"On this episode of "Strange Science,"" "is the ghost of a child caught beneath the decks of the Queen Mary?" "We'll hear from the world's noisiest sands." "Believers call it "speaking in tongues."" "Is it a real language?" "We'll investigate Pennsylvania's mysterious ringing rocks." "They call it the "Taos hum."" "Is it real, and could it be caused by secret military activity?" "Jackie, talk to me." "What is it?" "Okay, talk to me again." "Can the dead speak?" "And if so, has anyone ever successfully recorded the voices of the deceased?" "Is this the voice of a disembodied spirit or a hoax aimed at the gullible?" "Talk to me, talk to me, talk to me." "Over the last, oh, 1 1 6 years, there have been some accounts of apparitions or ghosts that have verbally communicated with their observers." "Now, the problem with this is it's hard to document." "And, while you may be able to record these audible utterances, it's hard to determine their source." "A ghost, in my opinion, is the ethereal double of its physical counterpart." "And I believe that one becomes a ghost as a result of an untimely or tragic death." "One place these ethereal doubles are rumored to inhabit is the famed retired ocean liner the Queen Mary, now docked in the harbor at Long Beach, California." "The Queen Mary was launched in 1934 to great fanfare." "Streamlined, elegant, and fast, she quickly became the favorite choice of Transatlantic travel for the wealthy and famous." "Filled with rich and luxurious appointments, the ship set a new standard for deluxe accommodation." "After exactly 1,001 trips across the Atlantic, the grande dame of sea travel was retired in 1967." "And she began a new career as a floating tourist attraction." "But now, other than the sounds of conventioneers, honeymooners, and Prom Night carousers, does the ship contain other unregistered guest?" "Psychic Peter James thinks so." "I believe that the Queen Mary is the most haunted vessel in the world because I was privileged to conduct research here for a period of about three years." "During that time, in my opinion, I encountered at least 600 ghosts." "Where could all these ghosts have come from?" "During the Second World War, the Queen Mary was outfitted as a troop ship." "In a dark moment, kept secret until after the War, the ship was running under a no-stop order in the North Atlantic, when a destroyer escort mistakenly crossed in front of the bow." "The HMS Curacoa was sliced like a sardine under a knife." "300 men died in the cold, choppy water." "The first experience that I had with ghosts on the Queen Mary was before I even worked there." "I had come with my family to visit the ship and we took a guided tour." "And we were down in the First Class swimming pool." "As the tour group was leaving, we heard the voice of what sounded like a small girl." "And then I started working here, and I was down in the swimming pool, walking through the tour route, and I heard the same voice." "It was very distinct." "It was definitely a little girl." "And I though it was unusual that it was five years later." "And still I heard the same voice." "But of all the supposed ghosts on the ship, this ghostly voice heard by tour guide Lea la Russo is the only one that has made any effort to be heard." "In 1991, psychic Peter James captured on tape his communication with this same ghostly voice, a spirit he called Jackie." "In the Second Class swimming pool, I encountered a child ghost." "And during the conversation, she said her name was Jacqueline, Jackie." "Jackie." "The moment that we opened up the doors to the pool, she began talking." "Let me help you." "What is it?" "Okay, talk to me again." "There's only three possible sources for this phenomena." "One possibility, it's coming from the person who claims they can make it occur." "Another possibility is that something is in the environment and the person sort of animates it, brings it into reality." "And the other possibility is, of course, that is, in fact, discarnate." "What I learned about Jackie is that she is lost." "I don't believe she's aware of being dead or being on the other side." "You don't have to stay here." "What's that, what's that?" "We were intrigued by Peter James' video, and decided to host our own investigation in the Queen Mary's First Class swimming pool area." "Our first goal was to see if we could capture" "Jackie's voice on tap ourselves." "We assembled a professional sound crew and deployed an array of eight highly-sensitive directional mikes, in order to fix the location of any sound in the room." "Why hello there, Dr. Taff." "Hi." "Nice to see you." "Peter James was brought into the room and swept for any broadcasting devices." "At 1 0:00 p.m., the entire pool area was locked up tight and sealed." "A motion detector was placed at the main entrance, to keep anyone from wandering in." "sealed off, the pool area is an eerie chamber, just the place you'd expect to find a ghost if they actually do exist." "In his attempts to contact Jackie," "Peter is animate, urging, even aggressive." "Jacie." "Communicate with me." "I need you to talk to me." "Make your presence know now." "But Jackie wasn't talking that