The Hum strikes again

All over the world there are more and more reports of a strange phenomenon known as "the hum". I would simply dismiss it, but I myself have heard it just a few days ago.

I only heard it once and thought it was a ceiling fan left on, but after checking, all ceiling fans had been turned off and so were the computers in the house and anything with a fan. Upon further investigation (this happened late at night) it turned out that the noise was coming from the outside. Since there was nothing more I could do, I decided to simply go back to sleep. I wish it were The Sportsman’s Quartet or Trent Reznor, but it was not. Here’s a report from The Telegraph:

Residents of Woodland, in County Durham, claim that every night a noise permeates the air similar to the throb of a car engine. It is sometimes so strong that it even shakes the bed of one of the householders. (..) is constant from midnight until 4am every night and stops them sleeping. There are no pylons, factories or abandoned mines nearby. The noise started about two months ago and has been plaguing the isolated village every day since. Marylin Grech, 57, a retired store detective, said:

"In certain areas of the house you can hear it more loudly. It is definitely from outside, it's in the air, all around, very faint. It vibrates through the house. We've turned all the electricity off in the house and we can still hear it, so it's not that. Sometimes we'll be in bed and it vibrates right through our bed, like a throbbing. It's not tinnitus, that's a high pitched sound and this is very low. If I put my fingers in my ears it stops, so I know it's not in my head. At 4am it's so clear, because we live in such an isolated place with no traffic, it's heaven. But it leaves a buzzing in your head for the rest of the day."

John Dawes attributes this widespread effect to ageing and gravitational waves:

The results of experiments carried out over the past year have confirm that the Hum is caused by gravitational waves. These waves are generated by the high voltage electrical grid supply interacting with the charged particles of the Earth's ionosphere.
The interaction takes place at a height of about 250 miles which allows the waves to cover a very large area. Reports obtained from Hum sufferers show the effects must reach a distance of at least 50 miles from the pylons, and probably much further. No increase in Hum level has been observed in close proximity to the pylons and on any given day, the Hum intensity is the same over 100's of square miles. (..)

It must be clearly understood that the Hum is NOT a noise in the normal sense of the word, it is a perceived sound generated inside the head of the sufferer. Only a small percentage of people can actually "hear" the Hum but the cause undoubtedly effects the population at large
Most sufferers start to hear the Hum at about the age of 50 with a two thirds majority of women. This is clearly the result of changes taking place in the body for the presence of the Hum has been established on a national scale for some forty years.

Academia has also looked into this phenomenon:

On 15 November 2006, Dr. Tom Moir of the Massey University in Auckland, New Zealand made a recording of the Auckland Hum and has published it on the university's website. The captured hum's power spectral density peaks at a frequency of 56 hertz. In 2009, the head of audiology at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge, Dr. David Baguley said that he believed people's problems with hum were based on the physical world about one-third of the time and the other two-thirds stemmed from people focusing too keenly on innocuous background sounds.

Some famous sightings hearings: Taos, New Mexico (1, 2, 3), conspiracy, Auckland, NZ.

It seems like reporting on strange phenomena is more and more a sign of courage. It’s as if something does not exist is we don’t have a rational, full explanation for it. This is precisely why you’ll find it here.

The “mind control” hypothesis seems rather unlikely to me. If there is a government experiment, it is more along the lines of previous Milgram and Zimbardo (@Google, RSA) experiments, trying to see how likely are people to believe verifiable but inexplicable phenomena and how quickly conspiracy memes can spread. It’s more like Asch, if you ask me..

Sources / More info: telegraph, wiki-hum, dawes-hum, auckland-hum, wiki-tinnitus

Cracanel, hum, unexplained, strange, phenomenon, phenomena, fenomena, peculiar, science, fail (Tags)