Thinking Sideways: The Hum

I guess probably. Well, so we're gonna tackle the hum, which is yeah, so into the theories now. So the hum is another apparently I'm on the like unexplained sounds bandwagon right now. I've been doing them a lot lately. I'm super are. Yeah right now. It was like it was something else for a while, mysterious middle aged men dying. Yeah, yeah, going to another phase. Sorry, so sorry everyone, I'm sorry

this isn't boring. So the hum is an unexplained noise that involves widespread reports of persistent and invasive low humming, low frequency humming, rumbling, or like a droning kind of noise that makes sense like an airplane, right, make kind of Yeah, it's it's often described as like an idoling truck, like a eighteen wheeler truck idling. I don't know, I've never heard it. I was like, you've never heard an

eighteen wheeler. Where have you been living forever? If you still heard a wheeler jake breaks, you could hear from a mile away. Yeah, man. Hums have been widely reported by lots of national media, particularly in the UK and the United States. So it's mainly English speaking people, Mainly speaking people. Yeah, I don't think that's true that here the hum, but I think it is true that that's where it's both. Let's be honest. The UK in the

United States are pretty good at reporting stupid stuff. It's probably over Africa and they're probably just busy trying to like, you know, stay alive. You know, they hear it, but they just got better things to do than talk about

the hum. Yeah. So it's often you'll hear it referred to with the like the location affixed to the front of it, so like the Bristol home, the Taos hume, and it can be really disturbing and apparently in the UK it's directly attributed to at least three suicides, which is, which is weird. It seems like a strange reason to kill yourself. Well, I think you know stuff going on as far as as anybody can tell. It's just it's persistent, like people can't sleep through it. People, you know, it's

just there. It's just hearing this hume like over and over again. It's almos like that Chinese water torture right with the drips, except for it's a sound in your head. I can understand how that would be obnoxious, would get old, yeah, really old, really fast. Yes. So, as I said, the home is kind of like a truck engine idling outside of some outside of someone's house. But often it's it's people hear it more inside than outside. Like if they're

hearing it inside and they go outside, it's not as prevalent. Wait. So if if I'm hearing what I attribute to be a hum and I'm sitting in my house, you go outside to explore, right, But it's less it's less loud, it's more quiet. Okay, And do do they know why that is? I mean, well, I'm just I'm just thinking here. Okay. Well, if I'm inside and I don't have the TV on or anything like that, there's not as much background noise.

So I just wonder if background noise outside the wind and the trees and you know, dogs and cats and whatever it might be, if all of that kind of makes it harder for people to pinpoint maybe. I mean, it's it's generally accepted that it's not a noise that's just coming from inside of like a bunch of different individual houses. It's accepted that you know, if it is

something right, that it's something outside. And so if you hear a noise outside that you here very loudly in your house and you walk outside out the doors and you know, the walls and the insulation and things like that, even if there's more background noise, it's going to be louder because you're closer to whatever is making the noise.

Does that make sense? It does, And I guess I can follow that if it's coming from if it's a noise with the source outside of the earth, to say, if you're inside your house, if you say this was due to high frequency vibration of the earth itself and the ground there, then if you're inside your house, it's kind of like being in an echo chamber. It stands to reason it would be louder inside if it's from

that source versus outside. The difference between shooting it gun off inside your house and outside your us it's a lot louder inside. Sure, Yeah, that's the hum is also louder at night than it is that day in day. And it does appear to be geographically focused a little bit, as in people kind of you can move away from it. That makes sense. You can hear it and then getting your car and dry. It's a small range, yeah, and that it's it's actually focused someplace that it's actually actually

has a source of some kind. So if any of these any of these people, these sufferers, the hearers, have any of them actually just taking the trouble to just try to localize it, walk towards the source of the noise, yeah, and often people can't. One of the things that is kind of emerging in this there's this kind of big data collection effort that's happening. That's a worldwide HUM data collection. It's like a Google doc. Well huge, huge, anybody who

suffers from it. Anytime you have an instance, you go in and you plug in just a massive amount of information about like where you heard it, if you heard it. More on your left or right, and by and large people say they hear it on their left more. And you know, you can only follow your left for so long before you know, you try and localize it, and it's just you know, I don't I don't know. Maddening. I think it's the word. Yeah, maddening. I think is

definitely the word. Yeah. People can actually get away from it, but they can't go towards it, I guess. Yeah. In one of the weird mysteries of the hum, I'm trying to pack up and move. I guess. Also, only about two percent of people living in an area that's HUM prone they call it a homb prone area can hear it. Most of them are from ages fifty to seventy, which is kind of weird. Uh it was. That's that's a statistic from a study that was done in two thousand

thirteen by an acoustical consultant who lives in Surrey. So that's weird a little bit, right, Yeah, it's not weird, Okay.

So I'm just gonna do a little bit of a list of places then and where the HUM has been reported, So in London and Southampton in the nineteen forties, Bristol England in nineteen seventy nine, Large Scotland in the nineteen eighties, Taos, New Mexico in nine, Cocomo, Indiana in n Vancouver, BC pre two thousand three, Calgary, Alberta in two thousand eight, Winter, Ontario in two thousand nine, Woodland Country Durham in England in two thousand and eleven, County Kerry in Ireland in

two thousand twelve, Seattle, Washington two thousand twelve, Wellington, New Zealand in two thousand twelve, the Italian National Research Council in Pizza, Italy in two thirteen, in Guadalajara in two thousand thirteen, and Kalima in two thousand thirteen. So it seems to be getting more prevalent a little bit too, right. I don't know if it's more prevalent or just people know that there's a way to complain about it. Yeah, they've heard about it now. So now, did it just

like Santaos? I thought that was an ongoing phenomenon? Did it just it is? I think that was the first began. Yeah, I said, I already mentioned that there's an age kind of range, kind of an age range for this. There's also apparently only one third of the sufferers are male to two thirds female, which is a little interesting as well, I feel, and there's a very defined age curve that people under the age of forty tend to like not