night, at least, not to us." "Jackie!" "But there was one odd sound." "Buried very deep in the room noise, listen carefully for the high-pitched squeal." "Listen." "Did you hear that, like a screech?" "That's actually how she begins talking." "Hello?" "Jackie, is that you?" "Are these squeals and Peter's 1991 conversations actually the voice of six-year-old Jackie's disembodied spirit or merely a cleverly staged hoax?" "We took all the tapes to a state-of-the-art sound studio for analysis." "Using sophisticated acoustical analysis software, each recorded event was translated into a sound wave." "The large dark clusters are Peter speaking, and the narrow dark areas are allegedly Jackie." "We asked Dr. Peter Lagefoged, a world-renowned expert in acoustics and linguistics, to determine if any of the Jackie samples could have been generated by a human voice." "First, we looked at the squeal we captured with our crew." "... Carried, I'm back." "Talk to me." "Yes?" "Listen." "We then analyzed Peter James' 1991 Jackie tapes." "Jackie, are you here?" "Yes?" "Talk to me?" "Yes, there is, there'd seem, really high-pitched straight line running across the whole thing, which is, I think, could not conceivably be made by a human." "Then we analyzed the so-called "singing" Jackie event from Peter's 1991 tape." ""I look not, I look not."" "This singing type of noise probably was produced by a human voice." "What is it?" "Okay, talk to me again." "This recording shows somebody who was talking as a human being, and then in between the human saying these things, there is another sound, which almost certainly is another human." "What is it?" "When people are talking, they normally overlap, if they're two different people." "And the only thing that we have seen here is that they do not overlap." "What is it?" "It's like a ventriloquist." "A ventriloquist can't talk at the same time in one voice as another." "It's not a tape recorder, or it's not a child I had down there." "I'm not a ventriloquist." "I've been accused of all of the above." "And I realize this is very, very controversial." "But she has spoken a number of times, witnessed by hundreds of people." "After several tense late night hours onboard the Queen Mary, our investigation caught one non-human squeal, while the psychic - in a totally unscientific manner recorded reels of interesting but unintelligible chatter from an unknown source." "Was it the psychic himself disguising his voice, the disembodied spirit of a lost child, or some still unexplained phenomenon?" "I don't see any evidence here that would really convince me that this was something out of the ordinary or out of a supernatural event." "To the believer, no explanation is necessary, and to the non-believer, no explanation is possible." "Coming up, most sand dunes are silent." "But not these." "We'll investigate booming sands, on "Strange Science."" "Sand." "We think of it as a metaphor for the impermanence of things, as it shifts silently through the passage of time." "But not all sand is silent." "Nature has its share of surprises, its own peculiar way of shattering our preconceptions." "Throughout the world, there are noisy sands that boom, and even sing." "Professor Franco Nori is an Italian physicist at the University of Michigan, who became intrigued by the acoustic properties of sand." "The first reaction was of disbelief." "Why would sand produce any sound at all?" "I was used to the silent garden-variety kind of sand, where you walk and you don't hear any squeaks or whistles or roarings or barkings." "Early nomadic tribes encountering these unexpected sounds created imaginative myths to explain their origin." "Chinese legends described unseen thunderstorms and angry gods." "While in the Mid East, phantom armies were heard to clash in the desert." "One North African myth tells of a cathedral that has been swallowed by the desert." "And the sounds heard are the bells, which are now beneath the desert sands." "Singing sands are the most common acoustic sand phenomena, which occurs on the beaches in Japan, England, and the United States." "Manchester By The Sea, Massachusetts is the site of a well-known singing beach." "Pat Martinez is the town librarian and a lifelong resident." "The sand at Singing Beach is not a coarse sand." "And it's not really a fine sand." "It's in between." "It's very soft to the touch." "It's not white, it's sort of a yellowish-white." "And when you walk on it, it makes a rather unique squeaking noise." "But why does the sand sing?" "One theory holds that when polished sand grains of similar size are compressed underfoot, they shear past each other with what is called "stick-slip motion."" "We asked Professor Nori for a simple demonstration, using chalk and a blackboard." "Well, here you can see skid marks, indicating the stick-slip motion, which is the analog of what happens with wind instruments, like violins or cellos." "The stick-slip motion indicates there's a vibration in the object and this vibration creates the sound." "To really hear the sound, one does what the Manchester locals call" ""The Singing Beach Shuffle."" "The Singing Beach Shuffle is when you kind of scuff