Invasion of The Airwave Snatchers

By Michael Walsh

"Turn that thing off," Irene said. "Maybe they can hear us." Jim switched the radio off. "That was Miss Armstrong, the Sweeneys' nurse," Irene said. "She must be reading to the little girl. They live in 17-B. I've talked with Miss Armstrong in the Park. I know her voice very well. We must be getting other people's apartments."

"That's impossible," Jim said.

-The Enormous Radio

Try telling that to Blanche Fawell. The Glen Ellyn, Ill., mother of two stumbled into the technological twilight zone when she bought a two-channel monitor to keep audio tabs on her new baby. The machine works fine. The trouble is, Fawell is never sure whether the gurgling and snoring she is listening to are little Timmy's -- or some other infant's.

"I'm hearing other people's children on both channels," says Fawell. "One of them seems to be older and more mobile, based on what the mother says to him at naptime. The child I'm hearing on the other channel is a baby around $ the age of mine. One day my husband was holding the baby, when, over the monitor, he heard another baby crying upstairs. He turned white."

Those ghostly sounds on the monitor are just one manifestation of an electronic specter that is spooking America. Cordless telephones snatch the sounds of other people's conversations from the ether. Garage doors magically shudder open. Houses light up unbidden. Like the Westcotts in The Enormous Radio, John Cheever's 1947 short story about a wireless that broadcasts the real-life drama of a New York City apartment building, Americans are unwittingly tuning in to their neighbors' private affairs.

HELP! In Fraser, Mich., a baby monitor tapped into a drug dealer's cordless- telephone conversations, leading to three arrests after the parents invited police into the living room to listen. "The guy was setting up a transfer of drugs for later that evening, but we didn't know who or where he was," says Ron Wolber, the local director of public safety. Then the suspect sent out for pizza, giving his address, and the collar soon followed.

CALL THE EXORCIST! In suburban Dayton, Cindy Dolloff lived for eight years with a spirit that took possession of her automatic garage-door opener, causing it to pop open at all hours. In Beverly Hills, Andrew Utasy came home one drizzly night to find himself locked out when the center bay of his three- car garage adamantly refused to open -- and he owns a company that makes and services automatic openers. "Of course, I don't design them," says Utasy. "I don't really know exactly how they work. Or why they sometimes don't."

THEY'RE BACK! After discovering that both his cordless phone and his baby monitor were eavesdropping on his next-door neighbors, Paul Prinke, a sheet- metal worker in a Chicago suburb, switched back to his conventional telephone. But he still wasn't safe from poltergeists. "I was talking with someone on my regular old phone, when suddenly I heard another voice say, 'Is that you, Paul?' " recalls Prinke. It seems that Illinois Bell had wired neighbors together on an impromptu party line after a storm.

For years, audiophiles with powerful hi-fi rigs have battled stray radio signals, trying to shield Mozart from the intrusion of amplified CB sets. But now that electronic gadgets have insinuated themselves into nearly all of daily life, the problem of interference is widespread. It can result from strong radio emissions that blot out weaker signals and from the inability of some products to reject unwanted signals.

"The frequencies are getting crowded," says Jerry Friebus, a Federal Communications Commission spokesman in Chicago. "It's like putting a bug into someone's home." (Courts have held that cordless telephones are like radios, and conversations on them are not protected by privacy statutes.) To complicate things further, some devices, such as baby monitors, operate on the same frequencies as cordless phones. "There's no getting around it. When you use a monitor, you're on the public airwaves," says Carol Blackley, director of public relations at Fisher-Price, which makes monitors.

Manufacturers are trying to correct the problems. Newer cordless phones feature as many as ten frequencies. Still, the sheer proliferation of wireless communications is likely to mean more future shocks. There are an estimated 1.23 million cellular-phone owners in the U.S.; other types of mobile communications have materialized on airplanes and in taxicabs. The worsening gridlock worries even professional spooks, whose nightmares run to wired-for- sound informants having their cover blown by stray radio waves. "All the problems you can experience with your phone or garage-door opener, you can experience with electronic surveillance equipment," says a former CIA electronics contractor. Not even Ronald Reagan is immune from things that go squawk in the night. Secret Service communications were jammed this spring while the President was at his California ranch. The source was finally traced to two commercial paging companies in downtown Santa Barbara. "When we get a complaint from the Government, we have to roll on it immediately," says Larry Guy of the FCC in Los Angeles. "After all, it's a matter of national security."

But the FCC can't be everywhere. So don't be surprised if some night on your street, a driver returning home activates his automatic lighting system, which trips his neighbors' lights, waking up their baby, whose crying is heard on the monitor down the street, which inspires angry phone calls that cause other cordless phones to ring in sympathetic vibration, waking the families down the block, which causes . . .

With reporting by Dan Cook/Los Angeles and Sheila Gribben/Chicago