Imagine it is a little after two in
the morning.
You are somewhere near Taos, New Mexico.
It is dark in a way many of
us almost never experience anymore.
There is no endless highway.
There is no constant traffic.
The mountains sit like black walls against the
night sky.
And when the wind dies down, the silence
can be almost physical.
Then you hear it.
It is not loud.
It is not a siren.
It is not even a sound that you
can easily identify.
It sounds more like an engine, a diesel
engine, far away.
Maybe a truck sitting somewhere on the other
side of the house.
You wait for it to drive away.
It does not.
You walk to the window.
There is no vehicle.
You open the door.
Outside the sound may actually become weaker.
You go back inside.
And now it seems stronger again.
You turn off the refrigerator, the ventilation.
Anything electrical you can think of, but it
is still there.
A deep, steady hum.
Some people describe it as a sound.
Others describe it as almost like a pressure,
a vibration.
Something right on the edge between hearing and
feeling.
And the strangest part, the person standing next
to you may not hear anything at all.
This is the story of the Taos Hum.
And if you are experiencing that, by the
end of this episode we will be able
to point one machine in the desert and
say, there it is.
That is the sound.
Well, it gets more complicated than that.
Because scientists have looked.
Engineers have measured.
Sensitive microphones have been used.
So have electromagnetic instruments and seismic equipment.
And the harder people have tried
to find the Hum...
the more important another question has
become: Was there ever only one?
Why are we still talking about it?
Taos is almost the perfect place for a
mystery like this.
The town sits in the landscape that seems
made for strange stories.
To the east are the Sangre de Cristo
mountains.
The Rio Grande cuts through the land at
the west of the town.
Taos Pueblo sits only a few miles away.
It represents the Native American culture with roots
that go back long before the United States
existed.
The area has attracted artists, wriTaos, spiritual seekers,
hippies, scientists, and people who simply want to
live far away from big cities.
Then in the early 1990s, a strange story
began to spread.
Some people could hear sound.
Other people could not.
The people who heard it described it as
slightly different ways.
But certain details came up again and again.
A low hum, a rumble, a buzz, something
mechanical.
It often seemed strongest at night.
And in some cases people said that it
was worse inside their homes than outside.
And the last detail mattered.
Most of us think that if a sound
comes from the outside, a house should protect
us from it.
But some very low frequencies do not always
behave that way.
Low frequency sound has a long wavelength.
It can move through and around buildings differently
from higher frequency sounds like speech.
Walls, floors, pipes, and rooms can also resonate.
It means some frequencies can actually become stronger
in certain parts of a building.
So the reports are not physically impossible, but
there is only one major problem.
Nobody could find the source.
The story eventually reached politicians, and in 1993
it was taken seriously enough that researchers from
several major institutions became involved.
This included the University of New Mexico, Sandia
National Laboratories, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Philips
Air Force Laboratory.
That is worth emphasizing.
The story is sometimes told as if scientists
simply laughed and said, people must be imagining
these things.
That is not what happened.
They investigated it.
And that takes us to the established story.
One of the key people involved was engineer
Joe Mullins from the University of New Mexico.
The investigation was basically trying to answer two
questions.
First, how many people were actually experiencing the
hum?
And second, can we measure anything in the
environment that matches what those people are hearing?
Researchers carried out a population study.
The word hearer began to be used for
people who experienced the hum.
The result shows an interesting pattern.
The hearer was not at all one type
of person.
It was not of all men.
It was not of all women.
It was not at all one age group.
Later materials from the Acoustical Society of America
said that about 72% of the hearers
were between the age 30 and 59.
Men and women were represented roughly equal numbers.
Most people reported hearing the hum between about
8 at night and 9 in the morning.
If researchers assumed that every hearer in the
study had answered the survey, the number suggested
a conservative minimum of around 2% of
the population.
We would be careful with that number.
It does not prove that exactly 2%
of all humans can hear the hum.
It was an estimate from that particular study,
but it tells us something important.
We are not talking about an entire town
hearing the same thing.
We are talking about a minority.
Then came the measurements.
If a large industrial machine somewhere is producing
a strong, low-frequency tone, you would expect
that, in theory, sensitive equipment should be able
to detect something.
If vibrations are moving through the ground, seismic
equipment might find them.
If the case is electromagnetic, it could also
be investigated.
Researchers placed sensitive equipment around people who experienced
the hum, and the results were frustrating.
They did not find physical signals that clearly
matched the moment when the hearer said, there,
I can hear it right now.
That means something very specific.
It does not mean that the hum does
not exist.
