Back in January, a bizarre recording of an apparent nuclear early-warning-system transmission was posted on reddit by a user who claims the broadcast was intercepted by his elderly mother on her home phone in Greeley, Colorado.

Did a Cold-War-Era nuclear defense warning system get its wires crossed? Or is this an elaborate hoax?

After receiving a frantic phone call from his mother regarding a spooky message blaring through her home phone, the original poster visited his aging mother to make sure everything was okay.

Upon arriving, he soon discovered that the message was real.

Over the next few days I figured out that the message only came between 7 PM to 7:15 PM. Any other time of day, there was a normal dial tone and the phone worked normally. The phone didn't ring at 7 PM or anything - it was just that if you lifted the receiver to make a call between 7 to 7:15 PM you'd get the sinister message rather than the dial tone. If it was before 7:15 PM, and you hung up the phone and then lifted the receiver again, the message would play again from the start. If you hung up and then immediately (as in, within a fraction of a second) lifted the receiver again the line would appear to be dead until 7:15.

Listen to the recording made by the original poster below.

NORAD's closest operations are roughly 2 hours away in Colorado springs; the BMEWS Central Computer and Display Facility and notorious Cheyenne Mountain Bunker Complex, a military safe-house installation capable of withstanding a 30 megaton nuclear blast, originally made famous by inspiring the command center in "Dr. Strangelove"

Cutaway of the military's nuclear safe-zone some two hours from where the message was heard.

A number of redditors have analyzed the audio of the transmission, and found that the frequency range of the male and female voices exceed the allowable frequency over normal telephone lines. This indicates that this message was delivered by a non-standard telephonic system.

Additionally, the tones dialed at the beginning of the missive are non-DTMF (yet were decoded to dial the number 49872250), and therefore wouldn't be able to dial over a standard POTS telephone. This either indicates the transmission system is a proprietary military set up (possibly set up to continue functioning after a nuclear incident that would disable standard telephone systems), and the message was received by an unwitting recipient, or the recording was falsified.

If it's a hoax, it's a pretty awesome one. What do you think? Comment below!