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comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  3293 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Hum

So...

The "scientific paper" linked is published by "a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal of fringe science". I grew up with the "Taos Hum" and to no one's surprise, it was mostly blamed on Los Alamos National Labs at the time.

The interesting thing about "the hum" is that no one has bothered to do any actual research on it. What frequency is it? "well it sounds like this, except when it sounds like this." How loud is it? "Unbearably loud." Where do you hear it? "Everywhere." Quantifiable data it ain't.

And quantifiable data, particularly with sound, is easy to get. Quantifiable data with infrasound not so much. Which mostly means the people capable of doing the research aren't. Want a few qualified guesses?

1) Did you know that there's a Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Hawthorne, NV? Know why? 'cuz infrasound is fuckin' freaky. Through a bizarre combination of geologic resonance and the deep sound channel, the places to listen to, say, nuclear submarines isn't necessarily near nuclear submarines. I am way out of my depth when predicting that there are sympathetic nodes between Hawthorne, NV and say, the Grand Banks. But if you told me there was a node between Hawthorne, NV and the Grand Banks I'd believe it. Granted - there are a lot of ammo depots out in Hawthorne and it's entirely possible they're just storing torpedoes out there. But there are aspects of infrasound and sonar that are not well-studied in the public sphere.

2) In 2002, when I diagnosed a "ghost" from an infrasound hum in an office building, there was one scientific journal describing how creepy and unpleasant infrasound is. Then I posted it on Reddit in 2008. Now there's a goddamn Cracked article.

3) Harmonics are a bitch. You may not be able to hear 5 Hz, but it's probably rattling something at 40Hz somewhere, and you can sure hear that (and hate the 5Hz at the same time). You can even do cool shit like point ultrasound at a surface and hear the harmonics.

Long story short? The navy does weird shit with sound. It wouldn't surprise me at all if it were audible somewhere you wouldn't predict. After all, the Roswell "UFO" was an acoustic listening device for monitoring Soviet nuclear tests and they didn't declassify that shit until the '90s.





mk  ·  3293 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Yeah, I have no clue about the scientific validity of the hum. I just stumbled upon it last night.

Since it is most often heard indoors, I agree it often probably has something to do with resonance and harmonics of the resonance frequency. There's likely a number of scenarios that can lead to a similar effect.