The Hum

So I'm working on my summer chin. Oh are we recording? God damn it, Edwin, did you know we're recording. I've started doing face yoga and I'm really hoping that's a thing. Yeah, face yoga, And I used to make fun of it. Now I'm older and I'm like, oh, I got it. So anyway, my chin's going to be looking good this summer. Everyone, get ready. Welcome to Scary Mystery Surprise, where we talk about scary things that surprised us around the internet. I'm Edwin and I'm Michelle. You probably didn't get to see this because I had just gotten it or was getting it done because I had just met Ness at a conference that we were at. Whenever I go out now and after that, after I receive this thing, I always walk around with this blue pouch with a zipper on it. Huh, what's in there? And this is not an ad. It's little earplugs. You can still hear things, but like they're made for my ear, so I like it just kind of lowers down the volume of things. And ears are actually super super important because obviously for us we're at headphones on, always listening, always doing things. And I noticed that a lot of people don't really care about this thing. They'll be up in front of a really loud speaker. Anyway, it turns out there's this phenomenon that's affecting a very small portion of the population, but it's affecting them in a really annoying way. If anyone that's listening to this right now knows what I'm talking about, you're gonna get it like that. It's going to be like, oh, I hear that. And the thing is, there is this mysterious hum that has been bothering people for a long time. Few people can hear it. So I haven't done the math, but I think that if the percentages here are correct, there there are about twenty two people that are twenty two people listening to this episode right now might know, like twenty two people in the world, Like you're trying to reach twenty two people right now, twenty two, just twenty two that hear the hum. There's gonna be a few people that might know like, oh, I can hear that. I have that ability. Everyone else dismisses this as you know, all your troubles are just in your head or it's like tendonitis or whatever in your hearing, Yeah, tendonitis whatever, what's it called? And tonightis whatever? Do you know what I mean? Listeners? In twenty thirteen, citizens of Windsor, Ontario finally got a group of researchers to pay attention to something that was bothering them like crazy beginning around twenty eleven, but people really started paying attention to them in twenty thirteen because they were complaining about something weird that you might just be like, ah, you'll get over it. And it was a strange hum that will last for hours. The researchers, led by an associate professor of engineering at the University of Windsor, confirmed the sound and said that there was a frequency of about thirty five hertz that was sounding at different times of the day. Oh. Interesting. The researchers suspected that it was a blast furnace. You had a US facility somewhere on the US side, but the government didn't let them investigate further. It's the US very secretive. They're like, no, you can't, no, well, business, business is very secretive. They basically left it at that, so the scientists were like, ah, oh well, and when the plant closed in twenty twenty, the hum reportedly stopped suspicious. By the way, when I was looking this up, Michelle, like I saw that they started being reported, Like the earliest I found that, like an official one was in the seventies. Oh interesting, I'm like, I guess the hum could have existed anytime the Industrial Revolution started her tying it to that or whatever or companies, but a weird environment hum. I don't know, there's no one alive for before the Industrial Revolution that can be like, yeah, it was a thing. Also, like I don't think there was a way to like mass distribute news that well, not that quickly, you know, way way back then. So like if there was one person hearing a ham, they would just be dismissed because they could never find each other. They can never be like oh I hear it too, or I hear it too. It's more like, oh, yeah, somebody used to hear a hum. Like it's more difficult. In England in this nineteen seventies, there's this phenomenon called the Bristol Hum and it was a first to be linked to a specific city. A bunch of articles started coming out in the newspaper it's called the Sunday Mirror, and then people started writing in saying that they too had heard the same hum and they thought that it was just them at first, until the editors started getting all these letters like I hear it too, I hear it too, And they all described it the same way. It was a low rumble that was heard throughout the city. And at first it was just a noise, like it was just like this a really annoying thing, But then they was set to be linked two people taking their own vibes because of it. What. In fact, people talked about it so much that even serious researchers, like there was one group that wrote for a scientific journal called Applied Acoustics where they called it quote a particular environmental noise phenomenon which appears to be a cause of real and severe disturbance to certain people. Serious stuff, right, the just make it scientifically. Yeah, it would be pretty disturbing to hear. I mean, it would be weird to hear ringing in your ear all the time, and it'd be weird to have just a thing, especially if not everyone could hear it. Oh, this group took a gat as to what it was and they said, oh, it's industrial sources you know that are far away, so it might be true, but was the windsor one in Canada looking at this case