Tag: Fortean phenomena

  • The Hum: The Unexplained Low-Frequency Sound That Drives People Crazy in Dozens of Cities Worldwide

    In the early 1990s, residents of Taos, New Mexico, started complaining about a low-frequency humming sound that wouldn’t stop. It was there when they went to bed and there when they woke up—a steady, throbbing drone, like a diesel engine idling somewhere over the horizon. It was louder at night, louder indoors, and impossible to locate. Not everyone could hear it. Roughly 2 percent of the population reported the sound. The other 98 percent heard nothing. The complaints were persistent enough that Congress funded an investigation. A team from Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, and the University of New Mexico deployed specialized acoustic equipment tuned to frequencies between 8 and 80 hertz—the range where sound registers more as vibration than tone. They found that the hearers were telling the truth: something was being perceived, each person at a slightly different frequency between 32 and 80 hertz. They could not identify a source. The investigation ended inconclusively. The sound did not.

    The Taos Hum was not the first and was nowhere close to the last. Bristol, England, reported a persistent thrumming in the 1970s—about 800 people heard it. It was tentatively blamed on vehicular traffic and factories running 24-hour shifts, but never definitively explained, and the reports eventually faded. Windsor, Ontario, erupted in late 2011 with a low droning vibration loud enough to provoke 22,000 reports to officials in a single evening in 2012. Kokomo, Indiana. Largs, Scotland. Auckland, New Zealand. Bondi, Australia. Frankfurt and Darmstadt, Germany. San Francisco‘s Sunset District, where residents reported it as recently as 2024. The Hum has been documented on every inhabited continent, and the case files share the same strange profile: a low-frequency drone, typically between 30 and 80 hertz, heard indoors more than outdoors, worse at night, worse in quiet environments, perceived by a small minority of the population while the majority hears nothing at all.

    What the investigations found

    Some Hums have been solved. The Windsor Hum was traced, with reasonable confidence, to Zug Island—a heavily industrialized section of River Rouge, Michigan, across the Detroit River from Windsor. Canadian officials identified the area as the likely source, but jurisdictional politics complicated the investigation: local authorities couldn’t access the island, and U.S. Steel, which operated a steel mill there, said no new equipment had been installed around the time the noise became noticeable. The resolution came accidentally. When the blast furnaces were deactivated in April 2020, during the pandemic shutdowns, the Hum stopped. When operations resumed, the Hum returned. In Darmstadt, Germany, investigators in 2022 identified multiple sources: two faulty air conditioner units, a faulty heat pump, and three structural noise protection measures on energy generation plants that were themselves producing low-frequency noise. In Kokomo, industrial fans were implicated, though some reports persisted after the fans were addressed.

    These solved cases share a common mechanism: industrial equipment generating low-frequency noise that propagates through the ground or air and is amplified by the resonant properties of certain buildings. A room with the right dimensions can amplify a faint 40-hertz signal into something perceptible, the way a wine glass vibrates when you hit the right frequency. Low-frequency sound penetrates walls more effectively than higher frequencies—bass travels through structures that block treble—which explains why the Hum is louder indoors. It’s louder at night because ambient noise drops, unmasking sounds that were always present but drowned out during the day. It’s louder in suburban and rural environments than in cities for the same reason: less background noise.

    But the industrial explanation doesn’t account for all the cases. The Taos Hum investigation found no industrial source. The Bristol Hum was never definitively explained. Auckland researchers found some low-frequency sources, silenced them, and the complaints continued. The Hum in Kerry County, Ireland, was investigated and remains unexplained. The pattern—some cases explained by identifiable mechanical sources, others remaining stubbornly unresolved—suggests that “the Hum” is not a single phenomenon. It’s a symptom that can have multiple causes, some of which are industrial, some of which may be biological, and some of which haven’t been identified.

    The biology of hearing things that aren’t there (or are)

    The human ear is not a passive microphone. It generates its own sounds—called spontaneous otoacoustic emissions—produced by the motion of the outer hair cells in the cochlea. Studies show that 38 to 60 percent of adults with normal hearing produce these emissions, though most people are unaware of them. In quiet environments, some individuals perceive their own otoacoustic emissions as a faint hissing, buzzing, or humming. The Taos investigation considered this as a possible explanation: the Hum might not be coming from outside the ear but from inside it.