here at all. Well, I could, I could almost I could almost see some easy answers to those those numbers. So the only one third of the here's are men, correct, And it's also people under forty five tend not to hear it. Well, that seems pretty easy to me because people who were above forty five are from the era when we didn't use a lot of safety precautions. So I'm talking large machinery all day long, and that was

typically run by men. Okay, so riddle me this. Then of males to females, so well, riddle me this, batman. Many of the HUM sufferers are either partially or mostly deaf. Partially are totally deaf, So there's not a good explanation

for that. There's just not Okay, well, there might be, actually, But I do agree though, that it's not surprising that people in the older age group would be would be more likely to have already sustained some sort of damage to their ears that could cause something like this to happen,

it would make sense to me. I also mentioned the left side more than the right side, and apparently some people who are affected by the hum, not all, but some can get relief from actually physically closing off their left ear, putting their hand over their ear, basically sleep. Maybe I don't know. I don't know. Maybe it seems to be the physical act of putting the hand over

the ear, but I could be it may just be. Yeah, it turns out if I put my Beats by Dr Dre on my head, I don't hear the home because I don't hear anything. This episode of Thinking Sideways brought to you by Beats. You are there any known recordings of this kind of um. There's a lot of YouTube videos of hums or humlike phenomena, which is interesting and I think is actually a fairly solid argument against some of the theories we're going to talk about. But it's

hard to tell. I mean, you know, it's so easy to edit a video, especially there are a lot that I've watched and been like, well, that's like just out a garage band, Like I know that effect really well, you know, But there are there are others that I've

listened to that. I'm like, I've heard a lot of them where I was, okay, well, I want to hear this the sky wherever finds it, and you can tell that they have just gone in and crank the volume, because if you've ever listened to an audio track when it peeks out and it's just hitting the top and the wind is really loud, and then things just start keep hitting that upper range and getting caught off by the audio program, that's what I wonder. How much these

things are doctored to make it quote unquote hearable. Yeah, yeah, I think that's definitely true. But I think that there are a couple and I will make my best effort to find them so that we can include them before you know, often they get taken down or whatever. I'll try my best to find some good ones so that we can put them on the website, because I think there are a few out there at least that are really compelling and interesting. So is this um? Is it

something some mysterious creature humming a tune? Maybe just chuper cobra to keep the cobra. Finally we figured it out, So do you want to talk about she didn't buy that at all. How enthusiastic we solve the mystery, we can start drinking beer now, Oh, you're right, I do. Okay. I want to talk about two specific places because they've

done they've actually done research on both of them. So first we're going to talk about Bristol, England, which was one of the first places, as uh you may recall on that list that I rapidly read off where the hum was reported about eight hundred people in this coastal city, which is Bristol, right reported having heard a steady like thrumming sound. I guess almost thrumbing. That's a good word, right, which authorities kind of blamed on vehicular traffic and local

factories working twenty four hour shifts, which is I guess fair. Now, these people that hear this, they hear it all the time. It did not intermittently. They hear it more at night

than during the day. But I guess that seems fairly mundane if it is indeed a factory or something, because there's more outside noise kind of interfering with that right during the day when you're trying to lay down to go to sleep, harder to Yeah, that would be acous, but but it never for these these people, they reported it never stopped. It just kept going seven. Yeah, that's that's correct. So they did some studies and the audiologist I was talking about earlier conducted these studies in two

thousand three. The hum frequency was at thirty six hurts. And funny side note, before we start talking about thirty six hurts, they were instructed on how to construct aluminum helmets to be placed over their head when the home was happening. You're kidding. They taught them how to make tinfoil hat yep, yep, because they thought they would help you are making this off. How do they work? Well? I don't know. There were no reports. Wow that guy fleeced. Yeah,

totally custom made hats. While you wait, we'll me two. Let's talk about hurts frequencies a little bit. We're just gonna we're gonna talk about them when we talk about taus in a minute too. But hurts are kind of a weird, a morphous thing right now, not a lot of us kind of know what they sound like or anything. So the hum has been recorded at you know, kind of like from the twenty six to maybe like I

don't know, fifty six hurts or something like that. So just to give you a little bit of reference, here's what twenty hurts would sound like. Well, and one quick thing I'd like to say to everybody, as we've discovered, when you're listening to this, depending on the system that you're using, you might or might not hear this. Some computer laptops especially don't seem to have the speaker capacity

to produce the sounds. So if you're listening to that, you might want to take a second and get some headphones. But let's go ahead and listen to twenty hurts. And here's what forty would sound like, and sixty and as Steve says, eighties heinous. So we're not even gonna go um, the Bristol hume is, as we said, the thirties six, which is pretty dang close to forty hurts. Yeah, yeah, so that's kind of what that sounded like. Put your

aluminum hats on everything. Uh. In Taos, the you know, the hume kind of started being reported in residents complained of a low level rumbling noise is what they called it. I think it may just be a little bit of semantics, right, thrumming and rumbling, probably about one's way more cool and British sounds like it's from New Mexico. So a team of researchers decided, hey, research, let's go research. Their researchers from Los Alamos National Laboratory, the University of New Mexico

and Sandina National Laboratories, and apparently other regional experts. They were unable to identify the source of the sound, but they were able to identify the range of the sound, which was forty eight to seventy two. Hurts, that seems really loud. That's really reported. That's wavelength. That's not that's that's not free. That's not like amplitude, right, but it just seems like really painful to listen to. Yeah, I'm not sure what that well, let's find out what's here.