It means that the researchers could not find
an outside physical source using the methods they
had.
And right there, the mystery splits in different
possibilities.
What happens if a person says, I can
hear it right now, but the microphone next
to them does not record the expected sound?
Maybe the equipment is not measuring the right
thing.
Maybe the signal reaches the body through a
process that the microphone cannot detect.
Or maybe the experience begins somewhere else, inside
the body, inside the ear, inside the nervous
system.
That is another problem, too.
The hearer did not always describe or match
exactly the same frequency.
That makes it difficult to talk about the
Taos Hum as a single sound.
So if it was not a normal outside
sound, then what was it?
If we look at the first cracks, this
is where the story gets more interesting.
The first problem may actually be our basic
idea of hearing.
We often say that a normal human hearing
starts, runs about 20 hertz to 20,000
hertz.
And people sometimes take that to mean that
19 hertz is complete silence.
That is not true.
A sound goes lower in frequency, it usually
becomes much stronger before we can detect it.
But humans can detect a sound below 20
hertz if the sound pressure is high enough.
And very low frequencies do not always feel
like normal sound.
A tone can begin, feels like a note,
more like pulses, pressure, vibration.
So when someone says I don't know if
I hear it or feel it, that is
not actually nonsense, or should I say automatically
nonsense.
There is a physical gray area between ordinary
sound and very slow pressure changes.
People also have different hearing threshold.
A sound that sits right on the edge
of a hearing might be obvious to one
person and completely invisible to another.
That is not very different from the fact
that some people can hear high frequencies that
other people can no longer detect.
So the first possible explanation is simple.
Maybe the hearer is unusually sensitive to real
low frequency sound.
But then the sound has still to exist.
And why can't the microphone find it?
Another possible explanation is resonance.
A house is not a neutral box.
Rooms have resonant frequencies.
Walls can vibrate.
Pipes can vibrate.
Ventilation systems can vibrate.
Large surfaces can react to low frequency energy.
So a weak sound from outside may become
much stronger in one room than another.
That could also explain why some people experience
the hum more strongly inside.
But it does not fully explain why two
people standing in the same room may disagree
about whether the sound exists at all.
A third possibility comes from the ear itself.
Tinnitus.
When we say tinnitus, many people imagine the
classical high pitch.
But tinnitus is not one sound.
It can hiss, click, pulse, buzz, and hum.
And it can sometimes be very low in
frequency.
There is also something called otoacoustic emissions.
That sounds exotic.
But the basic idea is simple.
The inner ear is not just a passive
microphone.
It contains active biological systems.
Outer hair cells help boost and fine-tune
sounds.
And because of that activity, a healthy ear
can actually produce extremely weak sounds of its
own.
So another possible explanation appears.
What if some hearers are in some way
detecting activity created inside their own hearing system?
And then there is one more strange detail.
Some people say that the hum follows them.
They travel.
They move to another place.
And the hum is still there.
If that experience is accurate, there might be
two different ways to explain it.
Either the signal is extremely widespread, or the
source is not in Taos.
Maybe the source is inside the hearer.
But before we go down that road, we
need to give the opposite idea a fair
chance.
What if the hearer, right from the beginning,
what if something is really out there?
If we look at the alternative theory, we
are going to take, should we say, this
part very much seriously.
The physical hum is physical.
It is a signal.
It is not an illusion.
It is not mass psychology.
Something in the real world is affecting certain
people.
But it exists near the edge of the
normal human perception, and maybe near the edge
of the normal measurement, too.
If it's out there, several pieces begin to
fit.
First, the description.
A distant diesel engine.
That is exactly the kind of a sound
we might expect from a rotating machinery.
Large fans, pumps, compressors, transformers, ventilation systems, and
all other machines that produce a lot of
low frequency energy.
Low frequency sound behaves differently from many of
the sounds we normally use to understand our
surroundings.
A bird in a tree is usually easy
to locate.
A deep hum can be much harder.
Low frequencies can bend around objects.
They can travel long distances.
They are not always stopped by walls, and
because the wavelengths are so long, it can
become difficult to tell exactly where the sound
is coming from.
That gives us our first alternative model.
The source may not be in Taos at
all.
It could be far away.
Imagine a large industrial system, a compressor station,
a mine, a pump, a large fan, maybe
a facility that runs harder at night.
Under certain atmospheric conditions, sound can travel surprisingly
long distances.
Temperature layers in the atmosphere can bend sound.
Wind direction can change how far it carries.
The mountains around Taos is complicated.