and being like, oh, they said industrial, so it might be industrial. But then again it did stop in Canada once the US Steel Company things shut down, So all signs point to industrial causes, right, some deep sounds coming from like a warehouse or something. I don't know if you ever worked at a factory or like a distribution center or like a place with forklifts, but there's always heavy things being moved, and those things really thumped the ground really hard. It's just a boom. They can just feel that rumble like a construction site. Construction sites do this all the time. Just oh yeah that. But also like trains, you'll hear something and you're like, what is that? Like I can get that at my house where I'm like, why do I hear? And it's the train going by. I can't see the train where I live, but it's definitely the train, you know. Airports also have this noise like this. Yeah, even to this day, people across the UK report the deep, humming, rumbling, annoying sound clustered around different cities like hythe Plymouth and Swansea. And even though they are studied. The answers are always always inconclusive, and I hate that. I'm just like your scientists, you guys, like come on, but again that is an answer. It's like we don't know or we can't be certain, so here it is. Another interesting theory is that the noise might be caused by the mating call of midshipmen fish. What which sound like louder droning sounds like that. I imagine it more like like what, yeah, that's way more sexual and that they can go even for hours. The scientists here like this fish is horny fish, like has horns. Wow, it's that literal huh. Or they might mean that and be playing on the word. But yeah, they ended up with those two theories where house sounds and horny fish. Now this thing, by the way, they say it's some mysterious sound because it can be heard at different areas of the world, like different places, and everybody reports it the exact same way. Just this deep rumbly sound that comes at night and it's very annoying. Maybe someone out there has heard the same thing. But can you hear electricity, Michelle? Can you hear like from a sometimes but not like regularly? I have to say. It's like maybe like an old house or something. If I can do it, and I can usually hear it turn on. If all of the electricity is turned off, I can hear it turn on, and then I kind of forget. So it's kind of like a constant humming little thing. Okay for me when I used to plug in things, sometimes I can hear this, Like if I plug in my phone, for example, if I angle my ear just right, I can hear it and I turn away and I stop hearing it right Also against the wall, I see hear like this, like I turn away a little bit and my ear just doesn't get it anymore. But I know it's there, and I'm pretty sure other people can hear this too. But anyway, his thing was turning into a whole thing, like this global thing. And in this article I found in The Guardian by Jordan Tannehill talks about all these cases, like all these things that I just talked about too, and they bring up a potential answer that was mentioned at an Institute of Biology conference in nineteen seventy three. They're saying that the jet stream really fast air is rubbing against a slower stream of air and it's making a huh oh interesting. French scientists got into it as well, saying that this may be caused by ocean waves extending down to the ocean floor and shaking the earth as they collide with ridges, which is like, what is that when I get that England is an island? Pretty much, but like it'd still be hard to hear. True, quite very true. I remember like being in a pool and hearing the noises of you, like tapping on something. Everything sounds weird and a lot deeper. Oh yeah. Other theories also mentioned volcanoes, lightning strikes, submarine communication whales. Although interestingly enough about the submarine thing, there's this method that they used that I had to look up and I went a little bit too deep into it more than I should have. So I'll just mention the name, and that's it microwave auditory effect, which is, you know, a way to communicate underwater and everything. And it was studied by the Pentagon for use as we guessed it a weapon. We want to destroy things, kill people, and because of that we go to some conspiracies. Some people say that it's a government mind control experiment. They should do a better job though, Yeah, like with five G. Like, I don't know much about five G and everything. Some people swear by actually met somebody who was really into it, that it's bad for us, that it's harmful, that it's going to cause cancer, that it's mind controlling you, that it's emitting these frequencies that only your brain can catch and you don't know it. And I mean I kind of just listened for a little bit and yeah, it makes logical sense the way that using their logic, but yeah, jump into their world for it, and then yeah it does fix it. Yeah, it's like did you go into their dimension? And it's like, yeah, you know what, that's true. But then you're like, okay, some people say that you can use this thing called the mother Earth frequency and it could ignite dormant areas of your brains. So Toyles, New Mexico, was also a place that reported this hum oh interesting. Scientists from the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Sandia National Laboratories went in and there again completely predictable. Here they're like, we don't know, we don't know what it is. See and that's kind of far away from the ocean. Yeah, what is it? Are there industrial areas around there. I mean there's like long stretches of just nothing, you