your feet along, so that you can hear the squeaking sound." "You see mostly children doing it." "They go around in circles and they see who can squeak the loudest, and it's kind of a strange thing to do." "In the lab, the Manchester sand speaks with a different voice." "This is a container that has squeaking sand, also known as whistling sand, which is found at many beaches and lakeshores around the world." "And I'm going to take this glass beaker, put pressure on it, and make a rotation." "So when you shear the sand, or when you compress it, it makes like a whistling or squeaking kind of sound." "Deep in some of the world's most remote deserts exist a much rare phenomenon, booming sand." "The 13th Century explorer Marco Polo was the first European to encounter booming sands, on his way to China." ""These sands," he said, "at times filled the air with the sound of all kinds of musical instruments."" "Kelso Dunes, in California's Mojave National Preserve, contains sand which, under the right conditions, make a distinctive booming sound." "Ranger James Woolsey of the National Park Service helps conserve this unique environment." "The reason they boom has to do with the quality of the sand itself." "The sand grains that are here actually blew from the Mojave River." "Sediment builds up through evaporation of the Mojave River, as it flows through the desert." "And that sediment builds up and builds up and when we get nice strong windstorms, the wind blows the sand grains to the Kelso Dunes." "They have to travel a long distance." "And the reason that's important is it has to knock off the rough edges." "And it makes the sand grains round." "And the feature that makes them boom is when the sand grains fall off the top of the sand dunes." "As the sand grains flow down, rubbing against each other, they actually begin vibrating audibly, and that vibration is what causes the sand to boom." "Many people try to imitate the sound of booming sand dunes." "It's a very difficult thing to do." "It's been said that it sounds a little bit like the didjeridu, t he Australian Aboriginal instrument that's used." "But it's a very unique sound." "Something like..." "We asked Ranger Woolsey to create a small sand avalanche near the top of a dune's peak." "Listen for the low-pitched rumble." "Cleaned by a recent rain and retaining just the right amount of moisture, these unusual grains of sand lock into sheets, creating an audible vibration." "Even a slight hand motion will create a small boom." "We asked Professor Nori to create a comparative sound analysis of coming versus regular sand." "This container has silent sand." "And I will shake it, we're going to record the sound, using this microphone, and then, later on, analyze the signal." "Now, I'm going to shake a different container that has booming sand." "If you compare them together, you see the intensity of the sound versus time is very weak on the silent sand." "You can shake it as hard as you want." "It's very tiny." "In the cakes of booming sand, the amplitude fluctuations are large." "What seems like just a curiosity in the lab can become an awesome event when large amounts of sand shear off into an avalanche." "In North America, Japan, China, and Africa, oil spills and other pollutants from human activity have coated the sand grains, reducing their ability to boom or sing." "I've noticed, myself, in the last couple of years, that the squeak is not as significant as it used to be." "It used to be very loud." "It was, you know, you couldn't help but notice the sound." "Now, you really have to force it to make the noise, which you never had to do before." "The enigma of exactly why some sands sing and others boom is still a mystery." "Tantalizing pieces of the puzzle are understood, but more research is necessary." "Meanwhile, the sand continues to speak, however muffled its voice has become." "Next up, these people speak an unknown language." "We'll investigate speaking in tongues, on "Strange Science."" "What is this mysterious language?" "Some say they can easily translate it into English." "Others say it's nonsense." "Anthropologists call it "glossolalia" or "speaking in tongues."" "William Samarin is Professor Emeritus in Linguistic Anthropology at the University of Toronto." "Glossolalia is a pseudo-language, nonsense language, having only superficial similarities with natural languages." "Samarin believes glossolalia is regressive speech - random utterances that hark back to the simplest syllables learned in childhood." "But Father Mike Sears, a priest at the Saint Francis of Rome Church in Azuza, California, believes there's something more to glossolalia than just random syllables." "The gift of tongues is the Holy Spirit using the person's voice and their ability to speak." "The Holy Spirit is touching the person, to proclaim, to speak or to pray or to sing in another language or an unknown language to give praise to God." "Father Sears is a priest in the Charismatic branch of the Catholic faith." "Followers in this tradition place importance on the use of Charismatic gifts." "These include the gift of tongues, miracles, and the gift of healing." "The gift of