It is. Yeah, that's just that's just like it's just like wavelength, you know, so higher pitch sounds have a shorter wavelength, lower pitch lets have a longer wavelength. It's kind of like light. I mean, blue has got a shorter wavelength than red has. But that doesn't mean it blue is gonna like, you know, hurt your eyes more. That all just that all depends on how bright the blue light that shining in your eyes is so it can be damn So you know what I'm saying, Yeah,

same thing would sound. That's fair just for listener reference of seventy two hurts hurts a lot, according to Steve. One other one I'd like to mention is the Auckland hum which is Auckland, New Zealand, and a doctor Tom Moyer of the Massi University in Auckland recorded it, which is awesome. We'll put a link to that on the website if we can find it. And apparently it's spectral density peaked at a frequency of fifties six hurts. All right,

So that's that's what we know about the hub. Yeah, okay, a lot of great, super awesome information. Yeah, it's it's it's I know, we just listen to them. It's a lot of numbers that it's a lot of ranges, and it's so it's hard to and this is I'm gonna say this, I said this before, but it's just it's hard for me to imagine what that's like with background noise. I mean, listening to it on so and pure I

would drive me bonkers very quickly. But with so much background noise it's just hard for me to kind of think what that would be like. Then again, I live near a kind of a big road, so I randomly hear truck to Jake breaking, I think, is the one example you made. I hear that, and I don't even really pay attention to it, just because I tune it out naturally. So yeah, this, to me, this is something I would just naturally tune or like the light rail

or like the train or like that. You know, when you live near things like that, you just tune them out. But for whatever reason, this seems to impact people differently than just like a mundane whatever sound going past one, probably because it goes on all the time, you know, I would think that you would just get used to it stuff hearing it. So one of the we're going to jump into the theories, and one of the theories

is Tonitus. And I want to say a little caveat about all of these theories first, but I would say that it's a lot like Tonitus, and that like if you have tonightas you hear it all the time, you don't actually get used to it, and it can become more or less annoying, of course, depending on your kind of moods and things like that. You never get used to it, you never tune it out. It's always there, Tonitas.

You tune tonitas, you turned it out if you've got other things going on, But when you're laying asleep at in bed. I mean, I'm evidently better tuning things. Apparently you are. I can't do it at all. So the caveat that I do want to say is that most researchers who are actively investigating the home express kind of utter confidence that the hum is is a real thing. It's not like a like a psychological disord order, it's

not something that's just like happening in people's heads. And it's not a hoax, which is you know, those are kind of three things that people bring up. They say, well, it's just something wrong with these people, or they're just lying or whatever. The most researchers say, no, we do believe this is actually happening. It's real, and it's something external not internal. Fair. All right, I want to jump into some fun theories first before we say things like

it's tonitus. Is that cool with you guys? All right? My first favorite theory is that it's a leftover gift from Nikola Tesla. Yeah, that it's um a result of a low frequency electromagnetic radiation that is audible only to some people, right, and that they're apparently verified cases that individuals who there is a certain percentage of the population that is extra sensitive to hearing noises like this, which would be I think about two which the population that

can hear homes. But radiation is not annoyed, not noise though, it's that's like radiation, like electromagnetic radiation, yeah, which is like apparently radio waves, all that stuff, all that stuff is on the electromagnetic spect Apparently some people can actually translate radiation in the noises. Yeah, apparent also get the

local radio station on the filling us. I mean, you know, it's it's a range that's outside of normal human hearing to be sure, But apparently there's a certain percentage of the population who can actually hear these things people talk about.

But you can't hear like radio waves. I mean what I could see where maybe your brain somehow receives them and translates them into what perceived sound your brain or something, but they're not actually hearing anything, right, the brain thinks they're hearing something, right, Well, it's translating into that's what your brain does. That translates what the earbones are, which would help to ex lane why deaf people can hear them right, That it's not actually a sound, that it's

a wave that hits people in a certain way. Now explain to me again this people who are deaf are reporting it, or is it people who are hard of hearing? Okay, because what I think of is for people who can't hear, they're much more sensitive to pressure. If you've ever ever been to an event, I don't know if you guys have ever done this. I did it once and it was a dance for a local organization that was a deaf organization, and the music was blaringly loud, and they

had the base cranked up. And if you've ever been near a speaker when the base is thumping and you can you can feel that pressure wave. And and that's why I question if it's really a sound if they're reporting it, because the way that they know to interpret these loud noises are these things like this says they know it's kind of a pressure wave. It's just kind of a learning response that I tell you, that's what

it is. So now you Okay, I get it. So that's why I questioned that because it seems more of a pressure issue than a sound issue. It maybe Joe, you had a theory about elf actually is it one of the ones with a little green point else a little with the elves? Well, some people I did. This

is not a theory I came up with. Some people have speculated that it might be extremely low frequency radio waves that aren't kind of similar to this testa thing, and the US actually has in the Soviets had I think still have these things that these transmitters in the Midwest. Actually they were like miss Wisconsin and Michigan and they were actually disbanded in two thousand four, but they were

used for communicating with submarines. And that's extremely low frequency radio waves compenetrate seawater much better than high frequency ones. Are just very low frequency ones because these wavelengths are so huge. I mean we're talking enormous wavelengths, like you know, miles long. That means that essentially you can be very simple messages like a little too before letter code to a submarine and they received them at a rate of

about maybe two characters a minute. That's how long these radio waves are and then that's just kind of a doorbell kind of thing, you know, that's bringing the bell. They come up to the shallowers shallower depth where they can receive radio transmissions and get instructions from home. So we had and the people have been hypothesized, and there's been some of the conspiracy theories. There was even an episode of The X Files it was done about the LF.

