The Hum

The sound disappears when the pavement changes again.

Resurfacing the road changes or eliminates the hum because it changes the texture.

Different vehicles produce slightly different hums at the same location because their cabins have different resonant frequencies.

The physics is straightforward, the evidence is strong, and for many locations, the case is closed.

But some documented hum locations persist across different road surfaces.

The pavement has been repaved, sometimes multiple times with different mixtures, different textures, different contractors, and the hum continues.

The frequency shifts slightly with each resurfacing, but the essential phenomenon persists.

A low tonal sound localized to a specific stretch of road reported by independent observers across decades.

know.

Let's talk about the final one, okay? The Taos hum, okay? This next one is weird because there's nobody, or nobody, sorry.

Nobody.

No disappearance, no hijacked broadcast, no lights in the sky.

A persistent drone, audible to a small percentage of the population, resistant to standard acoustic countermeasures, and difficult or impossible to record with conventional microphones.

But the Taos Hum was the first to attract sustained scientific attention.

and the valley's geology offers the most compelling framework for understanding what might be happening.

The Taos Hum, as it has come to be called, has been the subject of multiple investigations.

Researchers from the University of New Mexico and Los Alamos National Laboratory conducted studies in the 1990s, deploying sensitive acoustic equipment throughout the valley in an attempt to identify the source.

They found no single origin.

The rock here is ancient, Cambrian and Ordovician sandstone, 500 million years old, deposited as sediment on the floor of a shallow sea, and then lifted, faulted and exposed to wind erosion that has been sculpting it ever since.

The towers of Wadi Rum are not carved by water, they are carved by wind, by sand-laden air moving through the canyons at ground level, undercutting the bases of the formations and leaving the harder upper layers as overhanging caps and arches that defy the expectation of collapse.

got me reading.

I was hoping Wikipedia would have a collection of these type of phenomenons, but the other one I've heard of is called The Hum.

Yes.

Which is, it says, is a persistent and invasive low-frequency humming, rumbling, or droning noise audible to many, but not all people.

So we have a similar phenomenon...

And it's just been unexplained.

So anyone in Ontario or Windsor, if you've heard of the hum, we have our version of the boom here.

But it's not as, like, invasive because it's not consistent.

One of the more eerie scientific theories involves Kármán vortex streets.

Under specific wind conditions, the topography of the mountain could have created a terrifying phenomenon known as infrasound.

These are sound waves below the frequency of human hearing that can trigger intense physiological effects, nausea, blurred vision, and most notably, an overwhelming sense of existential dread and panic.

If the wind hit the mountain just right, the hikers might have been driven into a state of madness by sound they couldn't even hear, causing them to bolt from the tent in a blind frenzy.

Similar dancing manias were recorded in Aachen, 1374, and Madagascar in 1863, but it remains the best documented.

It stands as a grim reminder that the mind is capable of infecting the body with a logic all its own, creating a reality where the only escape from life is to dance yourself to your own demise.

Now, while we often think of this as a merely medieval phenomenon, mass psychogenic illness still happens today.

In 1962, for example, the Tanganyika laughter epidemic saw hundreds of schoolchildren laughing uncontrollably for months.

In between all the raving, Ford began a burgeoning career as a producer, working with, among others, Depeche Mode, Friendly Fires, and Gorillaz.

His debut album as a solo artist, The Hum, was one of my faves of 2023, eschewing the bombast of his mobile disco days for more subtle passages that echo the styles of Brian Eno and Peter Gabriel.

James just released his second album.

He made it inside a hospital room after a swift illness late last year led to a leukemia diagnosis.

There are places on the earth where you can walk across the desert and make the landscape sing, which that is going to take us over to Taos, New Mexico.

And these are the Taos hum.

Beginning in the early 1990s, people around Taos, New Mexico, began reporting a persistent low-frequency sound that they couldn't identify.

It was a hum.

Coming up this hour… John George Haig took the plunge into murder when he knocked out his old boss and dumped the body into acid, then set out to kill again.

Only 2% of the population can hear it – a persistent, maddening sound that science has no explanation for, and the hearers have dubbed it the hum.

The Trump family fled their farm in 2016, and there's still no explanation as to why.

One police officer calls it the most bizarre case he has ever seen.

Personally, I think there's a better chance of the devil doing it than some weird energy force.

Up next, John George Haig took the plunge into murder when he knocked out his old boss and dumped the body into acid, and then set out to kill again.

But first, only 2% of the population can hear it – a persistent, maddening sound that science has no explanation for, and the hearers have dubbed it the hum.

That story is up next on Weird Darkness.

Coming up this hour… John George Haig took the plunge into murder when he knocked out his old boss and dumped the body into acid, then set out to kill again.

Only 2% of the population can hear it – a persistent, maddening sound that science has no explanation for, and the hearers have dubbed it the hum.

The Trump family fled their farm in 2016, and there's still no explanation as to why.

One police officer calls it the most bizarre case he has ever seen.

Personally, I think there's a better chance of the devil doing it than some weird energy force.

Up next, John George Haig took the plunge into murder when he knocked out his old boss and dumped the body into acid, and then set out to kill again.

But first, only 2% of the population can hear it – a persistent, maddening sound that science has no explanation for, and the hearers have dubbed it the hum.

That story is up next on Weird Darkness.