Mountains, valleys, large open spaces, they can create
acoustic effects.
A sound may not behave the way we
expect, and there's an interesting comparison.
Kokomo, Indiana.
People there are also complaining about hum.
Investigations eventually found real industrial low-frequency tones,
including noise connected to a cooling tower and
a compressor system.
That matTaos.
Kokomo shows when people describe a nearly unbearable
low-frequency hum, it can sometimes be reacting
to a real technical signal that many other
peoples either do not notice or simply cannot
hear.
So the fact is that only some people
hear sound does not mean that the sound
does not exist in their heads.
People have different hearing thresholds, different sensitivities, and
low-frequency sounds is especially good for creating
that kind of situation.
So maybe the Taos investigation is looking for
one steady tone.
While the real problem is more complicated, maybe
the signal changes over time.
Maybe it only travels into the area under
certain atmospheric conditions.
Maybe it came from interference between different sounds.
That brings us to another possibility, beats.
When two frequencies are close to each other,
they can create the feeling of a slow
pulsing pattern.
Wow, wow, wow.
That slow pulse is not necessarily produced by
a separate low-frequency machine.
It can be created by two higher tones
interfering with each other.
That could matter in Taos because some hearers
describe the hum as modulated.
Not as completely steady, but pulsing.
If several physical sources are involved, different people
in different buildings could hear it with different
versions of the same general environment.
That gives us a model where the Taos
hum does not have to be one tone.
It could be an acoustic condition, a mix
of weak low-frequency signals.
When conditions are right, the signals become noticeable.
And only to people those hearings happen to
be sensitive in the right range.
But some hearers also describe something even deeper.
Not only sounds.
Vibration.
Pressure in the body.
That brings us to infrasound.
Infrasound normally means sound below 20 hertz.
People also call it inaudible.
But that is too simple.
At high enough sound pressure levels, humans can
actually detect infrasound.
And as the frequency gets lower, the experience
changes.
It becomes more like a musical tone.
As it becomes less like a musical tone,
it becomes more pulsing, more pressure, discomfort, or
even physical vibration.
So if the Taos Hum contains an infrasonic
part, maybe it would be difficult to detect
it using equipment or methods mainly designed for
normal audible sound.
There are many natural sources of infrasound.
Storms.
Ocean waves.
Volcanoes.
Earthquakes.
Large weather systems.
And there are also human-made sources too.
Explosions.
Large fans.
Industries.
Aircraft.
Turbines.
But Taos is not sitting in the middle
of an industrial center.
So maybe the natural environment becomes important.
Taos is close to the Rio Grande Rift.
This is a major geological system where the
Earth's crust has been stretched for millions of
years.
Could the ground itself create the vibration?
Groundwater.
Small seismic movement.
Rock movements.
Resonance inside the underground structures.
If a deep vibration moves through the ground
and entered buildings, it could help explain why
some people experience the hum more strongly than
others.
A floor.
A mall.
A pipe.
A bed.
The building itself can act like a resonator.
It's also worth remembering that under very specific
conditions, humans can sometimes notice weak patterns better
than simple instruments.
Not because the body is magical, but because
the brain can study a weak repeating pattern for
a long time.
If a microphone records a complicated sound environment,
a weak signal may disappear back into the
background noise.
But if a person lying in the same
bedroom every night, they slowly learn the pattern.
Some hearers also report that the Hum changes
when they move their heads.
Or is it stronger in one part of
the room than another?
That fits very well with standing waves.
When a low frequency sound reflects between walls,
floors, ceilings, it can form zones where the
sound becomes stronger.
And those zones where it almost disappears.
So a person might move a short distance
and hear a big, major difference.
But the physical hum theory does not stop
from normal acoustics.
Some people, the facts that researchers fail to
find normal sound point, sorry, normal sound sources
point toward electromagnetism and this is where the
Taos becomes more an acoustic mystery.
Can humans hear electromagnetic signals?
Not directly in the normal sense.
A radio signal does not move in the
eardrum in the same way as a sound
wave.
But there are documented physical situations where electromagnetic
energy can create an auditory sensation.
The best known example is the microwave auditory
effect, also called the Frey effect after researcher
Allan Frey.
Short pulses of microwave energy can, under certain
conditions, create tiny thermoelastic pressure waves inside tissue.
The hearing system can then detect those pressure
waves as clicks or other sounds like sensations.
That does not mean that the Taos Hum is
caused by microwaves, but it proves an important
principle.
A person can experience a sound if there
is no normal acoustic sound wave outside the
head for a nearby microphone to record.