Did you ever watch the X Files? There was the episode where Molder and Scully were out in Nevada and they just happened upon that There's this guy who was like driving wildly across the state, kept driving ever ever, ever further westward because he had this thing in his head from from getting ELF waves, and the only way he could stop his head from exploding was to keep driving in high speed westward. And sort of I don't

know what what was gonna happened to him. I think I think I can't remember how how it all worked out. I think eventually you couldn't go any further in its head exploder or something like that. But that's anyway I said that. But at least for America, you know, we're not we're not broadcasting in the E. L F anymore and the Soviets, so they tell us, yeah, really now they've got better ways to do it now. But yeah, so to kind of piggyback on that, like America has

these weird things going on. Theory is HARP not the loan program? No, that's are not the musical instrument. No, not the musical instrument. The high frequency active ural research program that's up in active high frequency active auroral. Yeah, that's a hard word to say. It's up in Alaska. It's super technical. I'm not going to get into it.

There are a lot of acronyms. Basically, it's a really advanced piece of technology that is supposed to analyze the assan on honest sphere and investigate, um the potential for enhancing things like radio communication and surveillance. Show just looked really concerned, like I had not accurately portrayed what was going on. I mean, you know, it is most basic level.

It's super easy to google and like find a bunch of articles about the reason that people kind of talk about this maybe having to do with the HUM is because HARP is actually a really huge conspiracy theorist and actually we may do an episode on HARP I haven't totally decided yet. Well, it's not a conspiracy theorist. It's

a target for conspiracy theorists. Yeah, target for conspiracy theorists who say that it's capable of modifying weather, disabling satellites, and exerting mind control over people, and that it's being used as a weapon against terrorists. Well that's not such

a bad thing. Yeah, they're a lot of the people who are these conspiracy theorists against HARP say that things like earthquakes, drought, storms, and floods, disease diseases like Gulf War syndrome and chronic fatigue syndrome are attributed to HARP. They also say things like of the t w A flight eight hundred, the destruction of the Space Shuttle Columbia also attributed to HARP. It's a big old catch net for crazy. Yeah. This this seems like a my bank

account is empty. It's because of HARP. HARP. It's attributed for everything. Yeah, although to the credit of you know, putting it to this the hum right, it does do radio frequencies and it's a pretty big old thing up there, So I don't know it's high frequency though, which is what Joe kind of brought up high it's high frequency. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's kind of with the other end of the spectrum.

But you know, maybe people can actually some tiny minority of people can receive radio ways high frequency, although I don't know that it would necessarily translate to Well, again, I think it's it's what we were kind of alluding to. Earliers. You can't actually hear it. Your brain is doing the translation, but because it doesn't know what it is, it's a bad translation. So then it comes out into this weird range that people are reporting hearing, which seems to be

an issue if there's recordings of it. But yeah, there's that, there's that whole problem, silly recordings. Yeah, well we don't know if those recordings are real though, it's all a lie, another conspiracy theory. Okay, So, as we said earlier, some people were like, well, it's just timitus, which I think is the dumbest answer ever. Don't don't don't mask your feelings, just let it out. I'm trying so just to like

not show them at all. It's I mean, you guys know what tenitus is, right, It's that like ringing that you hear in your ears, ringing or a high pitch. I totally thought was totally normal. That's how I found out literally two years ago that not everybody has ringing in their ears all the time. You do, yeah, all the Yeah, I totally have. Tonightus, I have the same thing. Yeah, yeah,

I have. I get just an occasional spell. I'll just be sitting there and all of a sudden, it's almost seems like a little veil goes over my hearing, like the volume everything around me goes down, and that's just

a ringing. That's just old age. Okay, Yeah, that's been happening for percentially young age, happening since well, you've been an old person since you were born, apparently, so okay, yeah, no, I mean, so tonight's if you don't know what it is, I guess go look it up, because no, Tonight's is actually pretty basic. Yeah. What it is is how how

you're hearing works. Is that in I don't remember, it's cochlea, which is a kind of a spiral shaped vessel in your ear looks like a snail, looks like a snail, and it's full of fluid, and it's full of hairs, and as the fluid in their moves is moved by pressure of the sound. The hair has picked that up,

and your brain interprets that as noise. And so that's how we hear when you get really loud noises, things that damage you're hearing they think, this is the last time I read anything on it is They think that what happens is the pressure change in there in your in that organ or in that spiral is so violent

that it actually snaps those hairs or those filaments. And so what was you know, let's say this tall the length of my finger has now been chopped in half or a third of its length, So it's gonna vibrate much easier and more rapidly. And so it's sending these signals to your brain and saying, I hear noise, I hear noise, I hear noise. But it's it's so your brain is interpreting this, but it's not actually supposed to be that. And it's worth mentioned that it's not only

you can be born with it. It's not just sound damaged that typical frequently that it's sound damaged. Most you know, kind of baby boomers have it. Kind of a little bit of concerts, Yeah, and you know, a lot of people of my generation, which I'm not going to say which generation it is, have it because we listen to music rell out on our headphones. But yeah, I mean, you know, it's just you can be born with it, you can do it to yourself, and you can you

can lose hearing that way, you lose. Most people today don't have the same hearing range as people a hundred years ago because of cars, because of the frequency that cars put out noise all the time, because we're exposed to it constantly, it's just damaged and so we don't hear all of the noise that a car makes when it's on and driving because it's our ears are just shot that way. Yeah, so I think you know tonight's

I think it's very clearly. The problem. The problems with this as a theory is it doesn't explain why only people only hear it in certain geographic locations. You know, it wouldn't also explain the louder at night. Well, I think it makes sense to me, like my tonitus, for instance, is louder at night because there's less happening, there's less to distract me from it. I'm more aware of it. However, it doesn't explain why. It only like people age into it and out of it. Well, and I can't get

away from tonitus. I can't drop. Yeah, and it's not like, oh man, it's coming from a left ear, like oh, you know, like it's there. I know it's in my head. I'm not suffering any kind of delusions that like, wow, this is a weird noise coming from outside of my head. No, And I don't think that has ever been the case. Even when I was a child. I don't think I was ever like Wow, there's a weird ringing happening all around me. It was like, Wow, there's a weird ringing

happening in my ear. You know. I think people with tonight is kind of recognized, Wow, that's a weird happening in my ear. And I also it doesn't really go away If I cover my ear, that actually gets louder. Yeah, makes it worse. Yeah, Well, okay, you never wear ear muffs, So we're gonna say no to tenitis tis. There's a there's another theory out there that's not as prevalence, that it could be what's called tonsor timpanny muscle syndrome. What, Yeah,