tongues brings a calming peace, and a lot of people receive a type of emotional healing from stress." "Throughout history, glossolalia has been practiced by many cultures." "Ancient Hebrews and Muslims utilized speaking in tongues for their prophecies." "More recently, the puritanical Quakers and Shakers have gone into states of religious ecstasy and spoken in tongues." "Even in Ancient Greece, the Oracle at Delphi would speak in tongues, which would then be interpreted by the priests." "In much the same fashion, Father Sears invites the congregation to speak in tongues, and then offer an interpretation." "Father Mike himself begins speaking in tongues." "After a few moments, a member of the congregation named Jon Pavlovsky gives his interpretation of a message he believes comes from a divine source." "My Son was victorious over death because of my love for Him and His love and oneness with me." "You shall be with me." "Don't be afraid." "Father Sears does not dispute such translations, but some in the scientific community do." "The interpretation of somebody speaking in tongues and someone interpreting that utterance is a religious event." "But I can see no way, other than rejecting it on a scientific basis." "There is no message, there's no way that the person can interpret that message." "But to believers like Jon Pavlovsky, the experience is real - a direct connection with God." "Something comes over me or into me that I will either feel an image, a picture, or I will get a feeling, emotion." "I pray internally to say if this, if what I'm getting is from you and you want me to speak out, then I'll just begin to speak." "And you'll go with it." "But how could a person possibly believe he or she hears language in a line of nonsense syllables?" "Brain function studies may hold the answer." "Stuart Fischoff is a professor of psychology at Cal State Los Angeles." "There is some research that shows temporal lobe activity when people have religious experiences, have a sense of spirituality." "Research has shown that temporal lobe activity occurs within the brain when people have mystical or religious experiences." "Their brain then signals them to interpret these routine sensory events as being deeply meaningful." "In this state, even a blade of grass or a tree can seem profound." "Could this be why people who interpret glossolalia hear a message instead of gibberish?" "We all impart whatever meaning our culture dictates to whatever kind of event is transpiring." "So that, sure, they could find religious meaning in something, whereas somebody else might find it simply a whimsy." "Passages in the New Testament describe the Holy Spirit coming down upon Saint Paul and Christ's Disciples and causing them to speak in tongues, or "tongues of fire," as the Bible calls it." "When in this state, the Bible says the Disciples were sometimes able to speak foreign languages they never learned." "I've heard many, many stories about somebody actually speaking modern human languages without having previous knowledge of that language." "Linguists call this phenomenon "xenoglossia,"" "but there is no solid proof that it has ever occurred." "I get inquiries from all over the world." "People send me tape recordings, asking me what this language is or if they're, sometimes they get frightened." "They begin speaking in something they called speaking in foreign language all gibberish and they're, and they get frightened." "I have never, ever found any sample of spontaneous glossolalia that could be identified with any human language, that was even similar to any human language." "Felicitas Goodman is a retired professor of anthropology and linguistics from Denison University in Granville, Ohio." "She has studied glossolalia in several different countries." "I have, many times, tried to run down recordings of such xenoglossia." "Somebody would say "When we heard Brother Robert Speak in tongues for the first time, that was ancient Greek."" "I would say "Do you know any Greek?" "No."" ""Have you ever heard any ancient Greek?"" ""No, but this was ancient Greek."" ""Was it recorded?" "Yes, it was recorded."" ""Well, could you get me a tape?"" "And then, it was like a wild goose chase." "I never was able to run down a tape." "But why do people think they are hearing a foreign language when they hear xenoglossia?" "It's the inventory of sounds, consonants and vowels, gives people the impression that something is like one of the languages of the world that we know." "What these people ignore, however, is intonation." "Every language has a range of intonational patterns." "In other words, we evoke a certain meaning." "And that is what we do not get in glossolalia." "For thousands of years, people have been speaking an unintelligible language from which others claim to derive meaning." "Is glossolalia nonsense or divine communication?" "You start to see how this gift brings unity to the Church." "It brings unity to the people, and it's a sign and gift of God." "Without grammar, syntax, or vocabulary, glossolalia fails the tests that define all known languages." "But to the people who speak it, it has a meaning scientists will never understand." "Coming