If a technological signal creates the experience through
the body itself, then the microphone may not
be simply the wrong tool.
And that is where the military theories begin
to make more sense to some people.
New Mexico is not a random place in
the American military history.
Los Alamos, Sandia, White Sands, Kirtland Air Force
Base, the history of the nuclear weapons, rocket
testing, radar, advanced weapons research, secret projects.
The United States government really did run highly
classified technological programs in New Mexico.
That is not a conspiracy theory.
It's fact.
It's history.
So when people begin to experience a strange
signal and federal laboratories cannot explain it, some
people naturally ask, can it be military?
Transmitter?
Communication system?
Navigation system?
An experiment?
A signal that was never meant for human
beings, but some people still can detect.
During the Cold War, both the United States
and the Soviet Union developed systems using very
long electromagnetic frequencies.
VLF and ELF has unusual properties.
Very low frequency electromagnetic systems were studied and
used because they can reach places where normal
radio waves are difficult, including communication with submarines.
And when people look into the numbers without
separating sound waves from electromagnetic waves, something seems
strange.
The hum is often discussed in frequencies of
a few tens of hertz.
ELF also exists at extremely low frequencies.
So the connections become tempting.
Maybe the hum is an electromagnetic ELF signal.
From there the story actually moves toward HAARP.
H-A-A-R-P.
The High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, a
research facility in Alaska, built to study the
ionosphere.
HAARP uses a large antenna array to send
powerful radio signals into the ionosphere.
And through interactions with the ionosphere, HAARP can
create modulation in the VLF and ELF ranges.
That detail matTaos, because if someone says HAARP
can create ELF, there is a real physical
idea behind the statement.
Through interactions with the ionosphere, HAARP can create
a very low frequency electromagnetic signals.
So if the hum is electromagnetic instead of
acoustic, it is understandable that some people ask
whether high energy ionosphere experiments could play a
role.
Then we come to Schumann resonances.
The Earth and the ionosphere forms a huge
electromagnetic cavity.
Lightning storms around the world feed the energy
into this cavity.
This creates resonances.
The main one is about 7.8 hertz,
which is higher resonance above it.
That leads to an interesting idea.
If we live inside a planet-wide electromagnetic
resonance system, the human nervous system works electrically.
The brain contains rhythmic electrical activity.
So could especially sensitive people detect changes in
the Earth's electromagnetic environment.
And if the technology affects the ionosphere, could
it also affect the environment?
It's a big idea, but people find it
attractive for a reason.
It can explain why several parts of the
mystery at once.
Why are the hum reports found in many
places?
Because the signal is global.
Why is it hard to locate?
Because it's not normal sound coming from one
machine.
Why might a microphone fail to detect it?
Because the signal is not mainly acoustic.
Why do some people only some people notice
this?
Because biological sensitivity differs.
And why is the experience often stronger at
night?
Because normal background sounds become quieter and people
notice weaker sensations more easily.
The full idea becomes something like this.
The hum may not be a sound in
the normal sense.
It may be a physical signal that the
human nervous system sometimes converts into a sound
-like experience.
And this is where the Havana Syndrome becomes
a part of the story.
Starting in 2016, American diplomats, intelligence officers, and
family members reported unusual experiences.
Pressure, sounds, pain, dizziness, balance problems, cognitive problems.
One technological explanation discussed publicly was a pulse
radio frequency energy.
If technology can affect humans from a distance
and create strange auditory or neurological experiences, then
a technological hum at least has a possible
physical mechanism.
But not necessarily the same technology, but the
principle.
And in New Mexico, the rabbit hole goes
even deeper.
A few hours northwest of Taos is the
town of Dulce, a small community in the
Jicarilla Apache Reservation.
Since the 1980s, especially Dulce has become famous
in the conspiracy circles because of stories of
a secret underground base beneath Archuleta Mesa.
In the full story, this base is enormous.
Several underground levels, advanced military technology, genetic experiments,
UFOs, non-human beings, tunnel systems, blah, blah.
Phil Schneider later became one of the people
who made the story famous.
He claimed that he had worked on a
secret underground facility and had personally been involved
in the violent confrontation with non-human beings
beneath Dulce.
If you accept that story, the Taos Hum
changes completely.
The hum could then be imagined as a
side effect of a huge underground installation, with
ventilation systems, tunnel boring, generators, energy systems, communications,
etc.
in the Carilla Apache Reservation.
Since the 1980s especially Dulles becomes famous in
the conspiracy circles because of stories of a
secret underground base beneath Archuleta Mesa.