I know, is there it seriously in your ear. There's a there's this little muscle called the timpanty muscle. It's a it's a muscle that that kind of kind of an exert pressure on your ear drum make it tighter or less tight. And uh if when this muscle is activated, it can actually tighten to the point where it's vibrating and you get a sort of sensation that's kind of like a rumbling. And you've experienced I experienced it a

few minutes ago. What I yawned, and you know how you want you yawn a real deep beyond sort of you feel that sort of yeah, kind of a pop, yeah, kind of like this. I hear kind of a sort of thing in my ears when I if sometimes seven Chevy in his head. Yeah. Yeah. So that that's another possibility, is and maybe these people have something going on with their their thoughts are timpanty muscles, I guess, yeah, And that you know, I guess My problem with that is

the same kind of with the tonitus. Is that like, why only in these certain geographic locations, and why so prevalently in these geographic locations, right, It's not like a couple of people in this one area are saying, oh I hear this noise. It's like two to eleven percent of the population in any given kind of hub of the hum or hearing it. So I mean, I don't know, maybe there's something, Maybe there needs to be more research into this syndrome, Maybe there is something that could be

affecting people in this area. But thinking of research, like saying, tause um, how many people in Taos reported this as happening, hundreds lots. It was eight hundred in Bristol. I don't think I have a number in tause but I think it was almost eleven percent or something like that of the population. Fairly substantial. And the fact that you can record it or that people could measure the like hurts that it was right. That to me means that it's external.

I don't I don't know how they did that if they and ID have to like look at the research and found out and find out if they actually went out found the noise, recorded it and measured it's its wavelength, or if they just played like sounds to people who claim to be hearing basically to them, like you go to the eye doctor and they just play sound as well. It's just does this sound like it. How about this?

How about this? And then finally when they get there, Yeah, and then they setting on that articles that I've read about people trying to track it down as they've gone out with a mike and all of the audio equipment that you you know, you're it's portable, you're carrying it, and of course as they're listening to it and with their the headphones and there, oh wait, I think I've found it. They're looking at the meter and the meter

is registering this stuff. And I think that's how they're doing it is actual real world walking around with a mic to try and pick it up and pinpoint where it's at. Yeah, and then after that, But would be interesting to say, say Bristol, for example, if they could actually take a map of the city and plot out the occurrences of this all over the city and find out that's sort of there's an epicenter of it, um a uniform across the city, which doesn't really make sense

to me. They I think they have done that with the data collection that they're doing. They say, you have to be pretty specific about where you are, and they have a map you can see and I don't know, I haven't ever, like looked very closely at a city, so I can't remember it or I don't know. I guess if they do it within a city, but they do it within countries. Well, the map on one of the links where they were that one where they were mapping. I loaded that map. You went all the way down.

I went all the way down. I I zoomed into Portland's just to see what it was like in the city, and it's all over the city. And when you're zoomed how the country or the world, it's just you know, those silly little those little blips that mark your location on the Google Maps, just everywhere. And it wasn't until you got in pretty closed that they started spreading out.

So people are reporting them literally everywhere. So if this isn't geographically specifically geographic specific, then some form of hearing problem. I think it's meant to. I mean, I think it is geographically you know. I I don't know how specific the data collection that's happening with this HUM website is. I don't know if they're actually filtering any reports, you know. I know on their website they do say, oh, if you're not sure if it's the HUM, don't report it.

But this is the Internet and it's hard to kind of you know, call that down to what's legitimate and what's not. Anybody can just go into this document and then put put us this stuff in, So you got to figure there's at least a few pranks. Well, and I also when I was going through it, there are you can tell the people who really care because they

fill in and it's spreadsheet. They in every cell and there's a lot of cells, and then there's yes, it's like fifteen questions or more per report, but a lot of them it'll be the location, the date, and maybe one or two other little bits. A lot of people are just giving the minimal amount of information, which is unfortunately kind of corrupts the research. And because you've got

a bunch of red herrings. Yeah, so, and it's worth mentioning since we're talking about this little data collection thing happening. Some of the questions are asking, are you know, how close are you to power line or to a power hub? How close are you to a gas line? How close are you to like these other theories that people have kind of thrown out, like maybe it's you know, it's just a power station. Maybe it's because these communities are

close to that. Maybe it's a gas line. Maybe this is the noise that gas lines make, you know, things like that. They're saying, you know, how close are you to this? Looking for man to kind of see if there are any really patterns. Yeah, patterns, I guess is the word that I was looking for. Yeah, to go back to our theories. There's one other one that maybe internal, and it's called spontaneous auto acoustic emissions, which I know

sounds all dirty. I'm sorry everyone, but apparently the human ear generates noises called spontaneous auto acoustic emissions, which affect like the population, and most people are like unaware of them. I guess as far as I can tell, it's kind of like tonitis. But it's not. It's not forever. Oh okay, I was gonna say, because it's that that sounds exactly like tonitus when I was doing the reading, but they

didn't catch that. It just goes away. Yeah, I think it's just like little It happens every once in a while. It's not a constant sound as far as I can tell. That's the difference. Next is that it's colliding ocean way here. Yeah, this this, this is one is kind of a head scratcher from I don't I don't like this theory very much. I think it's dumb that apparently waves in the deep sea can collide in such a way that send out a noise. And I think this this mostly pertains to

