This is going viral on Facebook and scaring thousands of people, many panic attacks, some suicidal. This is another of my Doomsday Debunked posts to help these vulnerable people, many of them young children, still at school, who read about this on their mobile devices. Ever since March 14th I've spent hours every day reassuring very scared and panicking people that the MH 370 flight recorder did not send a voice mail message to a random twitter user warning us of an alien invasion on 18th April. Honestly‽

This is a piling heap of stinking horse dung that attracts trolls like flies and beetles from thousands of kilometers away. Like the Titan Arum or Corpse Flower.

Right now the social networks like twitter and Facebook are going crazy. E.g. a recent post in Facebook about this daft idea has over 14,000 shares as of writing this and 10,000 comments, most of them tagging other people.  People are getting really really scared by this. Not able to sleep. Contemplating suicide. We get comments and posts from them in our Doomsday Debunked group and getting PM's from them, 24/7 hour after hour. Luckily there are a fair number of us to handle it now, it's far too much for one or two people to handle.

I am posting this in the hope that some of them may see this post and share it. 

This is a totally absurd story. Of an all singing / dancing flight recorder with inexhaustible battery and able to communicate via  the mobile phone network through water, and that can send voice mails, in NATO phonetic alphabet for some reason, e.g. instead of saying "Danger" it says Delta Alpha November Golf Echo Romeo. Why would anyone in any circumstances do such a thing‽ Then of all things, a text message in morse code. Why‽ Why would anyone type a lot of dots and dashes in a text message when we have a perfectly good alphabet to hand? 

This seems a good article to try out my "Interrobang" :)  ‽ Emphatic question  ‽ I sometimes think that that's not quite enough and I should have a dozen of them in this totally absurd story ‽‽‽‽‽‽‽‽‽‽‽‽

And what is the origin of the April 18 date? It is a text message sent to a 15 year old girl by a known troll who was doing it to promote his album on Sound Cloud. Where did he get it from? Probably from a widely shared false prophecy from an article by an absent minded Jewish scholar who misremembered a text he thought he had read in Medieval German by a historical rabbi. 

So why do they think it is "real"? Mainly because it uses a robotic voice. To be more precise, Siri - you use it to read text to speech on a Mac. Usually used e.g. by partially sighted people who can't see the screen very well and you have text to speech on all modern computers. And because it uses morse code. And - well basically it's because it makes no sense that they puzzle away and puzzle away trying to make sense of it. And because they can't they get more and more scared. And because so many people are sharing it and getting scared so they get scared too.

If they tweeted that a cow jumped over the moon in morse code dots and dashes, or in English autotranslated to Malay, would you now believe them?

Let's try it without any encoding

The cow jumped over the moon

Do you believe it?

Let's try it in NATO phonetic alphabet

Tango Hotel Echo Charlie Oscar Whiskey Juliet Uniform Mike Papa Echo Delta Oscar Victor Echo Romeo Tango Hotel Echo Mike Oscar Oscar November

Let’s try it in morse code

Morse code: - .... . / -.-. --- .-- / .--- ..- -- .--. . -.. / --- ...- . .-. / - .... . / -- --- --- -.

Do you now find it more believable? Let’s try autotranslate to various languages:

Zulu: Inkomazi yagijima phezu kwenyanga

Corsican: A vacca saltò nantu à a luna

Malay: Lembu itu melompat ke atas bulan

Still don’t believe it? Let’s try Japanese, surely you will believe it now?

牛は月を飛び越えた

Nope?

It is like that. It is nothing to worry about at all. It is all the most absurd nonsense I’ve ever seen while debunking! And they just add more nonsense on top of it in layer after layer.

Some people have been puzzling over this literally for weeks, getting more and more scared!

Anyway let's go through that a bit more slowly.

First, if you are suicidal over this - do ring a suicide prevention hotline. List of suicide crisis lines - Wikipedia

And do see your doctor and health professional. They really can help you a lot. Most of the people who I help by PM for fake doomsday scares are seeing health professionals. They get many people like you - don’t feel embarrassed to ask for help. It can happen to the best of us.

THE BULLSHIT STORY AS IT IS TOLD

I will tell the story first and then explain why all this is utter BS.

