Many Hearing Mysterious Hum and Strange Sounds Around The World
There’s nothing more distracting than the bass from a house party or the droning sound of an engine outside the window when trying to relax at home. But lately, people have reported hearing strange sounds around the world, notably an interminable humming.
No one has been able to definitively explain this audible annoyance, but some believe it may be related to bizarre operations the government or corporations don’t want us to know about.
Mysterious Hums
There is a multitude of areas around the world where people claim to hear a strange hum varying in tone and intensity. About two percent of the population can hear it, typically resembling a monotonous subwoofer or diesel truck engine idling in the distance.
There are several well-known cities with a hum, including Taos, New Mexico; Winsdor, Ontario; Auckland, New Zealand; and Bristol, England. In some of these cities, residents have heard the hum for decades, while others say it began just within the past few years.
Some put their homes up for sale and tried to move, others went on medication to take their mind off it, and in the U.K., there have even been three suicides related to it.
Doctors provided inadequate explanations ranging from tinnitus to people focusing too hard on background noises. Those who hear it say earplugs do nothing to silence it, leading some to believe the source is causing vibrations throughout sufferers’ bodies.
In Windsor, Mike Provost created a Facebook group that has grown to include over 2,000 members hearing the hum. Windsor is situated across the river from Detroit and several miles from a small island filled with industrial foundries and steel mills, that many believe to be the source of the hum.
Zug Island is considered Detroit’s Area 51 and every attempt to illuminate operations conducted there is met with staunch resistance from the government and corporations. The island, which was once a Native American burial ground, is heavily guarded by the companies operating there as well as the Department of Homeland Security. Spokespersons for companies operating on Zug Island refuse to disclose their operations, while also denying the possibility they could be the source of the hum.
The hum can only be heard on the Canadian side of the river, no one in Detroit or elsewhere in Michigan can hear it. Some nights, Windsor residents say it gets so loud it shakes their homes and rattles glassware in cupboards.
The Taos Hum and TACAMO
In Taos, a similar hum has been reported by residents since the 1950s. There, descriptions of the hum vary, with locals saying it might not be coming from a single source. Some describe it as a hum, others say it’s more of a whir or buzz.
In an interview with Gaia, Taos resident, Georgie Jones, says she started hearing the hum shortly after she moved to the city, initially believing she was hearing the low end from a stereo system at a nearby house. When she woke up in the morning, she asked her roommates if the neighbor’s rave party kept them awake last night.
“I asked my friends about it and they said, ‘I think you’re hearing the hum,’” Jones said. “It varies, but you hear it usually in the evening or at night. It’ll go every day for several weeks at a time – it’s really annoying.”
Jones said the hum is a single monotonous tone that varies in pulse and intensity. Sometimes the hum is louder than others, but it remains monotone. She said it’s been so bad that she occasionally considers moving out of the city.
Recordings of what the hum supposedly sounds like can be found on YouTube, and after listening to it in the background for 10 minutes, one can understand how distracting and frustrating it is.
One popular theory that many, including Jones, are familiar with, is that the hum comes from a military program which employs very low-frequency radio waves, or VLF, for communication between submarines and aircraft. This idea was first proposed in a paper by David Deming, a geoscientist at the University of Oklahoma.
Deming offered a number of possible sources for the hum, including wave frequencies bounced off the ionosphere from HAARP to long-range radio navigation transmitters, a.k.a. LORAN. But the one explanation many have ascribed to is from a military project known as TACAMO, or Take Charge and Move Out.
TACAMO was coined in 1961 and was outfitted on aircraft the following year. TACAMO essentially relays radio frequencies to nuclear-armed submarines telling them to surface and receive commands.
The frequencies sent and received by TACAMO-equipped aircraft are complemented by land-based transmitters, some of which are the most powerful radio stations in the world operating at two million watts.
Most bases where TACAMO missions are conducted are located in coastal areas, which would explain locations like Bristol experiencing the hum. Bristol was also a primary area of submarine operations for the U.S. during the Cold War.
Since the hum is infrequent and nearly impossible to pinpoint, so it would make sense that it might be coming from an aircraft flying sporadic, classified missions.
But there are some flaws in Demings’ theory, such as the fact that there aren’t hums reported in areas of the country where similar high-powered ground transmitters are located. Also, Taos isn’t in a coastal area, it’s in the Sangre de Cristo mountain range, at least 900 miles from the Gulf of Mexico or the Pacific Ocean.
Taos is, however, located a short distance from the Los Alamos National Laboratory, a military base originally built for the design of nuclear weapons during the Manhattan Project. Today, it continues to be involved in projects regarding nuclear security, defense, and energy.
The Earth is Vibrating
A popular theory some say puts the hum conundrum to rest is that scientists have discovered the Earth gives off a subtle vibration at a frequency of 10-millihertz. Humans aren’t supposed to be able to hear at this low of a frequency, but some say there is a possibility sensitive ears could pick up on this.
This delicate hum is thought to be caused by the force of the ocean moving against the surface of the planet, creating something called microseisms. These faint Earth tremors are sometimes referred to as a “hum,” though skeptics say this is entirely different than the hum they hear.
Microseisms can create electromagnetic noise signals, but the frequencies heard by those suffering from the hum are significantly higher than 10-millihertz. Many have measured local hums to be somewhere between 30 and 80 Hz.
The average range of human hearing is anywhere between 20 Hz to 20,000 kHz, so the ocean vibration frequency falls significantly below our hearing range. It also wouldn’t explain why it is only heard in specific areas across the world, especially landlocked areas.