coastal communities that are affective. As far as I can tell, Well, I think it's I mean, we've all been at the ocean when it's really windy and you're not on the beach, you're a couple of miles away, but you can still hear that noise that's made from the surf. Yeah, And I think that's that's where this is going. It's it's well, I think it makes a lot of noise. Waterfalls do

the same thing. I think a little bit. It's it's more like a mix of that plus like the blue, like these weird noises that happen when like too deep ocean waves collide. They make this frequency that can travel. It's fairly low frequency. I don't know. I know that to some research, this is under water, is what they're saying. No, it's in, but it's in deeper oceans. It's not like hitting the cost If there if there is like some sort of collision that makes a noise like that and

it's very low frequency. Low frequency sound ways do travel a lot further through the water, then I guess the US Array Earth Scope, I don't even know what that is, has tracked down a series of waves that I guess they're kind of like compression waves that do produce kind of humming noises a little bit. But I don't think that that goes far enough to explain what these people experiencing,

particularly in a place like Taos, New Mexico. Exactly. You know, when these guys are saying, like these the sounds of these collisions of waves could travel far far away, that's true, but in the water, they're not gonna They don't climb out of the water on the west coast of the US and walk over to New Mexican, right, So, like it might explain Bristol, which is a coastal town, right, but it definitely doesn't explain landlocked house like house also, I mean, if you know where to houses, but it's

like pretty north New Mexico, it's like center North New Mexico. That's a that's pretty landlocked in the rockies. Is it the Rockies suddenly can't think of what that major string of mountains that runs through Mexico. Yeah, the Rockies go to Colorado, which do you know which side of the Rockies houses on. I'm guessing the east side, be my guest. Yeah, Which means that you would think that if it's coming

from the ocean. Okay, let's just say these ultra low frequency waves are bouncing up and traveling across the land, they're gonna hit mountains, which you're gonna slow them down and stop them before they ever got the other side for these towns maybe. And then and then you've got to think too, that the sound would be incredibly painfully loud in coastal communities. You would see this instance more

definitely in coastal communities, right. I think that, you know, I mean as far as natural explanations, So I think that seizemic activity or geothermal activity is I don't know if anybody has ever investigated that or not. Yeah, I

think it's it's kind of been floated. I don't think anybody has done any kind of serious research into it, however, but that it's kind of a nice segue into this next theory, which is that it might be underground drilling, kind of covert underground drilling, right, so the government's like or maybe it's the lizard people, Yeah, the lizard people. So I guess there's kind of a consistent trend with the communities that this is heard. Is there more suburban

you know, like more out they're not. They're not rural. They're not rural because they are communities. They're like villages and towns, but they are not urban. So you know, I guess you could kind of say that that would be a good target for people to be drilling under, right, because there are people there so like and would cover up some of the noise or whatever. Right, But it's not a thriving metropolitan area. I don't know, well, I think it kind of you're talking about like horizontal oil

drilling or something like cracking, but not really people. But people are drilling in the ground constantly. It's not just for natural gas and stuff like, I mean, people are drilling for wells and things like that, and is full of cracks. I mean, the mantle of the ear of our planet is not a solid chunk of rock. It is full of all kinds of veins and pockets. So

I mean I can see that. Let's say that I'm drilling a hundred miles from here in an area that's okay for me to drill for oil or water or whatever I'm drilling for, and then those cracks don't just go, you know, they go horizontally and then they make their way up and that could leak out. I guess there's a way to say it. I guess. I just think all I can ever think of when I think of nderground drilling is Ocean's thirteen when they're drilling under Las Vegas. Yeah, listeners,

help me out doing the show with old people. Apparently no, um, So, I mean they do that. They did it with the Max Tunnel to underground drilling and those things. It's just a plate. It's not an actual drill, right, like a drill, but it's just a plate. There's there's a bunch of those things out there, and it looks like this. She's greater, Yeah, exactly,

flat with the Yeah they're pretty awesome. I want to go they're pretty cool, but they I mean, I think if there was any kind of proof that things were drilling under there, that would be a good explanation. But I think that at this point people would have had to say, oh, yeah, I know, we're drilling under that place, right, But people don't always realize that drilling is going on. Do you realize that in the city of Portland they were drilling for fifteen or twenty years for the entire

sewer redo that they did here. It was called a big Pipe project and they were drilling from one end of the city to the other and it took him ten or fifteen years. They were drilling every day, nonstops. So maybe maybe it is under ground drilling. But this kind of stuff happens in the municipalities all the time and people don't realize that it's going on. They may sort of be aware, but they don't really think about it,

so then they're hearing this weird noise. And I guess that would be another argument actually, like four, that these are like less urban places, right that like when we're when drilling is happening underneath us, we've got like a bustling city happening. We can't hear what's going on down there, right, But if it's a smaller community and they are drilling under there, what I like, who's gonna I mean, you hear it? It's an evil genius building his bunker for

the more. Right, there is one more kind of since we're talking about the earth theory. We were talking about it a little bit earlier and none of us has a really good grasp nor do we have any details. But apparently there is an actual global hum. Now there is. They can be heard worldwide. Question was it's the geothermal activity? Right, Well, it's not geo thermal activity as much as it's um.

There are some scientists who have been mapping the ears, the inner structure of the Earth and the typically typically the way that's been done and they just sort of sit around the wait for an earthquake somewhere and then using recording stations around them around the planet, you can know that sends that earthquake is going to send massive waves,

shock waves to the through the planet's core. You can use that that information when you pick it up somewhere else to infer information about how what the structure of the earth inter core is. Sure. Yeah, but the problem with that is as you to sit around a way for an earthquake, and so some of these guys started actually amassing data on the sink that they called the Earth's hum, which is when we read it to you here. Okay,

that's hum. It's called seismic noise. It's generated by sources such as storm driven ocean waves, among other things, and it's detectable everywhere on Earth. Interesting, but we don't we don't know what the frequency is or anything like that. Unfortunately, I haven't figured that out yet. Yeah, but that's that's that's the possibility. I didn't realize that the Earth actually had a home. I didn't need it. But it's like, yeah, the Earth does have a hung well, and it makes sense.