The claim basically is that aliens hijacked MH 370. Somehow in the process they let slip that they planned to invade Earth on 18th April 2018. 

(If this sort of thing bothers you, see my Why we don’t need to fear an alien invasion)

They claim that somehow this got broadcast from the black box in the MH 370 crash site as the following:

• A voice mail that speaks out a message using the NATO phonetic alphabet.
  
  - this is a system used when you are asked to read out a post code over the phone and you may say Tango Sierra or whatever because spoken letters can be confused e.g. Tee for Dee or whatever. Nobody would spell out "Danger" in this way they would just say "Danger". But this message spells it out as: 
  
  "Sierra Delta Alpha November Golf Echo Romeo Sierra Oscar Sierra India Tango India Sierra Delta India Romeo Echo Foxtrot Oscar Romeo Yankee Oscar Uniform Tango Oscar Echo Victor Alpha Charlie Uniform Alpha Tango Echo Bravo Echo Charlie Alpha Uniform Tango India Oscar Uniform Sierra Tango Hotel Echo Yankee Alpha Romeo Echo November Oscar Tango Hotel Uniform Mike Alpha November Zero Four Two Nine Three Three Nine Six Four Two Three Zero Sierra Oscar Sierra Delta Alpha November Golf Echo Romeo Sierra Oscar Sierra ”
  
  Which, taking the first letter of every word becomes:
  

  “sDanger SOS it is dire for you to evacuate be cautious they are not human 042933964230 SOS Danger SOS”
  
  They read this as meaning that aliens hijacked MH 370. And somehow that lead to the black box sending this voice mail message to a random twitter user four years later just before their planned invasion. Note, there is no date in that voice mail yet.

• It says SOS (should be Mayday Mayday Mayday - SOS went out of use in 1927 and was only meant for morse code).
  
  It goes on to say "it is dire to evacuate". How do those fit together‽
  
  Who are they supposed to be talking to‽
  
  SOS is asking someone to rescue you.
  
  Dire to evacuate means you are talking to someone who needs to be rescued.
  
  There is no situation where you'd say both in the same message
• A text message in morse code‽
  
  Who ever sends text messages in morse code, what's the point‽ Why type loads of dots and dashes when you can just type text‽
• A text message in Malay. Not fluent Malay but google translate's version of it.
• A text message with many numbers one of which is the number 41818. 
  
  Those text messages are all in the form of direct messages from other twitter users. For some reason they think that if a user sent an enigmatic DM to Ty@strayedaway in the first day or two of the hoax this means it is authentic and comes from the black box somehow.

The original voice mail message gives a number that looks like a phone number 042933964230 but is apparently after you insert decimal points and a space, the MH 370 crash site. One problem with that though, it points to a location that's 33 km inland!

In addition, black boxes do not send radio waves or any kind of message. They record anything that is said in the cabin - people speaking, whatever they say. They do not broadcast any of this (for obvious reasons, it's only for the aircrash investigators).

They are not even equipped with radio transmitters. They have an ULTRASOUND beeper. This is used if the box falls in water (if it is on land you spot it by its bright red colour).

The reason black boxes are designed in this way is because the signal from a mobile phone or a normal radio can't pass through water. If you take your mobile phone down to an underwater habitat, it won't work unless there is some relay station in it connected by wire to the surface.

To hear a black box you need an underwater microphone. Not a mobile phone. This is a very high pitched sound like a dog whistle too high pitched to hear. And since it's in the water the sound doesn't pass into the air easily either. To hear the sound you need to put it into the sea close to the black box. And when you do, all you hear is "ping ping ping" for 30 days until the battery runs out.

You will not pick it up on a mobile phone. Not even if the phone is watertight and you put it in the water. It's the wrong kind of signal.

The ultrasound beeper can’t send a signal with any information at all.

It is not attached to anything that could make it send a signal even in ultrasound. It just goes ping ping for 30 days until its battery runs out.

The black box battery ran out in April 2014. They towed the pinger locator underwater microphones back and forth in the search area until the very last day.

It might be that the beacon broke during the crash as happens sometimes. But we now know they were searching the wrong area by back tracking the few bits of debris they found in places like Reunion island - looking at the ocean currents and working out where they must have come from to get there. So they wouldn't have heard it anyway.

