In December 1978, an unknown ham radio operator contacted the FBI with tapes of eight conversations he had recorded of Peoples Temple, which he said were operating in “both the legal and illegal radio ham bands.”
As happens with most of the ham radio recordings, there is much repetition of words – in part because of the degraded signal between Jonestown/Georgetown and San Francisco – as well as a number of unintelligible words and sentences. In addition, much of the conversation is in code, with references which are unknown without a Temple codebook. Finally, the breaks between separate tapes sometimes seem arbitrary and sequential tapes may be more a case of a different transcriber picking up the work on the same tape.
Several of the tapes – limited to the voices of an “Unknown Male” and an “Unknown Female” – were apparently conversations between the same two people. The ham radio operator said that he believed some of the conversations were between Paula Adams in Georgetown and Albert Touchette in Jonestown. While that may be the case, the expressions of love and affection between the two speakers suggest that the conversations could be between Paula Adams and her brother, Elton (Tom) Adams – who was one of the Temple’s radio license holders – in the United States.
The tapes include:
| Serial 1200 Cover | Text | |
| Tape 1 | Text | |
| Tape 2 | Text | |
| Tape 3 | Text | |
| Tape 4 | Text | |
| Tape 5 | Text | |
| Tape 6 | Text | |
| Tape 7 | Text | |
| Tape 8 | Text |