I mean, I know that this isn't directly related, but seismic activity and stuff like that. I mean, the planets always moving and the cores moving and plates are grinding and things are always happening. It's always in a little bit of a state of flux. And is it the in it on the San Andreas Fault, they record little mini quakes constantly. Yeah, I mean, nobody feels and nobody. We just had we just had two earthquakes this past week in Sherwood. Yeah you feel I didn't feel, you know,

there were like three pointers. But yeah, but yeah, but these things happened constantly. We don't realize it. But that could be a culprit is that it's actually just products of natural seismic activity that we don't recognize as happening. But it's some people can hear it. Yeah, I guess that's fair. Yeah, it's and it might be more geographically specific, because the thickness of the Earth's crust differs in places, and it's like that in the composition of a different

in places. Yeah, I think that's not a bad theory. I do want to talk about another kind of not bad theory, which is that it could just be like mechanical devices, if you will notice, right, it has definitely picked up in the last you know, really yeah, since the Industrial revolution, if you will, desk goes goes to So you're talking are you talking about drillings some more? You're talking about other things we're talking about, yeah, more

like factories. So apparently in Kokomo, that's how you say that, right, Kokomo, Indiana, it's a it's a fairly industry heavy city. Apparently, some researchers went out and identified where the hum was coming from. There were two sources that they traced. One was a Chrysler casting plant that was emitting a thirty six hurts tone apparently, which would do it, because totally sure. The second one was an air compressor intake at the Haines

International plant that was emitting a ten hurts tone. And do you remember we were listened to twenty hurts. That's hard to hear, right, Yeah, the low down ones are very hard to hear, so ten hurts would be like super hard to hear. Furthermore, once uh, these devices were corrected and stopped emitting these noises because they were malfunctioning. Yeah, the people who had been complaining about the home didn't say that they stopped hearing it. Maybe they're just complainers.

Maybe maybe they're just whiners. I do also remember again the guy who was talking about having walked around his city with the audio equipment trying to track it down himself. He was pretty sure he had pinpointed it to some chimney that was part of a factory and it just happened to be next to an alley, so it was creating basically an echo. Cha. Yeah, that was in China or something, wasn't it. No? I think it was Indiana. It was one of the Indiana ones, but I could

be wrong. There was one in China where they said, yeah, it was this construction that was happening. So they again they corrected it, and people were like, no, it's still happening. You know, I think this has happened a couple of times. Could be like this is suddenly occurred to me. What do you blow over like the end of a coke bottle? It makes that noise noise I remember one time I I I experienced. I think of that and at a larger,

larger scale, lower wave length. Because I was in when I was in college, I stayed around after the end of the school year because I was worked. I worked for the dormitory, so stayed around for an extra week or two to clean up the dorms after everybody else had left and gone home for the year. And it sounds like, yeah, I know, so I know what the So I was up and I was up on the seventh floor and I had the whole place to myself.

It's really weird to be in a place that's always full of people and you're and suddenly you're the only one. I feel like that's one of the creepiest things. Is it is? It is, It's kind of creepy. And I'm I'm there and uh, and suddenly I hear this really weird, unearthly noise. It's sort of like low kind of noise, and it made it made the hair on the back of my next stand up. Somehow, I feel like we need to be around a campfire right now. Yeah, I know.

I finally figured out what it was is that there were these really long halways. There are two of them, and at the end they had windows which opened, and so just hap finally figured out if the wind was blowing at just a perfect angle across these open windows and making that same coke bottle sound, but much louder and much lower frequency. It was a weird sound. Interesting. Yeah, so yeah, I can see there being natural formations that

I mean, that that would happen. Yeah. Yeah, although again, why only like fifty to seventy to seventy because they're the only people who sit around, listen around and listen. All the younger people are walking around with like iPods and buds in their ears. Yeah totally. So we have one more theory might be my favorite. Are you guys

so ready for this one? It's fish. Yeah. This guy from the Scottish Association Scottish Association for Marine Science says that nocturnal humming from fish, from male midshipment fish, it's their mating call, and that they were just doing it in the night. They were making this mating call night because they're nocturnal, and that's what everybody was hearing in this one community in hid Hampshire. Okay, so I tried

to read upon this fish. There are they are They sort of like a mud puppy or a lungfish, something that crawls out of the water at night for a little bit of time before it goes back in. Do you know, I have no idea. I'm sorry, this is literally the extent of the research I tried to look. I looked into these fish a little bit, but I couldn't really get any good info. But I mean, I do know that there are fish that come out of the water for brief periods of time. I've never heard

of fish moaning or humming. But that's a good way to advertise your position to nearby predators. Yeah, bad idea. Yeah, it doesn't seem like the smartest thing to do. Yeah, I guess you know, if you're gonna take you know, a lot of these series all together, you know, maybe this one applies to that particular spot in Scotland. But it's hard. It's hard to see how I could apply to Toos, New Mexico. Yeah, but it might be that there's hums around the world and they all have difference.

