The Hum: Mass Delusion Or Targeted Torture? Scientists Explain

The Hum’s cause has been attributed to an array of sources, from the US military to fracking, but what is the most likely cause, according to scientists? The Policy Mic has provided scientists’ updated answers, minus the Hum’s subsequent “pseudoscientific insanity.’

Abnormal noise prompts Canadian scientist to research

Dr. Glen MacPherson says the first time he heard the sound might have been at the beginning of 2012, but he’d unsure when the dull, steady droning like a diesel engine idling down the street from his house in the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia began. 

A University of British Columbia lecturer and high school teacher of physics, mathematics and biology, MacPherson says months passed before MacPherson realized that the noise that he’d previously dismissed as background nuisance, like car traffic or an airplane passing overhead, was something abnormal.

“Once I realized that this wasn’t simply the ambient noise of living in my little corner of the world, I went through the typical stages and steps to try to isolate the sources,” MacPherson told Mic. “I assumed it may be an electrical problem, so I shut off the mains to the entire house. It got louder. I went driving around my neighborhood looking for the source, and I noticed it was louder at night.”

Mic says, “Exasperated, MacPherson turned his focus to scientific literature and pored over reports of the mysterious noise before coming across an article by University of Oklahoma geophysicist David Deming in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, a peer-reviewed academic journal devoted to exploring topics outside of mainstream science. 

“I almost dropped my laptop,” says MacPherson. “I was sure that I was hearing the Hum,” MacPherson said.

The Hum Defined

“The Hum” refers to a mysterious sound heard in places around the world by a small fraction of a local population,” according to the Mic. “It’s characterized by a persistent and invasive low-frequency rumbling or droning noise often accompanied by vibrations. While reports of ‘unidentified humming sounds’ pop up in scientific literature dating back to the 1830s, modern manifestations of the contemporary hum have been widely reported by national media in the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia since the early 1970s. 

Regional experiences of the phenomenon vary. The Hum is often prefixed with the region where the problem centers, such as the “Windsor Hum” in Ontario, Canada, the “Taos Hum” in New Mexico, or the “Auckland Hum” for Auckland, New Zealand. 

“Somewhere between 2 and 10% of people can hear the Hum, and inside isolation is no escape. Most sufferers find the noise to be more disturbing indoors and at night. Much to their dismay, the source of the mysterious humming is virtually untraceable,” the Mic reports.

Mass delusion?

While the uneven experience of the Hum in local populations has led some researchers to dismiss it as a “mass delusion,” the nuisance and pain associated with the phenomenon make delusion a dissatisfying hypothesis. Intrigued, MacPherson launched The World Hum Map and Databasein December 2012 to collect testimonies of other Hum sufferers and track its global impact. He now moderates a decade-old Yahoo forum along with Deming.

MacPherson quickly discovered that the strange rumbling was actually having pernicious effects on hundreds of people, from headaches to irritability to sleep deprivation. Weeks of insomnia caused by the Bristol Hum drove at least three U.K. residents to suicide. 

“It completely drains energy, causing stress and loss of sleep,” a sufferer told a British newspaper in 1992. “I have been on tranquilizers and have lost count of the number of nights I have spent holding my head in my hands, crying and crying.” Thousands of people around the world have shared similar experiences of the Hum; some, like MacPherson, are devoting their time to finally uncovering its source.

Photo Above: Self-reported experiences of the Hum, recorded as part of The World Hum Map and Database by Glen MacPhearson, British Columbia.
 

Tom Moir, an Auckland University of Technology aprofessor and Hum investigator, began resaerching the Hum after an Auckland resident called Moir’s office at Massey University in 2002. Moir, a professor of control engineering, placed an ad in the local paper after ra visit from a Hum sufferer desperately wanting to know the source of the racket. 

Within days, Moir was inundated with responses, all describing a mysterious droning noise matching that described in Deming’s landmark paper. Auckland’s northern shore residents claimed the Hum was so intense, it was preventing their sleep or concentration.

“When it’s loud, it’s like there’s vibrations between your ears, that your brain is vibrating,” one resident told local TV in 2011. 

The noise had been so disruptive to one resident’s life,t he’d deafened himself in one ear with a chainsaw so he could sleep through the night. Many lived in ”vibroacoustic agony”, unsure if what they were hearing was real or not.

“For my entire life, I was a perfect sleeper,” says Steve Kohlhase, 60, who began experiencing the Hum at night in his Brookfield, Connecticut home in September 2009. A mechanical engineer in the chemical industry, Kohlhase, like so many other Hum sufferers, has devoted his free time to searching for the source of the noise. “I immediately felt the effects in my head: It feels like your fingers are in your ears.

Others experience other related phenomena: Sometimes house floorboard vibrate, or people feel it in their feet and in their bedsprings. Many are finding their ears are ringing.”

Above: “The Torment of the Hum” by Rosemarie Mann (2004).

So what’s behind the Hum? 