In the full story this base is enormous,
several underground levels, advanced military technology, genetic experiments,
UFOs, non-human beings, tunnel systems, blah blah.
Phil Schneider later became one of the people
who made the story famous.
He claimed that he had worked on a
secret underground facility and had personally been involved
in the violent confrontation with non-human beings
beneath Dulles.
If you accept that story the Taos Hum
changes completely.
The hum could then be imagined as a
side effect of a huge underground installation with
ventilation systems, tunnel boring, generators, energy systems, communications
equipment, something underground sending the vibrations through the
rock.
In the material used for this episode the
connection between the hum, underground tunnels, and the
wider four corners areas appears more than once.
It creates a story where geology, military secrecy,
and UFO mythology began to blend together and inside
that model the pieces from a surprisingly complete
picture.
A state with well-documented military research, large
empty areas, a major history of nuclear technology,
stories of underground facilities, a hum that researchers
simply cannot explain easily, and senses with people
who detect something instruments do not have clearly
identified, and a government that has in the
past keep major technological programs secret.
There's also a broader argument.
History contains examples of strange reports that were
first ignored but later turned out that to
have a real physical causes.
Low frequency industrial noise is one example.
A person may complain about a sound that
the neighbor cannot hear.
A normal sound meter may show nothing unusual,
but later a specialist analyze the low frequencies
and discover a fan or a compressor.
From this point on viewing saying we did
not measure it so it's not outside hum.
That may be too simple.
Maybe we just have not made the right
measurements yet.
That is the strongest versions of the alternative
theory.
The hum is real.
It's a physical source.
Maybe several sources.
People have different levels of sensitivity.
Buildings can amplify weak signals, and our measurements
may not have identified the exact process connecting
to the source, to the people who actually
hear it.
It does not have to be aliens.
It does not have to be HAARP.
It doesn't even have to be military.
It could be something as ordinary as machinery.
A complex long-distance sound moving through the
atmosphere as deep as the geological vibration.
And something technological that we have not yet
identified.
But in this model one basic idea remains.
When the hearer says there is something out
there, there is really something out there.
If we should have a look at the
rabbit hole then we need to leave Taos
for a moment.
Because Taos is not alone, not even close.
In Britain stories about strange hums have been
reported for decades.
The Bristol hum became especially famous in the
1970s.
Again people described the same kind of experience.
A deep machine-like sound.
Worse at night, hard to locate and only
some people could hear it.
Later became similar reports from other places.
Kokomo, Windsor, Auckland, Largs and many more.
This is where the idea of the worldwide
hum becomes interesting.
Canadian researchers Glen MacPherson began collecting of self
-reported hum cases in a global database.
When you look at the map it seems
dramatic.
Reports appear all over the world and many
people describe similar things.
Diesel engine sound, nighttime humming, a sound
that seems stronger indoors, pulsing and the experience
of being the only person in the house
that could hear it.
MacPherson's projects has suggested that maybe two to
four percent of people may experience some
kind of hum under the right conditions.
But one of the most interesting things about
the project's later direction is that MacPherson's did
not end up in one of those worldwide
machines.
Instead the project becomes, sorry, began separating people
who may react to real environmental sounds from
people whose Hum may come from inside the
hearing system.
That is important because the more hum cases
we studied the more it looks like the
world may be described several different things.
Look at Kokomo.
There investigators have found industrial components.
That tells us something important.
Some hums are real environmental sounds.
Then there is the Windsor in Canada.
For years residents complained about a deep vibration
and a low rumbling sound.
The Canadian government found scientific, sorry, founded a
scientific investigation.
Researchers found signals that seems to point toward
the Zug Island area on the American side
of the Detroit River.
It is a heavy industrialized area.
Researchers got close to an answer.
But even there the story did not end
with one technician finding of one machine.
Flipping one switch and saying, there, mystery solved.
Hum problems can acoustically be difficult.
And that actually supports one of the alternative
arguments.
Failing to locate a source does not always
mean there is no source.
But then we have Schumann resonance. 7.83
hertz.
That number appears again and again in alternative
explanation.
It has almost become a mystical number.
The earth frequency, the heartbeat of the planet,
some people connected to meditation, sleep, brainwaves, health,
consciousness, and the hum.
There is something almost poetic about the idea.
The earth really does have electromagnetic resonances.
And all of us live inside the electromagnetic
environment.
That part is real.
Schumann resonances are caused by electromagnetic waves moving
through the space between the earth and the
ionosphere, driven mainly by the lightning around
the planet.
But the question is whether Hum hearers are
is actually detecting them. Then we have HAARP.
