One of the most remarkable achievements of Candle Cove was the experimentation in air wave broadcasting and receiving brain waves. In May 2007, the American National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) confirmed that they used the television show's time slot to test a special broadcasting signal.
The show's producers never made a conclusive statement about whether or not they agreed with the experiment, but there are sources that indicate they were coerced by the NASA agency to collaborate.
The broadcasting system involved a technology known as "SEBTAW" (Sound Echography Braincasting Transmissing Air Wave Signal). It worked with the long-peak radio/air wave conversion to brainwave homologues, in order to stimulate brain cells directly with the air waves without needing a visual/auditory output.
This system was created on the television's aforementioned "static" that was, by other means, a peak projection whose radio signals permitted the watchers to acquire the visual information. The "static" was, in reality, a weak signal that televisions closer to the broadcasting studio could pick up. Meanwhile, other televisions further away relied on children's tolerance for low video and audio quality to watch their TV show. An adult may remember this as static, since at the time they saw it as close to pure static.
According to classified sources, the determined signal length allowed the system to only work in children between two and six years old. Their brains have not passed the final myelination stages, unlike teenagers or adults, and thus were susceptible to the braincasting process. This is the main reason NASA chose to mask the testing program with a children's television show.
However, this is not to say that the show was not at all visible to those close to the signal; it was just stronger with younger children. There have been reports of children, who were at least twelve at the time (effectively possessing an adult brain), that lived close to the television studio who watched Candle Cove. There was even one instance of someone's mother watching the show with their child (the mother was 18, while the child was 3). The woman could not understand why her son was so engrossed in it, when she found it to be just another silly children's show (except for the Skin-Taker). She was surprised at her son's ability to clearly discern images from the weak signal. However, the signal needed to be at least faintly received by the television in order to be imprinted. A weak signal looks like static, with faint swirls representing pictures.
The SEBTAW system also experimented with "memory reverberance" technology. It allowed the test subjects (the children) to retain the information about the show acquired via SEBTAW to last only six hours or less. This explains why most of the information about the show is lost. Even so, in recent years it has been possible to recover some synopsis and fragments of plot from old TV Guide issues, production notes, interviews, child writings and drawings, and from those who were close enough to the signal that they could physically watch the show sans static. However, aisde from the well-recieved pilot and first episode, most of the show's content is unknown.
According to the official network book, only six Candle Cove episodes of the final season (the last one planned before the show's cancellation) were broadcasted exclusively by the SEBTAW system. These were episodes 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, and 12
In Q4 of 1972, on the show's 1972-1973 rerun, previously unaired episodes, along with all the other episodes, were broadcasted in the SEBTAW signal. This explains why most watchers remember episode 11 as the series finale.
In some areas, it was not only those episodes, but the full series that was transmitted via SEBTAW. As well, there sometimes was regular advertising and announcement of the show in the regular episode, and even the title cards of some SEBTAW-exclusive episodes, like the Death of Milo, played before the SEBTAW braincasting. This is why Candle Cove is remembered by children and parents as an "urban legend", since most could see nothing more than thirty minutes of static, unless they were close enough to fully receive the television station's weak signal, and the content of the show was quickly wiped from the kids' memories.
According to the show's producers, they were actually forced (it's unknown by the contract or the NASA people) to direct the infamous "Screaming Episode", for the sole purpose of making the final test of the signal. For this reason, the episode was totally improvised and the script was deliberately consisting of the show's characters screaming directly at the camera for roughly seventeen minutes.
Episodes 5 and 6 from Season 2 are generally thought to have similar content. Concurrently, it must be noticed that all of the SEBTAW-Exclusive Episodes were known to deal with considerably darker or risque content in comparison to the regular series episodes. In fact, the decision to produce episodes with such questionable content was taken in only after it was reportedly known that children watching the brainsignal had developed a level of addiction to the series, and had become influenceable to follow the characters' behaviors. A number of casualties was also reported by local newspapers, coinciding with the SEBTAW rerun period. The infamous "screaming episode" was broadcasted on December 4, 1972.
SEBTAW technology has been systematically denied by NASA and the US government, but was reportedly used in the 80's to transfer information and confidential, top secret messages by air without the risk of having them decrypted. It is not known currently if the system was being discarded by the coming of the 90's and the digital adoption by part of the US government, or if it is still in use.
Some scientific publications also treated the topic by describing the danger of the brainwave transmission, making the specific indication about how it was "...demonstrated to create addiction and aggressive behavior on little children in the 1972 NASA experiment."