playback, we started to hear some sounds that were not coming
from what we had just recorded, faint sounds as if from far, far away. We were
in a soundproof studio. Nothing was on except the tape player, the console and
the speakers. What was that noise? We turned off the tape playback, but the far
away sound persisted. We turned the speakers all the way down, and still the
strange sounds came. With our ears we followed the sound to the source, the
small broadcast monitor speaker in the console. We were not a radio station. We
were not “broadcasting” anything. It got weird after that.
“If we’re not broadcasting,” I said, “then we must be receiving.” John turned
up the volume on the console monitor and the sound became more audible. It was
like nothing we had ever heard before, like a microphone was on in a strange
place and no one knew it was on, and it was being transmitted. Somehow, my old radio broadcast console was
picking up that transmission. Strange indeed, for the sounds were like an old
radio serial from days gone by. “John,” I said, “we’d better get this while we
can.” John turned on one of the
recorders and we started recording.
The recordings continued, night after night, and in time we came to discover
that what we were hearing was some sort of transmission from a small planet
named Amphibia, in a far away galaxy known as Croakatoria. All in all, we
managed to piece together 40 of these recordings. Astounded as we were, but
fearing how the government dealt with those people telling stories about
"hearing people from outer space", we dared not release the
recordings to the public. The project was code named “Star Base Toad”.
Kept secretly and securely in my vault for all these years, I have now decided
to risk ridicule and share these recordings with others who may find them of
interest … people who may wish to hear
about life on other planets, about alien civilizations and the distant reaches
of space and time. It is important to me that the world has the opportunity,
through these recordings, to study the society that exists on Amphibia so that
we may try to better understand our own. There has never been a time when we
needed that more than right now.
In order to share this amazing audio discovery with as many people as possible,
I have transferred the 40 recorded Star Base Toad episodes to 4 audio books,
which have been published and are being distributed online by
OpenBookAudio.com. They are now available at most audio
book dealers including iTunes and Audible.com. The four audio books are also available in CD format
at
StarBaseToad.com.
If your imagination will allow you to believe that life
exists elsewhere, you can now listen and learn about the strange and exciting
life on Amphibia. I urge you to listen carefully
to the entire series.
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