HAARP has become something like a Swiss Army
knife in a modern conspiracy culture.
Earthquake? HAARP. Weather? HAARP. Strange sound? HAARP. Mind
control? HAARP.
And that is actually a shame because the
real HAARP is already interesting.
The facility has 180 antennas.
It can send up to 3.6 megawatts
of high frequency radio energy to study the
ionosphere.
That's real physics, real radio science.
And HAARP can create ELF and VLF modulation
through processes in the ionosphere.
We do not need to invent that what
HAARP does to make it interesting.
But going from that to saying therefore people
in Taos hear diesel engines is a much
bigger step. Then there is Havana Syndrome.
That's also difficult because real people reported real
symptoms.
There have been years of investigations.
Doctors, scientists, politicians and intelligence agencies have not
always agreed.
And some technological mechanism has been discussed are
not science fiction.
But we do not have a simple chain
that says Havana Syndrome equals microwave weapon.
Microwave weapon equals Taos Hum.
There are separate questions.
And the American intelligence community has remained diverted
in the part of the Havana Syndrome issue.
In an updated assessments in January 2025, five
of seven U.S. intelligence agencies still believe
that it is very unlikely that a foreign
enemy is responsible for the most of the
cases.
But two agencies with low confidence believe that
it is roughly possible for a foreign actor
to have developed or used a new technology
in a smaller number of incidents.
That is not exactly a clean Hollywood ending.
And finally... Dulce.
I have to concentrate a little here because
names like Archuleta Mesa and Jicarilla Apache were
clearly not designed for my Danish speaking podcast.
But the story is fascinating.
The Dulce conspiracy did not grow directly out
of the Taos Hum.
It is developed from the UFO reports of
cattle mutilation stories, Paul Bennewitz, claims about
underground facilities, and later Phil Schneider's lectures.
It is really its own conspiracy universe.
And its being close to a map does
not prove a new, does not prove a
connection.
But when two mysterious stories exist in the
same general region, people naturally begin to connect
them.
An unexplained vibration in Taos. A supposed underground
base near Dulce. Military laboratories in New Mexico.
UFO history. HAARP. ELF. Schumann resonance. Havana Syndrome.
Suddenly you no longer have one mystery.
You have a network.
And this is where we need to be
careful.
Human beings love networks of strange facts.
We love patterns.
But connection on a map does not always
have a connection in the real world.
So now we have reached the part where
we deliberately have waited for.
It's time to take the connections apart again.
So let's look at the critics.
We start with the simplest idea.
An unknown industrial machine that is physically possible.
We know ventilation systems, transformers, compressors, turbines, cooling
towers, pumps and heavy industrial can create low
frequency noise.
We also know low frequency noise can be
unusual, difficult to deal with.
It can travel far, it can move through
structures, and buildings can change the way it
is experienced.
So the explanation belongs high on the list
in any individual Hum case.
The problem in Taos is that the original
investigation did not find a steady outside acoustic
signal that matched the hearers what they have
reported.
That does not make industrial noise impossible.
But after many years without a clear source,
the idea becomes less satisfying if we try
to use it to explain the entire Taos
phenomenon.
Next is infrasound, also completely real.
And there is one myth that we should
get rid of.
Infrasound does not automatically, is impossible to hear.
Humans can detect extremely low frequencies if the
sound pressure is high enough.
Researchers have studied humans' perception at low, very
low frequencies.
And the frequency drops, the experience changes.
It becomes less a musical tone and more
like a pressure pulsing or individual waves.
So that part works.
But there's another problem.
If infrasound is strong enough to create a
clear and constant experience, proper equipment should normally
be able to measure it.
And on a worldwide infrasonic source, it is
supposed to explain every Hum report.
It is also to explain why people match
different frequencies, and why experiences are varied so
much, and why some people say that the
homes follow them when they travel.
Then there's geology.
Taos sits on an interesting geological area.
But an interesting geological location is not the
same thing as evidence for particular vibration.
The earth is constantly producing background seismic noises.
Ocean waves can create small seismic signals that
travel across continents.
Wind and weather can create signals too.
But if geology is going to explain the
Taos Hum, we need a measurable chain: a
geological process, a specific signal, a transmission path,
a clear connection to what the hearers experience.
We do not have that chain.
And then we come to Schumann resonance.
Here we need to separate two very different
things that often get mixed together because they
are measuring in hertz.
Hertz simply means cycles per second.
A guitar string can vibrate with a certain
number of times per second.
An electrical signal can do the same.
Electromagnetic waves also have a frequency.