up, why do these rocks ring when struck?" "Real rock music from Ring Rocks Park, on "Strange Science."" "In the scenic Delaware River Valley lies a very unusual rock formation." "Ron Sloto is a geologist with the US Geological Survey." "We're here in Ringing Rocks Park, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania." "This is a very unique geological setting." "And it's one of the few places in the world where rocks will ring when struck with a hammer." "For hundreds of years, people have been both mystified and amazed by these boulders that make music." "Terry Beard is a musician who has been coming to the Ringing Rocks Park since he was a boy." "I grew up in this area, and we used to drive by here a lot." "And when I got my driver's license for the first time," "I decided to take a ride one day and showed up in here and started banging on some rocks." "Now, the first time I came back to the park," "I was just here with no hammers." "I didn't expect to be in here." "Actually,I kind of landed here by mistake." "I was sitting there, just banging with another rock." "I realized, hey, there's music here." "It was everywhere." "We asked Terry to show us some of the odd characteristics of the rocks." "While most rocks will emit only a single pitch, like this boulder, some rocks contain two separate and distinct tones, perhaps caused by uneven internal stressing." "More perplexing is the observation that rocks chipped from boulders ring at the same tone as their mother rock, despite their vast difference in size." "But it's not just the rocks' musical anomalies that have confounded some people." "Legend has it that the rock field possesses strange powers." "Compasses are said to spin and airplanes lose their bearings." "Although geologist Ron Sloto claims the builder field has no known magnetic anomaly." "Some people say that the boulder field causes interference with radio transmissions, or with the compasses on planes that are flying overhead, and that's not true." "There's nothing in this boulder field that would cause such a disturbance." "Other legends say that the area is a dead zone, where no plants or animals can survive." "But clearly, the surrounding vegetation is already encroaching on the field, and this dog appears completely unaffected." "Some have even claimed that the strange forces in the rocks cause people to become disoriented." "The only disorientation I've ever experienced is my normal disorientation." "But no, as far as I can tell, there's nothing really different about the area." "But geologically, Ringing Rocks Park is very different from the surrounding area." "A specific mineral composition, combined with the park's unique geological history and climate, causes these rocks to ring, when most stones don't." "These rocks are about 200 million years old." "They date from the beginning of the Jurassic period, the same Jurassic period as "Jurassic Park,"" "when T. Rex and his friends roamed the Earth." "Volcanic lava intruded into underground layers of rock in the area known as the Newark Basin." "As it hardened under tremendous pressure, diabase rock was formed." "Over time, the covering layers of Earth and rock eroded." "The diabase was uplifted and shattered into a field of boulders by glacial freezing and thawing." "There are many diabase outcrops in southeastern Pennsylvania, but ringing rocks are only found in boulder fields such as this one." "And that's because the boulder fields are dry and hot and exposed to the sun and the rocks weather differently than they do in areas that are wooded or shaded when diabase rock weathers, chemical erosion forms a mineral rind around the stones.." "this strong, shell-like coating constricts the rocks and keeps them under constant pressure." "When the rock is under compression and you strike it with the hammer, it vibrates and it rings." "If you strike an ordinary rock, it does not vibrate and it doesn't produce a sound." "But if you strike a rock that's under compression, such as these diabase boulders, they will vibrate." "If you put your hand on the rock and hit it with the hammer, you can actually feel the rock vibrate." "The same rock, if you remove the rind and they're no longer compressed, the same rock will no longer vibrate." "While this one over here is dead, this one over here is alive." "Dead." "Actually, it's not quite dead." "If you get up close to it, you can hear a ring." "Some of them are too subtle." "This one, that's not very subtle." "In Asia and other parts of the world, rocks have been used to make music for centuries." "Laurence Libin is the curator of musical instruments at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art." "These stones which are very brittle and hard internally are the ones that ring best." "And I think people discovered this ringing property by accident." "They didn't set out to look for rocks that sounded." "But probably accidentally by knocking against things." "Early people realized that some of these very hard stones were more apt to make a pure tone than the soft sandstones." "And so when people wanted to make instruments out of rock, they began looking for the hard materials, probably