Intro:
CONELRAD
Radio Alert ‘Real Thing’
(WBEN AM, Buffalo, NY)
1.
Thankfully, this 1953 recording sat unused for half a century at the transmitter site of a
Buffalo, New York radio station before an observant engineer discovered it sitting in a dusty
drawer. One glance at the red underlined title at the top of the smudged label signaled the 12"
disk’s eerie significance: REAL THING. Indeed, this record, with its announcer’s impossibly smooth
(and calm) voice, would have been the last ‘thing’ hundreds of thousands of Buffalonians would
have ever heard had it become necessary to be played. It seems only appropriate then to begin
this compilation with an announcement of THE END.
Note: CONELRAD, which stands for CONtrol of ELectromagnetic RADiation, was the first
emergency broadcasting apparatus implemented by the United States government in 1953 and
was the precursor of the Emergency Broadcast System (EBS) which replaced CONELRAD in
1963 and the Emergency Alert System (EAS) which replaced the EBS in 1994. CONELRAD,
which was intended to be an outlet for news and government communication in the event of an
enemy attack or other emergency, had another purpose and that was to foil enemy bombers’
navigational systems. Under the hopelessly complicated CONELRAD system, in the event of an
6