So there is no mystery about why they didn’t hear the black box pinger. It is often hard to hear one anyway - especially if it is in deep water and this was very deep water and they were looking in the wrong place probably too and it may have been broken in the impact.

The only way to find out what is in the black box now is to find the crash site and recover the black box. If they do it should still have that data safe to read.

IN SHORT

Black box flight recorders DO NOT SEND VOICE MAILS and DO NOT SEND TEXT MESSAGES and DO NOT SEND ANY KIND OF RADIO SIGNAL

WHAT IS A “BLACK BOX”?

It is a flight recorder, is the proper name. Basically an elaborate tape recorder that records everything that is said in the cockpit on a looping tape, or nowadays memory chip + all parameters from the plane itself - location, altitude, engine status, positions of all the controls etc. But it doesn't broadcast any of that. It just records it.

The only voices it records is whatever is said inside the cabin, 2 hours looping recording. Flight recorder

The only transmitting capability is the ultrasound beeper which you need an underwater microphone to hear. Just pings for 30 days.

Though called a "black box" for some reason colloquially, it's actually coloured bright red to be easy to spot on land. In the sea you can't see colours and the water is murky so you use the beacon. To analyse the crash they need to find the wreckage, locate the black box and then they have to cut it open to retrieve the flight data and recording.

The recording just records whatever anyone was saying in the cabin. In the case of MH 370 probably not much as they may have all been dead unless it was a suiciding pilot who was still alive and said something before it crashed into the sea.

DEAD EASY TO FAKE

The whole thing also is dead easy to fake. It would take a modern internet savvy youngster just a few minutes. There are online tools for everything. Online Text to NATO phonetic alphabet. Online text to morse code. Online Google Translate.

You can also do online text to speech though actually this one was done on a Mac as it uses the Mac Siri as you can tell by the voice.

Most modern computers have text to speech - it is to help partially sighted people to read emails etc, by getting the robotic voice to read it to them.

Try it for yourself with these four tools - you could do it in minutes. Literally.

• Phonetic Alphabet Generator
• Google Translate
• Morse Code Translator

Once you’ve made your morse code message try putting it into the input field and you can decode it like this:

• text to speech online

This is FAKE FAKE FAKE!

Do not fall for all this nonsense and above all, to those who may be feeling suicidal about it right now, 

DO NOT KILL YOURSELF BECAUSE OF SOME SILLY LIARS AND SENSATIONALIST ATTENTION SEEKERS. TROLL ALERT!!

It is all just tweets. Just people going home bored after a busy day at work and some of them a bit trollish and they type away messages on their computer that appear on twitter. And if this person who you could pass in a street without noticing types this into a tweet on twitter:

YELLOW HIPPOS EXIST #strayedaway

Well, half the people who read that might well start searching for yellow hippos, the strayedaway tag has become so potent as it goes viral.

Then a troll at his home computer sees all this going on on his computer screen which for him seems to be some amusing text based adventure game - and leans back and laughs like a drain. That's what is going on here. That's what it is all about. No mystery.

It's as absurd and silly as that. It really is.

 WHAT IS THE ORIGIN OF THE DATE?

The original tweets had no dates. Ty then said she received DM's on t6th March, and shared them and one of them is the one with the number 41818. The one who sent this tweet later confessed that he did it to promote an album on SoundCloud. The entire 18th April thing is based on this text direct message sent to her

Here is a copy of bdbxtjmsa1’s tweets posted to Reddit admitting it (now removed as his account was suspended)

Ahahahaha I’m just fuckin wit y’all lmao since y’all here tho check my nigga SoundCloud shit go hard https://soundcloud.com/djallelmu...

(tweettranscriberbot)

so @bdbxtjmsa1 was a fake account? • r/Solving41818A

This is one of many tweets in the long thread responding to his tweet:

Legendary. Literally has everybody thinking for hours about what your posts mean and it’s just to promote your soundcloud. Respect. Decent rap as well tbh

— John Hodgkiss (@19jhodgkiss) March 21, 2018

He sent a DM to Ty@strayedaway, first of the four in this screenshot of her tweet:

This is the first of her DM’s and the origin of the 18th April date:

Screenshot of it from: SOS Dangerous Not Human Voicemail • r/LPOTL as auto copied by a reddit tweet copying bot (tweettranscriberbot) on 16th March

WHERE DID THE DATE COME FROM ORIGINALLY?