But that does not make it that the
same physical things.
The Schumann resonance around 7.8 hertz
is electromagnetic.
It is not a normal sound floating through
the air like a giant subwoofer.
So if Schumann resonance causes the Hum, there
need to be a biological mechanism that converts
this very weak electromagnetic field into a sound
experience.
And this is where the evidence becomes weak.
Schumann resonances are real, but the popular idea
that people simply hear Earth's 7.83-hertz frequency
is not established science.
The same problems appears when people compare human
resonance with brain waves.
The two things can exist in similar frequency
ranges without directly interacting.
Similar numbers are not evidence of physical connections.
Then there is HAARP.
The facility exists.
It's powerful.
It studies the ionosphere.
It can indirectly create ELF and VLF signals.
All is documented.
HAARP's main transmitter operates in a high frequency
radio range, roughly between 2.7 and 10
.0 megahertz.
The ELF and VLF effects are produced indirectly
through the ionosphere.
But we do not have a connection to
TERS.
There is no documented correlation between HAARP activities
and the hum.
No recorded HAARP-related signal has been found
around hearers.
And the timeline is not especially helpful either.
TERS' story is already developing while HAARP itself
was being developed in the 1990s.
Of course, someone can always suggest an earlier
military system.
But the moment a theory requires an unnamed
secret system in order to survive, it
becomes much harder to test.
That does not make it logical impossible, but
the evidence becomes weaker.
Then we have the microwave auditory effect.
This may be the alternative theory's strongest technical
point.
Yes.
Electromagnetic energy can, under certain conditions, create an
auditory sensation.
That's real.
But the classic microwave auditory effect is more
often described as clicks, buzzing, or short sound
experiences connected to a pulsed signal.
To use it as an explanation for a
constant low frequency hum, we would need a
exposure source.
Where is the transmitter?
How powerful is it?
What frequencies does it use?
What pulse patterns?
Why does it affect these people?
Why, for years or even decades, where are
the locations?
No one has provided a complete chain of
evidence for Taos.
Havana Syndrome does not automatically make the connection
stronger.
It shows that discussing possible radio frequencies' effects
on people is not completely absurd.
But Havana Syndrome is itself still disputed and
unresolved.
It cannot take one mystery, place it underneath
another mystery, and call it result-proof.
Then there's Dulce.
Here the problem becomes much bigger.
There is no verified evidence for a huge
human-alien underground base described in the Dulce
stories.
No confirmed technical plans.
No verified workers with documents proving that the
base exists as described.
No independently confirmed tunnel system in the claimed
scale.
No physical evidence proving the existence of non
-human beings described in the stories.
Phil Schneider told dramatic stories, but his claims
about an underground battle cannot be established as
a historical fact from the evidence available.
That means Dulce may be a fascinating cultural
rabbit hole, but as an explanation for the
TEROS hum, the evidence is extremely weak.
And now we come for the most difficult
explanations for some hearers to accept.
The ear itself, tinnitus.
Some hearers reject this immediately because the hum
feels external.
They say, I know what tinnitus feels like.
It is coming from the house, the road,
the ground.
But our hearing system is incredibly good at
placing sound.
And sometimes it can place sounds incorrectly.
The brain builds our sense with the sound
that is located using timing, loudness, reflections, and
other signals.
An internal sound does not always feel like
it's coming from a tiny speaker inside our
head.
Tinnitus can feel inside one ear, both ears,
inside the head, or something less clearly defined.
And then in 2026, a very relevant study
was published.
Researchers studied 28 people who reported almost constantly
low humming or pulsing sounds.
The mid-range of the frequency they matched
the hum was about 50 hertz.
Researchers tested two important possibilities.
First, are these people simply unusually good hearing
low frequency sounds?
For most of them, the answer was no.
There were a few exceptions, but as a
group, they do not have the extremely low
frequency hearing sensitivity we would expect if they
were hearing normal outside sound that everyone else
simply missed.
Second, could they be hearing spontaneous low frequency
sounds produced by their own ears?
Researchers look for low frequency spontaneous uh auto
-acoustic emissions.
They did not find what would be needed
to explain the experience in that way either.
The overall conclusion was that subjective low frequency
tinnitus probably explains many of the cases.
And notice there were many, not necessarily all.
The researchers did not rule out a real
outside sound source for every person.
And to me, that might be the most
interesting part of the entire story.
Science may slowly be moving away from the
questions, what is the source of the hum?
And towards different questions, what type of hum
is this particularly person experiencing?
That is a very different question.