“After nearly four decades, Hum investigators may finally have some idea,” Mic says. “The general consensus among sufferers is that the Hum is comprised of very low frequency (or ‘VLF’, in the range of 3 kHz to 30 kHz and wavelengths from 10 to 100 kilometers) or extremely low frequency (or ‘ELF’, in the range of 3 to 30 Hz, and corresponding wavelengths from 100,000 to 10,000 kilometers) radio waves.”

Those radio waves can penetrate buildings and travel over tremendous distances, according to the scientists.

Both ELF and VLF waves have potentially adverse affects on the human body.

While the common refrain about ELF radiation in popular culture normally involves your cell phone giving you cancer, research by the World Health Organization and the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers shows external ELF magnetic fields can induce currents in the body which, at very high field strengths, cause nerve and muscle stimulation and changes in nerve cell excitability in the central nervous system. VLF waves, like other low-frequency electromagnetic radiation can also have a direct impact on biological functions

Finally, a body of empirical evidence exists that makes this theory more appealing, the Mic reports.

Research funded by the Canadian government and led by University of Windsor mechanical engineering professor Dr. Colin Novak spent last year listening to the “Windsor Hum” torturing residents in Windsor, Ontario area since 2011. A previous study had confirmed the low frequency noise in the vicinity of Zug Island, a highly industrialized island on Michigan’s side of the Detroit River.

“The researchers used specialized equipment to capture and develop a sonic “fingerprint” of the mysterious sound,” the Mic reports. “The study concluded that not only does the Windsor Hum actually exist, but its likely source was a blast furnace at the U.S. Steel plant on Zug Island, which reportedly generates a high volume of VLF waves during its hours of operation.

“It sounds like a large truck or a train locomotive is parked outside your house, buzzing away, causing the windows to shake,” Novak, himself a Hum sufferer, told Canada’s CTV News. “It can be quite uncomfortable at times.”

“I have been on tranquilizers and have lost count of the number of nights I have spent holding my head in my hands, crying and crying.”

Dr. Novak’s study caps decades of Hum theories, but given inconsistent experiences of the phenomenon around the world, cataloguers of the Hum remain unsure that it has a single, definitive source.

While ELF and VLF waves might cause people to experience the hum’s agaony, not every local Hum appears to have an easily traceable source.

US Military’s global TACAMO

“What about Aukland and Taos Hums?” asks the Mic. “And why does the Hum seem to appear and disappear for months at a time?” Some Hum investigators suspect a global source for the Hum worldwide – namely the US military.

Deming’s research, considered close to authoritative in the Hum community, suggests evidence of the Hum corresponds to an accidental, biological consequence of the “Take Charge and Move Out” (TACAMO) system adopted by the US Navy in the 1960s for military leaders to maintain communications with ballistic missile submarines, land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, and long-range bombers during a nuclear war. 

For TACAMO, military aircraft use VLF radio waves to send instructions to submarines: Due to their large wavelengths, VLF can diffract around large obstacles like mountains and buildings, propagate around the globe using the Earth’s ionosphere and penetrate seawater to a depth of almost 40 meters, making them ideal for one-way communication with subs. And VLF, like other low-frequency electromagnetic waves, have been shown to have a direct impact on biological functions. (Strategic Communications Wing One at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma, which is responsible for the manning, training and equipping of aircraft utilized as part of the TACAMO system, did not respond to requests for comment.)

There are other theories. While Moir agrees with MacPherson that the disturbance is occurring at a very low frequency, he’s convinced that the Auckland Hum source is primarily acoustic, not electromagnetic, partially because he claims his research team captured a recording of the Hum.

Listen: An alleged recording of the Auckland Hum by Prof. Tom Moir. Plug in your headphones or increase the volume of your speaker system to maximum to hear.

Listen: A simulation of the Auckland Hum created by a research team lead by Prof. Tom Moir. 

“It’s a very, very low wavelength noise, perhaps between 50 or 56 Hz,” Moir told Mic. “And it’s extremely difficult to stop infrasound because it can have a wavelength of up to 10 meters, and you’d need around 2.5 meter thick walls, built with normal materials, to keep it out. It gets into our wooden houses very easily. And part of the reason people have so much trouble identifying the source of it is because of how low frequency the Hum is: It literally moves right through your head before you can figure out which ear picked it up first.”

An electromagnetic explanation is not impossible, as there could be both electromagnetic or acoustic sources that complement each other. “The real difficulty is separating the two hypotheses through testing,” says the Mic.

“There haven’t been tests done were you subject people to these frequencies and put them in an anechoic chamber,” says Moir, referring to rooms designed to completely absorb reflections of either sound or electromagnetic waves. “But until you can actually prove that by doing tests, there’s no way to firmly come to that conclusion.”

