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January 21st, 1997.

We're back in the skull hole in Norfolk. The room is pitch black,

stripped of light, and heavy with anticipation. The only way in or out is closed, locked

and light sealed. There are no windows to worry about. But tonight, the focus isn't on the

mediums. It's not on Robin Foy or Diana Bennett.

The focus is on a small, crude object sitting on a wooden base in the center of the table.

To the un-initiated, it looks like something a child might cobble together from a Radio Shack kit.

Yeah, we know, some of you probably don't remember Radio Shack.

But on the table, there's a clear plastic box. Two high-resistance coils packed with

enough wire to generate a massive 5,000 oms of impedance. A sliver of germanium semiconductor held

in place by a thin copper strip and a contact screw filed

down to a razor sharp point. Germanium is a semiconductor, the primitive grandfather of the

silicon ship that runs your laptop or iPhone today. Back in the 1940s, it was the magic rock that

made the very first transistors possible. They called this box the germanium receptor.

According to the laws of electrical engineering, this device should have been a paperweight.

It had no power source.

It had no tuner.

It was a closed loop of wire and crystal rock that shouldn't have been able to pick up a local AM radio station, let alone a signal from somewhere we struggled to understand.

...