They all have different origins, they have different sources. Yeah, I guess you know, that's totally fair. It's a fair thing to think. But fish is the last theory that I have. We're out of theories. Do you guys have any other theories? No, I don't. Do you have favorite theories? I'm pretty sure it's mechanical. Yeah, I really think that

it is. It is a man made noise, especially since it's mostly reported in extremely developed countries, whether it's urban, suburban, rural areas, machineries everywhere, And that seems like the likeliest candidate to me from Yeah, that's pretty good. I mean I like the fish one. Yeah, kind of hard it

it doesn't it's not credible. I like it. Um. So anyway, the earth some that we were talking about, that's that's entirely possibility that the crust of the earth itself is is like vibrating, you know, enough to create either a sound or else maybe put something put a vibration and into your feet, into your body, basically vibrating your body. You're standing out the body, your body is resonating with that, and for some sensitive people, for whatever reason, they translate

that into sound. Yeah. I don't know. I don't have a favorite theory, to be honest, I deeply believe that it's external, right. I don't think it's just people like having like making it up. I don't think it's tonitous anything like that. I definitely don't think it's fish. I don't think it's colliding waves, but the Earth's hum machinery, weird drilling stuff, experiments. You don't want to say experiments really too much. But I don't understand what you mean

by the conspiracy theory stuff or something like that. God and buying that I did. I do think somebody should investigate any possible correlation between geothermal activity in the places where this happens. Yeah, I think that's fair. That would be you know, and that would be hard to pinpoint. I think they need to get some geologists involved in this quest. Yeah, So I guess that's all we have. As we've said, we're going to put a bunch of links up. Those will be available on our website, as

will um this episode. That website is Thinking Sideways podcast dot com. You can download on iTunes instead of listening to us on the website. If you do that, please leave us a comment in a rating. We've been trying to keep track of those as much as possible. We absolutely appreciate them, your comments and ratings or how other people find us, so kudos. If you forget to download us, you can always stream us from Stitcher on any mobile device, find us and like us on Facebook. We just started

a new group, I think just last week. We started a couple of weeks ago. Yeah, so you know, join that group so you can discuss things if you want with other listeners. And as always, you can send us an email. That email address is Thinking Sideways Podcast at gmail dot com. And we have some listener mail. I think it's backlogged. We didn't do any last week. We got a lot last week and we didn't do any. Yeah. Yeah,

that was a long episode because I'm so sorry. So we got some listener mails that we want to try and catch up. Well, yeah, we've got some emails, and we, like you said, Devin, there's a lot of emails. We've gotten a bunch this week and in the past weeks, and it's hard to read them all out as much as I'd love to, And we should just make it clear that this isn't like adult send us any more emails.

Got so much email. It's awesome, but it's it's sometimes I love it because it's one or two sentences and then it's a suggestion of the story, which is great because that's filling the hopper for us. But you know, I don't want to just read off all of those. But there's a couple of them that kind of stood out, so I think that those are the ones that I kind of wanted to focus on. So we've got one from a guy named Ben, and he said, first of all, I love the show. I think you guys are hilarious

and making a really unique and intelligent podcast. So what could I say other than keep up the good work. Yeah, cool, Thanks Ben, And that he has a quick question. Um, he was trying to figure out where we were based out of and I think we said it before, but if we haven't directly said it, we're out of Portland or and he was he had figured out that we were in the Pacific Northwest, because we knew things like

the sailor sea feet. We were pretty familiar with the coastal range, and so he'd kind of put two and two together. But yeah, I know, we're definitely out out of Portland, and uh, if you are out yeah, yeah, we are from Portland. Yeah's evidently from Seattle. So he was happy to to share the Northwest with us. It's not actually, if you live in Portland and you want

to be you want to be our intern. But and then Ben gave us obviously, as everybody else has, he gave us a great suggestion of the story, and that

one is in the hopper for us. Yeah. Emails from Tom, he says, I recently started listening to podcasts in general and was very disappointed that there are very few podcasts about mysterious events, people and places, and I wanted It was also a letdown that almost no other podcasts can even hold a candle to thinking sideways than I have in the past read an article on more than half of the things that you guys have discussed on the show, but you present much more detail and do so in

a fashion that keeps me from becoming bored in any way with the show. So he wanted to say thank you, and he also wanted to geek out with me a little bit about Earthbound, So we geeked out a little bit and then he's adjusted some shows, but Earthbound Bros for life using our side power. It's a video game. You guys are both looking at me like I'm the biggest idiots being a video game. It's a video game

that I love, but so also likes Fallout. So if anybody wants to make a Fallout reference, you'll love it. And listen, we already had a Fallout person, did we Yeah? I didn't catch it. It was on It was on iTunes. One of our commentary was Arcade Gannon, which is again, I'm so sorry. I it turns out I'm nerding myself. It's like aging yourself, but like you know, you're a nerd. Anyways, if you want to keep guessing my favorite video games, you should just send random emails to us about video

games and we'll see how many I can catch. So, Tom, thank you for the suggestions. They are as you would say in the hopper. Okay, one more, we got time for one more letter. Uh. This letter is from Jennifer. So Jennifer says Hey, guys, huge all caps fan of the show, found it too much or so back on Reddit and listen to your whole library in about a week. Yeah, I said, at work all day data entry boo and frequently gets distracted by your awesome show. I have a

semi local story. I'd love to hear your thoughts on blank blank blank Washington. Were to college. So yeah, so take a look is pretty cool and there's even a Wikipedia try it. I've heard about this particularly spot before. It is kind of interesting. I've almost I've been meaning to go up and take a look at it. We might need to take a field trip for this one. Yeah, okay, anyway back to her letter, thanks again for the awesome show. If you guys have lots of Portlands listeners, you should

have plan a meet up for everyone. Signed jan That's a great idea. Actually, that's actually not a bad idea. Yeah, we we might have to take a polling sometimes how many people are in the area that would be able to do something like that. They'll just use analytics Google analytics. There's there's things on the internet that do this. For holy Craft, they didn't know that's plan on that good idea.

Jennifer Yeah, thanks Jennifer, thanks everybody for the emails, and yeah, like I said before, we've got a bunch of them and I we can't read them all. We don't appreciate it, we don't love it. Just can't do everything. And we try to respond to all of them in a fairly good amount of time. Yeah, sometimes I'm a little behind on the replies, but I try to keep up bottom. Yeah, so I guess with that, that's it. Yeah, there's not too much you can say about it. It's just it's

just so let's play recording at the Taos. Hum. That's incredibly annoying. I can see people can get suicide man. Good night,