For Steve Kohlhase, the mechanical engineer hunting the Hum in Connecticut, the answer cannot come soon enough. Kohlhase, like Dr. Novak and researchers who traced the Windsor Hum to Zug Island, hypothesizes the Connecticut Hum source is industrial rather than military, generated by a network of nearby high volume gas pipelines. The Hum’s arrival, Kohlhase argues, coincided with increased development of natural gas pipelines in northern Fairfield County, andincreased hydraulic pressure used by the Iroquois and Algonquin interstate pipelines that run through his corner of Connecticut could result in the non-directional, extremely low frequency (ELF) humming noise previously unheard in the region.

This a pressing public health issue. It is not just some casual annoyance, claims Kohlhase. The resulting infrasonic sounds blanketing the region could result in widespread vibroacoustic disease — an occupational disease occurring from long-term exposure to large pressure amplitude and low frequency noise — the symptoms of which include those often described by Hum suffers: depression, mood swings, insomnia and other stress-induced pathologies.

The Hum may transition from unexplained mystery to unfortunate byproduct of modernity, a fixture of human geography like light pollution.

State and local governments may finally be paying attention. Worried about the potential behavioral effects of the Connecticut Hum, Kohlhase dispatched concerned emails to state and local health officials laying out his research. Kohlhase was so persistent that he contacted Connecticut State Police investigators almost six weeks after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, insisting that the Hum allegedly produced by nearby gas pipelines could have had something to do with Adam Lanza’s behavior leading up to the shooting. While law enforcement officials field a flood of calls from conspiracy theorists and pranksters following any major incident, investigatorsdeemed the information Kohlhase provided “appropriate” for inclusion in the 7,000 images, audio files, videos and documents released to the public.

“The reason that it could’ve affected Lanza is that sound and vibrations can have extremely subtle, detrimental affects on someone who’s fragile minded,” explains Kohlhase. “Imagine if you’re mentally ill or have a brain tumor or are just, well, fragile of mind. I am absolutely not an expert, but if sound sensitivity is such a serious issue to those on the autism spectrum, perhaps extremely low frequency sounds can result in a pernicious effect.” Kohlhase points to Aaron Alexis, the defense subcontractor who battled mental health issues and scrawled “My ELF Weapon“ into the stock of his shotgun before killing 12 people at the Washington Navy Yard in 2013. “He told his psychiatrist he’d been chased by vibrations. Look at a map of instances like this, in Washington, or the Gabby Giffords shooting in Arizona, and I bet you’ll see that each place coincides with a Hum cluster.”

Here is the fundamental problem facing Hum sufferers around the world: believability. Scientific data and anecdotal experiences of the Hum vary so much from region the world that it’s still unclear whether VLF and ELF waves are the source of it, let alone a catalyst for mass murder. The idea of a mysterious noise driving people to suicide has given birth to all kinds of pseudoscientific conjecture, making the phenomenon a favorite for conspiracy junkies who suspect foul play by some malicious government scheme (or UFOs, obviously). The World Hum, a site devoted to exploring the “mysterious phenomenon being heard by thousands around the world,” is riddled with byzantine entries about UFOs crashing in Siberia.

MacPherson knows how insane it sounds. “There’s a terrible irony to the vision of a conspiracy nut in a tinfoil hat, trying to keep the government from beaming thoughts into their heads,” laughs MacPhearson, “since aluminum does protect against some electromagnetic radiation. This is why you don’t put that stuff in the microwave.” 

The federally funded investigation into the Windsor Hum and the serious examination of Kohlhase’s research by Connecticut authorities may serve as a beacon of hope for Hum investigators like MacPherson, Moir, Novak and Kohlhase. State-funded tests on Hum-affected regions may yield data that could lead to a real-world solution, rather than conspiracy theories. Until then, developing a unified picture of the Hum is exactly what MacPherson wants to accomplish in British Columbia. By providing one destination for Hum data and testimony, he’s hoping that professional and independent researchers will use the collected data to help develop and execute experiments that could help identify the source of their local Hum.

Until someone, however, funds and conducts rigorous tests in an affected region, says Moir, people will continue using the Hum as an excuse to blame modern technology, from mobile phones to telecom towers to the digital radio bands used by law enforcement. And that aura of pseudoscientific insanity surrounding the Hum has made the job of independent researchers more challenging. “In the past, I’ve contacted my representatives, I’ve contacted my governor,” says Kohlhase. “There’s willful ignorance going on about this problem and the real consequences it has.” 

Should researchers like MacPherson and Moir finally pinpoint the local sources of the pain-inducing phenomenon, the Hum might “transition from unexplained mystery to unfortunate byproduct of modernity, a fixture of human geography like light pollution,” says the Mic, adding that in the meantime, “many just want to identify some relief.”

“A lot of serious researchers don’t want to have their name attached to that, but I’m not a formal academic researcher, and I’m quite willing to lend some credibility to this idea if I can,” says MacPherson. “This phenomenon is real and many people are suffering: I’m just trying to do the best I can to help.”

Source: PolicyMic.vom