Imagine a sound you can never turn off. A low rumble, like a diesel truck idling far down the road, except it never drives away. It follows you into your house. It is loudest at night.
That is what a small share of the people of Taos, New Mexico, began reporting in the early 1990s. Not everyone. Roughly two in a hundred. The rest heard nothing at all.
The complaints got loud enough that in 1993 the people of Taos asked their congressman for help, and a team of scientists from the University of New Mexico, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia came to find the source. They set up sensitive instruments across the valley. They interviewed the hearers, who described the sound with striking consistency. Then they went looking for the signal.
They never found one.
No vibration in the ground. No sound in the air that matched. Nothing from the power grid, the gas lines, or the military. The hearers were not making it up, the researchers said, but whatever they were hearing was not coming from anywhere the instruments could reach.
The hum became famous, and the same sound has since been reported in Bristol, England, in Windsor, Ontario and in Kokomo, Indiana. Some blame low frequency military communication. Some blame the Earth itself. Some say the sound is being generated inside the hearers’ own heads.
What if some people are tuned to a frequency the rest of us were never built to receive.
A trick of the ear, or a signal nobody has admitted to sending?
What do you think about this? The Dropa Stones, 716 grooved stone discs said to be found in Chinese caves in 1938 beside small bodied skeletons, telling of a crash 12,000 years ago. The 1978 book that spread the story was admitted to be a hoax. Pure fiction, or a truth wrapped in lies?
What do you think about this? The Paiute of Nevada told of red haired giants they trapped in a cave and burned, written down in 1883. In 1911 miners near Lovelock opened a cave and found red haired mummies and a layer of ash. Legend that matched a cave, or memory of real enemies?
What do you think about this? In 1987 a Wisconsin family bought a used bunk bed. Within weeks their kids were sick, a radio changed stations by itself, and a chair rocked with no one in it. They fled in the night in 1988 and burned the bed. Old house, or something that came with it?
What do you think about this? In 1904 an American dredged the Sacred Cenote at Chichén Itzá and pulled up gold disks, jade, wooden idols and the bones of more than 200 people, many of them children. The Maya called such wells doorways to the underworld. Prayers for rain, or an open door?
What do you think about this? Norse settlers lived in Greenland for nearly 500 years, with farms, a cathedral and a bishop. The last record is a wedding at Hvalsey church on Sept 16, 1408. Then nothing. The church still stands, roofless and empty. Starved out, or walked away?
What do you think about this? In 1615 a Spanish pearl ship is said to have sailed into an inland sea that then dried up. In 1870 a Los Angeles paper reported its hull found in the desert near the Salton Sea. Every searcher since has lost it to the sand. Mirage, or a galleon in the dunes?
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