The Strange Hums Heard Around The World | Sound Mysteries

All over the world, a disturbing sonic phenomenon is plaguing residents of rural areas, towns, and even big cities. This strange sound is a source of constant menace to those who hear it. It's actually something severely impacting people's lives. It's not just something they hear, it's something that they feel, that they detect throughout their body. These perpetual low frequency drones are often simply called the hum. 1991 in Taos, New Mexico, some residents begin to complain to city officials about an eerie tone haunting them at night. It wasn't long before the media picked up on the story. So I just woke up in the middle of the night and heard this strong humming sound, kind of low, kind of like a hmmm. A lot of people who hear the hum they refer to it as a bunch of trucks idling nearby. It's this low-level, low-frequency, bass kind of sound. It's not something that affects everybody. In a survey of Taos residents, about 2% of the population claimed to hear it. But to those few who can, the hum is more than just an annoyance. People say that the hum causes physical symptoms, sleeplessness, nausea, and it makes them nervous and anxious and depressed. And the U.S. governments actually tried to verify it. They went to Taos with low-frequency sound-detecting equipment, and they heard nothing. If this unnerving hum wasn't coming from an external source, maybe the sound originated in the hearers themselves. Maybe this is tinnitus. Tinnitus is a condition where people constantly hear a ringing in their ears. And the reason is, there might have been some sort of damage, and so to compensate, the brain sort of turns up its quote-unquote listening mechanism. But this is probably not tinnitus. And the reason is, tinnitus tends to be a very high signal, a very high constant whine. This is more like bass than like treble. Some people can hear it, some people can't. You know, I live off in the middle of nowhere, and I listen for it, but I've never heard it. Mysteriously, almost as quickly as the hum began, it disappeared, leaving residents and officials no closer to an answer. But the phenomena of unexplained hums has appeared all over the world, this time just over the Canadian border in the city of Windsor, Ontario. In 2012, more than 22,000 Canadians dialed into a local teleconference to complain about their very own mysterious hum. The hum, quite frankly, was hurting the quality of life here in the city of Windsor. So they got researchers from the University of Windsor to come and take a look, and they pointed to Zug Island. It's just this little island in the Detroit River where there's a lot of industrial activity. So they said that there are blast furnaces by a U.S. steel plant on Zug Island that are making a lot of sound, and that's what everybody's hearing. But there was one problem. Zug Island was on U.S. soil. Without cooperation from the U.S. government, university researchers were unable to conduct any tests on the actual island, and their study was left incomplete. Reports of new and different hums were popping up across the globe. Scotland, Auckland, Kokomo, Indiana, and elsewhere. And each new case seemed to invite a new theory. Some experts attributed the hum to electricity pylons. Other people insisted it was UFOs. And many believed it was just mass hysteria. There's some theories that the hum, whatever it might be, is still amplified psychologically. It's possible that a lot of the people reporting hearing the hum are reporting it because they live somewhere where other people are reporting it. Over the years, for every individual hum, scientists have proposed all manner of explanations for these distressing sound reverberations. In Seattle, Washington, scientists thought it could be armies of mating fish. The plainfin midshipman fish use acoustic communication to attract a mate. On summer nights, the males contract the muscles around their gas-filled swim bladders. This whirring oscillation produces a monotone droning sound calling all nearby females to his nest. The mating calls' low-frequency long wavelength allows it to reverberate off the boats and also off the shallow parts of the sea floor, amplifying the sound on land. A popular conspiracy theory puts forward that harp in Kokona, Alaska, the high-frequency active auroral research program, is responsible for the hum all over the world. Harp is made up of 180 antennas which transmit high-power radio frequencies into an outer layer of the Earth's atmosphere. The theory is that these intense frequency blasts are invading the minds of people particularly sensitive to them. Still, there has been no unified theory for this worldwide mystery. But recently, science has made a breakthrough. Some first reports of the hum were in Bristol, England in the 70s and researchers from Oxford came and were able to point toward a large industrial fan nearby and said that that was the source of the hum. And when the fan was later decommissioned, the hum went away. But then in 2015, the people of Bristol began hearing another hum baffling residents once again. This time a recent scientific breakthrough provided a possible explanation. Scientists discovered that colliding ocean waves and waves moving over the sea floor are responsible for micro-seismic activity. In turn, this constant vibration gives off a hum. They confirmed this in 2017 by putting seismic equipment at the bottom of the Indian Ocean. What scientists found is a sound that's basically emitted by the Earth itself. The Earth's hum is faint. It was measured at a level 10,000 times lower than normal hearing capabilities. Despite its promise and the amazing revelations about the Earth's hum, it seems improbable that this would be the cause for all hums. But it does launch a new era in the investigation of the maddening hum.