formed by volcanic forces." "The museum's collection includes a very whimsical rock instrument." "This is one of my favorite instruments in the while collection." "This is called a Rock Harmonicon." "And it's a really a kind of xylophone, but instead of wooden slabs, it's made with stone slabs." "Each rock is individually shaped by chipping away the edges and the bottom, underneath, in order to make it sound the right pitch." "And once it's been chipped away and the right pitch has been found..." "It never has to be tuned again, because the rock is very stable and it's not affected by humidity or temperature." "So it's in tune and will stay in tune forever, unless we drop one." "It came into our collection about 1 890, when it was left here by a family named Till, who were English musicians who performed in the music halls and vaudeville stage." "Long before the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, the Tills were advertising themselves as a rock band." "Real rock music, this is real rock music." "This is Rachmaninoff." "This is a rock concert." "And we have rock and roll." "We asked Terry to bring together a group of musician friends for a special concert." "Well, our first piece is going to be Beethoven's Fifth." "No, we're just kidding." "I guess you'd call it Earth music." "We're just going to get rhythm structures and see where they go." "It's a very impromptu kind of setting and we're just here to have a good time and make some sound." "Music curator Laurence Libin believes people may have been playing this kind of music since the beginning of time." "It's very likely that every culture, at some time in the distant past, used rocks to make music." "Even hitting two stones together rhythmically to accompany a dance is a form of music." "I think that the first people who realized that stones can make music were probably amazed and astonished and very, very happy and delighted, because it's a gift from nature." "It's not something that people set out to try to do, originally." "Volcanoes, glaciers, and millions of years ofjust the right kind of weathering have all contributed to create one of nature's most melodic surprises, rock music." "Next up, the Taos Hum." "Is this curious phenomenon a military secret?" "On "Strange Science."" "Taos, in the mountains of northern New Mexico, has long been a sacred place to Native Americans." "In modern times, its beauty and serenity have become an inspiration to artists, writers, and musicians." "But what is this sound, intruding on the tranquil landscape?" "A grating ,grinding, low frequency buzz invades the peace and quiet of 1 1 percent of the population." "It affects all ages, genders, and races, sometimes causing migraines, dizziness, and other symptoms." "Many of the hearers suffer from loss of sleep, when the masking sounds of daytime activity subside and the air is still." "The phenomenon is called "the Taos Hum."" "Sarah Allen, a broadcast engineer at KTAO Radio is Taos, hears the hum." "It's very annoying." "It almost seems to vibrate my teeth, and it's just so distracting that it'll wake me up from a sound sleep." "The hum was first heard in Albuquerque in 1989." "Then, there was a surge of reports in Taos in 1991." "The groundswell of complaints and resulting media attention prompted government officials to investigate." "Professor Joe Mullins, head of the Department of Mechanical" "Engineering at the University of New Mexico, was asked to head a team to study the hum." "These people were very disturbed." "They were very upset." "They felt their life was being invaded." "They hear this deep, disturbing sound all the time." "Mullins brought together scientists from Sandia and Los Alamos National Labs." "First, they interviewed dozens of those who claimed to hear the hum." "One of the things that was clear is that it's a sound that's fairly continuous." "They hear it a lot." "It doesn't come and go." "The other thing is they hear it over a wide area." "It's persistent." "And the other thing is that most of them describe it somewhat the same way, which is interesting." "To me, the Taos Hum sounds like a diesel locomotive or a diesel truck which is parked and idling off and it's in the distance." "Mullins and his team put together an array of highly sensitive microphones, special sensors, and customized listening devices capable of detecting sounds far below the range of the human ear." "They spent a week in various sites around Taos, looking for the hum." "We had three geophones planted in the ground to look for seismic disturbances." "We had an array of antenna just for sweeping the electromagnetic spectrum all the way to 50 to 1 00 gigahertz, all the way down to very low frequencies." "We had an electrostatic detector, to sense changes in electrostatic fields." "We had magnetometers, to sense the changes in the magnetic fields." "And we would run them all the time, and record everything." "And what were the findings of all this high tech gear?" "We could hear remarkable things." "We could hear automobiles down on the road." "We could hear airplanes long before the ear picked them up." "Thins like that, but we could hear no tone that