So if you look what actually holds up,
let's start clearing the table.
What do we actually know?
We know that people in Taos reported a
hum.
That's documented.
We know the problem was taken seriously enough
for a multidisciplinary scientific investigation.
That is also documented.
We know that only a small part of
the population reported the experience.
Around two percent was used as a conservative
estimate.
We know researchers did not find one external
acoustic seismic electromagnetic source that could explain the
hearer's experience.
That matTaos.
So the documented mystery is not.
Scientists detected a mysterious 40-hertz sound across
Taos and still cannot explain where it comes
from.
That would be a much stronger mystery.
But that was not what happened.
The real story is this.
People reported an experience.
Researchers could not find an outside signal that
clearly matched the experience.
So what is likely?
It is very likely that some hum cases
around the world are caused by ordinary outside
sources.
We have real examples of low frequency industrial
noise.
So when someone complains about a hum, the
first response should not automatically be tinnitus.
The first response should probably be, let's measure
the environment properly.
Vibration, pumps, transformers, heat pumpss, cooling systems, industry,
traffic, ships, compressors, wind, building resonance pipes.
All of this matTaos.
It is also likely that some people are
more sensitive to low frequencies than other people.
Human hearing thresholds vary.
And with low frequency sound, a small change
in the sound pressure can sometimes mean the
difference between almost nothing and something extremely annoying.
Then we have what is possible.
Atmospheric and geological conditions may sometimes allow weak
signals to travel in a strange way.
There may be interactions between outside sounds and
the human hearing system.
Weak signals could possibly trigger or strengthen an
internal sound perception.
But it does not always mean that it
has to be either.
And finally we have the speculative idea.
HAARP as the source of the Taos Hum.
Secret ELF weapons. Global military transmissions. Schumann resonance
as a direct auditory cause. Dulce Base. Underground alien
facilities.
In some cases we have real technology, but
no evidence connecting them to Taos.
In other cases the supposed source itself has
never been verified.
And then we have tinnitus.
That is no longer just boring default answers.
Modern hearing research makes it a serious candidate,
especially because it can explain some of the
strangest details.
Why other people do not hear the hum?
Why microphones do not record it?
Why some people hear it in different places?
Why the frequencies differ between people?
And why the experience still feels completely real?
The last point is important.
If the hum is caused by tinnitus, that
does not mean that the person is pretending
to hear something.
The perception itself is real.
Every sound you would ever experience finally exists
inside the brain.
That includes my voice right now.
The difference is where the signal begins.
In a microphone, in the ear, in the
cochlea, in the auditory nerve, or somewhere deeper
inside the hearing system.
Maybe that question about where the signal
begins.
It is the real tale's mystery.
If we look at the final balance, at
the beginning of the episode I asked you
to imagine an engine outside the house.
You hear the engines, but you do not
find the vehicle.
For more than 30 years people have been
asking where is the vehicle.
Maybe that was the wrong question, because the
hum may not be one thing.
In Kokomo a hum may come from industrial
equipment.
Somewhere else it may come from a compressor.
In another house building resonances may be involved.
One person may be unusually sensitive to real
low frequency sound.
Another person may be experiencing low frequency tinnitus.
And there may be some cases where we
do not have a satisfying explanation.
That is less elegant than the idea than
one secret worldwide transmitter.
But nature does not owe us an elegant
mystery.
At the same time we should not make
the opposite mistake.
We should not say we have a possible
neurological explanation, so we never need to
investigate the environment again.
That would be too lazy.
Industrial hums are real.
Low frequency noises are real.
Infrasound are real.
Human sensitivity varies and complicated acoustic problems can
be very difficult to identify.
So where does that leave Taos?
It's something that to me is actually more
interesting than one simple answer.
The Taos Hum is not a good mystery
because it proves secret weapons.
It does not.
And it's not a good mystery because science
has proven that every ear has simply tinnitus.
Science has not proved that either.
It's a good mystery because it sits right
on the border between the world outside us
and the world of our senses that are
built inside of.
Normally we do not think about the difference.
We open the eyes and the world seems
to be there.
We listen and the sound seems to be
there.
But our senses are not windows.
They are interpretations.
And that means that two people can stand
in the same room and honestly live in
two different sound worlds.
One person hears silence.
The other people hear an engine that never
stops.
And I think that's strange enough.
We do not really need an underground alien
base to make it interesting.
But if you're lying if you're lying awake
tonight and suddenly you hear deep engine sound
somewhere outside the window.
Well how far the rabbit hole do you
want to go?
It's completely up to you.
See you next week.