It doesn’t originate in this troll. It’s a date that’s been circulating on the internet since 2008.

It originates in an article by Ludwig Schneider an absent minded researcher aged 80 who misremembered something written in Medieval German by a rabbi Judah Ben Samuel.

In his Israel Today article he just talked about him from memory, didn’t cite a passage or even a work, and when asked through his son he didn’t remember where he had seen it.

Experts on that rabbi say there is no such passage in his collected works. They asked if they could search his library to see if he had some previously unknown work with the passage but his son said he didn't want his father to be disturbed because he is so old. They also say that it’s impossible that there could be such a passage, at least in the form in which he recalled it, even if he had some never previously discovered work by him in his library, because the prophecy he alleged to him talks about the Ottoman empire which is named after someone who was born around 40 years after he died.

That memory lapse of an 80 years old author writing for Israel Today article is the entire source for scary looking false prophecy pages around the web for 18th April.

• 18th April prophecy is fake - from 80 year old researcher Ludwig Schneider who had lapse of memory about Judah ben Samuel

The 18th April date originates in Ludwig Schneider an absent minded researcher aged 80 who misremembered something written in medieval german by a rabbi Judah Ben Samuel.

In his Israel Today article he just talked about him from memory, didn’t cite a passage or even a work, and when asked through his son he didn’t remember where he had seen it.

Experts on that rabbi say there is no such passage in his collected works. Also it’s impossible that there could be such a passage because the prophecy he alleged to him talks about the Ottoman empire which is named after someone who was born around 40 years after he died.

That memory lapse of an 80 years old author writing for Israel Today article is the entire source for scary looking false prophecy pages around the web for 18th April. Such as this one full of red text to scare people

• WARNING! The Rapture is in 2018! ARE YOU READY?

This is my debunk of that false prophecy:

• 18th April prophecy is fake - from 80 year old researcher Ludwig Schneider who had lapse of memory about Judah ben Samuel

Now to a few FAQ's.

WHAT ABOUT FORTNITE?

This is just a game, not reality. Probably they will start a new phase of the game on April 18. They have chosen to add a game approaching comet which will probably lead to an in game event on that date.

This is likely to have nothing at all to do with the rest of this. That they use the same date is no big deal. Either a coincidence - not that many dates in the year and lots of things people use dates for. Or else maybe they got it from the same false prophecy which has been around since 2008.

WHAT ABOUT COUNTY BLUFF?

This is a YouTube enigmatic channel with an extra twist that the owner adds messages in hexadecimal to the videos. This apparently is very impressive to people not used to hexadecimal and gets them believing everything he says. So, let's try our message in hexadecimal:

54 68 65 20 63 6f 77 20 6a 75 6d 70 65 64 20 6f 76 65 72 20 74 68 65 20 6d 6f 6f 6e 0a

Put it through the hex to tex tool and it says

The cow jumped over the moon

Does that make it true?

For some reason, for some people, if you turn something into hex and place it in front of an enigmatic video, the puzzle of trying to work out what it means leads to them gullibly believing whatever it says.

He posted a video with the 18th April 2018 in the title back in 2016. That means nothing as the date has been going the rounds as I said for a decade.

He also is said to have made "accurate" prophecies. But given that he prophecied that the world would end in 2016, 2017 and on March 30 2018, the "accuracy" of his prophecies are somewhat questionable to say the least. It is easy to "prophecy" if you predict some thing that happens often and then you delete all the prophecies that fail. County Bluff is known for deleting videos with false prophecies and he uploads often many videos a day.

Also in some of his videos County Bluff gives instructions to pick things up at GPS coordinates to various places in the US, such as a piece of loo roll with holes in it. His followers find this deeply impressive for some reason. All it shows is that he has the ability to travel, which is not unusual nowadays.

He also has warnings about the sky turning dark blue. It does this every clear evening! Blue hour