S1E45 - The Man Who Listened to the Spar Buoy at Loon Channel

On a mid-October evening in 2017, I met a man named Caleb Washburn on the deck of a rented skiff, half a mile off Ragged Island. He was fifty-seven, a retired hydrologist from Bangor who had been coming to the same patch of water every Tuesday for three years, listening. He said the buoy at Loon Channel — a steel spar, painted red, number 17 — had started to hum on a frequency that didn't match the tide or the wind. He recorded it. He showed me the spectrograms on his phone. The pattern was not random. It spelled out words in a lang...