know, like scrub brush and stuff like that. It's like flat, and then you go into the mountains, it's really beautiful. It's one of those landscapes where you can see rainstorms far off. Yeah, it's weird because, like you know, the scientists there were like, we believe you. We want to make it clear, we believe you, but we don't know what it is. And that's when they figured it out, like only two percent of people are said to be able to hear it, yeah, out of the whole town or whatever, so like they can they get coming up with that too to five percent range of people can hear it, and that's about it. Also, people complain that it only comes at night, like you can hear this, so what could it be? And the person who wrote this article in the Guardian they found a lot of information at some of these forums that people that can hear, which they call themselves like hearers or something like that this I mean just a made up word, but they all confirmed the same things. They're like, yeah, I can hear like this, I heard it hear at night, I hear it during this time And people say that yeah, and other people are just like, I don't know what you're talking about, Like, this is totally fine. One intriguing theory that I found. The HUM is said to be responsible for some recent mass killings in the US, what like Adam Lanza a Newton, Connecticut, the school shootings there in an area that was home to the Connecticut HUM. Oh. Also, Aaron Alexis, who killed twelve people at the Washington Naval Yard in twenty thirteen, had written my ELF weapon or ELF weapon into the stock of his shotgun ELF ELF extremely low frequency. Oh So I don't know if that's just the play on words or like if it's actually linked. But it's a theory and people have started digging into it. They're like, is this associated with this? Is this what it means? Is this a it's a thing. But anyway, there's so many things, Like scientists have tried it. Acoustic researchers have gotten into it. They're like, we need to figure this out. And they think that it might be an auditory hallucination, people just imagining a HUM. Scientists love to argue, but like they argue scientifically. And this other guy, David Deming from the University of Oklahoma was like, there's cases of mass illusion, like the witch hunts. Yeah. I mean, look, humans go crazy every couple hundred years, you know, multiple times every hundred years. But the hum I don't know. I don't know. I think I believe that people are hearing it. I believe them too. I'm like, you can hear something. I believe you can hear something. I can't hear it. There's people that have left their homes. They're like, I'm getting out of the city. They leave and then they stop hearing it. So that gives you that idea where it's like, okay, might be a location thing, like it's not all in your head. But like you said earlier about tinitis or tinitis, yeah, that one's a really high frequency tone, yeah right, but this one's like low. Oh interesting, you know, it's like this low low, low thing. So it's it's different. Another theory is that people that are just really sensitive with their hearing, like they have very sensitive ears, then they can hear between twenty and one hundred hertz. I think that there's just some people that have that type of hear Yeah, but if there is sensitive hearing, then what are they hearing the vibration of the planet or something I don't know. And that's the last theory that there that's like probably the most accepted, widely accepted ones is that once we started getting electricity cables, all this stuff, generators and everything, the earth or I guess cities started getting this natural sounding thing that blended in with the nature I guess with like regular sounds that we hear, wind and everything that is this constant that it's just there all the time, and only some of us can hear because we pay attention to it. We can. We have that sensitive ear to catch it. But that's what it might be just electricity from the modern world, which I mean, like you do notice like if you've ever been through a power out, it just like everything goes off and it's like dead quiet, and then when everything comes back on, you'll hear that woosh and then it's not as quiet as it was. There's something there even if you're not hearing it, you know, like there's energy is there now either way, like this is it's I mean, if you look it up, the hum is like a constant thing that it's just like people trying to figure it out. They're trying to see what it is. Nobody knows affecting all these people all over the world. Like, let's say it was electricity. Why can't they just compare frequencies out in the middle of nowhere and then come back and see if that's just being part of the city. Can they get closer to this sound? Yeah? They I don't know. Why can't we figure this out? Shouldn't we be able to at this point? I mean, we can tell the weather, like to see hour by hour when it's gonna rain and when it's gonna stop. We could probably get closer to this sound and be like, oh, this is where it's coming from. Well, I think it's because it's only affecting a few people and driving them insane, but it's not affecting masses. I think you're right, Like I think, until we get like a president that can hear it anyway, One thing is for sure. This thing sounds annoying. Do you hear the hum? Oh? I mean I don't, but I sympathize for anyone who does. But anyway, what are we gonna talk about next week? I don't know, but I think it'll be a surprise scary. Mystery Surprise is hosted by Michelle Newman, and Edwin Kovarubias. This podcast was edited and sound designed by Sarah Vorhez Wendel, a VW Sound