So, what are these strange hums? It’s almost certain the Windsor hum is coming from one of the factories on Zug Island, but why is the company being secretive about what’s going on there? And what about the Taos hum? Are these sound frequencies physically harming residents, aside from the lack of sleep and annoyance it’s causing them?
Whatever it is, no one has been able to definitively prove the cause of these mysterious hums. For now, the only solution for sufferers is to either put up with the hum or move away from an area affected by the hum. If neither of these solutions is practical, Dr. Glen Macpherson has devised a way to eliminate the hum by building a VLF-blocking aluminum box, originally proposed by Deming, that looks more like a metal coffin. Macpherson calls it a Deming Box.
Unfortunately, the box isn’t very practical for hum sufferers’ day to day life and is more of a tool to attract media attention to help bring awareness to the inexorable frustration of this small percent of the population.
Will the humming ever stop?
About the Author
Is a Parallel Universe Changing Our Reality?
Sometimes referred to as the Berenstain Bears Conspiracy, the Mandela Effect is a phenomenon in which people report having the same false memories, leading to a belief that something is changing reality.
We all experience life through our own subjective lenses, interpreting day-to-day happenings differently than everyone else. This contributes to individuality, free will, and the ability to think for ourselves. But of course, the way that we witness our world often results in lapses of memory or perception. We sometimes seem to remember events happening differently than others or our perception of time is skewed.
And individual memory lapses are easily written off when everyone else’s memory says otherwise. But how does one explain false memories that are held by a significantly large portion of the population?
Confabulation is the psychiatric term for replacing a gap in your memory with a falsification. So, what about mass confabulation? Well, that’s become a conspiracy of sorts, referred to as The Mandela Effect.
Examples of The Mandela Effect
The Mandela Effect was given its name by Fiona Broome, who seemed to remember hearing about the death of Nelson Mandela on the news while he was imprisoned in the 1980s. In “reality,” Mandela survived until late 2013 and did not even become president of South Africa until 1994. But as it turned out, her memory was shared by a deluge of similarly convinced people, resulting in many other instances in which large swaths of the population have claimed to experience the same confabulated memories.
Could this be the result of one person incorrectly remembering a historical event or cultural icon propagating their misinterpretation to be inaccurately remembered by the masses? Or could it be evidence of a multiverse in which waves of events from a parallel universe have washed over into ours, creating subtle nuances in the time-space continuum, where there was once a children’s book called the Berenstein Bears, instead of the Berenstain Bears? It’s more interesting to explore the latter.
While the Berenstain Bears is ostensibly a mundane and inconsequential example of the Mandela Effect, there are other instances that are so uncanny, they’re hard to ignore. For example, when Darth Vader reveals his paternalistic relationship to Luke in Star Wars, most remember him saying, “Luke, I am your father.” In ‘reality,’ he says, “No, I am your father.” While an intransigent Star Wars fan might scoff at someone who misquotes such an important scene, it can’t be ignored that most people remember it in the former. Even James Earl Jones, who voiced Darth Vader, remembers the line incorrectly.
Movie quotes aside, an example of a famous real-life event that has been brought into the mystery of the Mandela Effect regards the famous protester at Tiananmen Square. The ‘Tank Man,’ whose defiant act of rebellion, standing in front of a tank with grocery bags in hand, is remembered by many as resulting in his death from being run over. In fact, he was not run over and there is no evidence of it, but many remember his crushing demise distinctly.
This is nothing new to those familiar with the theory and there are many other examples that support it; so many that there is an entire subreddit devoted to the effect. With topics ranging from movies that never existed to discrepancies in historical events, people vehemently claim to remember very particular things differently, but on a large, collective scale. Some people’s reactions are visceral when they experience new revelations due to the Mandela Effect, to the point of incurring panic attacks or questioning reality.
Mandela Effect Theories and CERN
One pragmatist theory for explaining the Mandela Effect is that it is simply a failure in the collective memory. Our brains are very easily influenced by our own filters, as well as the perception of others. Many common instances of the Mandela Effect are trivial and maybe just went unnoticed in the past, or are the result of conclusions that our brains jump to based on the context of an image or video. But some are substantial, like an entire country hundreds of miles out of place.
One of the more intriguing theories that attempt to explain this phenomenon points a finger at CERN and the large hadron collider in Switzerland. CERN’s experiments are intended to find elusive particles that could potentially show evidence of a multiverse, create tiny black holes, or discover dark matter. While all of this sounds very exciting, it also sounds potentially dangerous. What could possibly go wrong if we opened up a black hole in Europe, or tapped into another dimension with consequences unknown? While the scientists at CERN assure us their experiments are conducted on such a controlled, small scale as to have little, if any, negative consequences, some believe that their meddling in quantum fields has led to some strange effects, resulting in some kind of interdimensional entanglement.
One of the quantum particles that CERN has been searching for is the graviton. These elusive particles correspond with how gravity would react between different dimensions and are still only hypothetical, but the way CERN describes them is intriguing.
“If gravitons exist, it should be possible to create them at the LHC, but they would rapidly disappear into extra dimensions. Collisions in particle accelerators always create balanced events – just like fireworks – with particles flying out in all directions. A graviton might escape our detectors, leaving an empty zone that we notice as an imbalance in momentum and energy in the event. We would need to carefully study the properties of the missing object to work out whether it is a graviton escaping to another dimension or something else.”
Is CERN inducing these gravitons, creating holes to other dimensions, and swapping idiosyncrasies in our world? Or are we just having a collective memory lapse?