came anywhere close to being what the hearers were hearing." "If the official investigation found no external answers, could there be an internal physiological explanation for the hum?" "Louis Slesin is the editor of Microwave News, a publication that caters to military and civilian users of electromagnetic radiation." "We get reports all the time of people hearing things, you know, and one might say that you're talking loony tunes here, but I would say that the human body is more delicate and has more powers" "of perception than maybe we've realized." "Hum hearers of all ages were checked by audiologists." "And most of them that had their ears checked were found to have quite normal hearing." "Studies at the University of New Mexico Medical School also ruled out tinnitus, a common ear disease affecting millions of Americans, as a likely cause of the hum." "The opinion of the ear expert that I worked with was that tinnitus is a disease that produces a sound that's a nerve disturbance." "It produces a sound that's only at high frequency." "But the hum is almost always reported at the unusually low frequency of 30 to 80 hertz." "Many exasperate hum hearers abandoned their homes to try to find solace elsewhere." "But strangely, their troubles did not end." "By and large, most of the people who go somewhere else start hearing it again." "One in Santa Fe left to a place in Texas where she started hearing it again." "Did these people take the sound with them or is it from some long range source that, once attuned, people with highly sensitive hearing can pick up almost anywhere?" "I suppose it is possible that, somehow or other, the ear is itself becoming hypersensitive to low frequencies." "And maybe, with some people who are too sensitive, it tunes itself up too much." "It start hearing that sound all the time and once you've heard it and latched into it, it's very difficult to let it go." "Louis Slesin has a theory why only certain people hear the hum." "There's a large number of people who call themselves electromagnetic sensitive." "You know, like dogs can hear signals that we can't hear, some people can hear different, you know, different kinds of signals." "But what kind of signals could they be hearing that sophisticated sensing devices could not pick up?" "Northern New Mexico is a virtual minefield of national laboratories and military installations." "Early on, some residents suspected that secret activities at one of these locations might be the source of the hum." "We pay our taxes, and those taxes pay for much of the secret activities and goings-on of this country." "We have a right to know when they affect us." "In 1993, then-New Mexico congressman Bill Richardson questioned the Secretary of Defense about possible military sources of the hum." "But the military denied any involvement, and continues its denial to this day." "When Professor Mullins and his team could not pinpoint a source, funding dried up and the investigation ground to a halt." "Slesin believes there may be a more sinister reason." "It's quite possible that they were told to lay off." "At some point, if they got close, or too close, to a, you know, what's called in the trade a "black military program,"" "a top-secret military program, or some kind of technology." "Sarah Allen and others believe the Taos Hum is linked, somehow, to top-secret Defense Department activities." "She claims to notice a change in the hum when the United States engages in offensive military actions, as she did in early 1996." "I did notice, all of a sudden, an intensity increase, and I shot off an e-mail to an e-mail group I was in at the time." "And I said "Well, something must be up, because the hum just intensified."" "A couple days later, the President announced that troops had been assembled and transported back to the Middle East." "On Friday, I ordered our forces to launch a cruise missile attack on the Iraqi Intelligence Service's principal command and control facility in Baghdad." "Those missiles were launched this afternoon at 4:22," "Eastern Daylight Time." "My best guess is that there's increased data traffic during those times." "Sarah Allen believes the source of the hum is the Navy's extremely low frequency transmission system for communications with submerged submarines, called the Sanguine Seafarer, or Project Elf." "Although the two known transmitter sites are in the non-coastal states of Michigan and Wisconsin, the extremely long waves generated by the system cover the globe to reach the Navy's subs." "But a Naval source who declined to be interviewed on camera denied that Project Elf is the cause of the Taos Hum, noting that the Elf's transmissions are intermittent, unlike the relentless hum heard in New Mexico." "Logically, he added, any harmful effects would be expected to cluster around the transmitters, and no such complaints have been recorded." "It's my belief that the government is fully aware of what is the source of this phenomena and in deep denial about its effects on people." "The hum continues to irritate and infuriate the residents of Taos." "Whatever its cause, the one thing they all agree on is they would like it to stop."