    This hypothesis explains some features of the phenomenon—why only a small percentage of people hear it, why it’s worse in quiet environments, why earplugs sometimes make it louder rather than softer (blocking external noise unmasks the internal signal)—but it doesn’t explain the geographic clustering. If the Hum were purely a biological artifact, it should be distributed randomly across the population, not concentrated in specific towns during specific time periods. The geographic pattern suggests an external stimulus, even if the perception of that stimulus is mediated by individual differences in auditory sensitivity.

    Low-frequency tinnitus is another biological candidate. Tinnitus—the perception of sound without an external source—typically manifests as high-pitched ringing, but a subset of cases involve low-frequency perception in the range of the Hum. Some researchers have proposed that the Hum represents a form of tinnitus that is triggered or modulated by environmental low-frequency noise too faint for most people to perceive but sufficient to activate auditory responses in sensitized individuals. Under this model, the industrial source doesn’t have to be loud enough for most people to hear. It just has to be present enough to trigger a disproportionate perceptual response in the 2 percent of the population whose auditory systems are tuned to those frequencies.

    A 1973 university study of 50 Hum complainants found the sound always peaked between 30 and 40 hertz, was heard only during cool weather with a light breeze, and was more common in early morning. Philip Dickinson suggested at an Institute of Biology conference that year that the sound could result from the jet stream shearing against slower-moving air, possibly amplified by power line structures or by rooms with corresponding resonant frequencies. Another acoustics researcher dismissed this as “absolute nonsense.” The disagreement is characteristic of the field: every proposed explanation accounts for some features of the data while failing to explain others, and the researchers who study the Hum spend as much time arguing with each other as with the phenomenon.

    Why it matters beyond the sound

    The Hum has driven at least one person to suicide in England. Others report chronic insomnia, headaches, nausea, nosebleeds, and diarrhea. In Largs, Scotland, residents moved away. In Windsor, the 22,000 reports to officials in a single night reflected a community that had been sleep-deprived and frustrated for months. The Hum is not a curiosity for the people who hear it. It’s a quality-of-life crisis that they often can’t prove to their neighbors, their doctors, or their local government—because the person standing next to them in the same room, at the same time, hears nothing.

    This is what makes the Hum a genuinely interesting epistemological problem rather than just an acoustic one. It exists at the intersection of physics, biology, psychology, and infrastructure—a sound that may be real, may be internal, may be both, and whose investigation requires expertise in acoustics, otology, environmental engineering, and psychophysics, all operating simultaneously. The solved cases prove that external low-frequency sources exist and can cause the reported symptoms. The unsolved cases prove that the solved explanations don’t cover everything. The biological evidence proves that the human ear can generate perceptions that have no external correlate. And the geographic clustering proves that biology alone doesn’t explain the pattern.

    The Hum is, in some respects, a perfect Fortean phenomenon: real enough to investigate, elusive enough to resist explanation, distributed widely enough to suggest a systematic cause, and variable enough to prevent any single theory from closing the case. Charles Fort would have collected the reports, filed them, and waited. Half a century of acoustic science has, essentially, done the same thing.

    We cover the Hum alongside ball lightning, UAP encounters, and the full taxonomy of phenomena that resist clean scientific explanation across our Fortean Phenomena course—including why the most maddening sound in the world is one that only 2 percent of people can hear.

  • What Are Fortean Phenomena? A Serious Guide to the World’s Strangest Unexplained Events

    In 1919, a largely unknown writer named Charles Hoy Fort published a book called The Book of the Damned. The “damned” in question were not people. They were facts—data points collected over decades from scientific journals, newspapers, and maritime logs that the scientific establishment of the day had either ignored, dismissed, or quietly buried because they didn’t fit any accepted theory. Rains of frogs. Falls of red liquid from clear skies. Unidentified lights tracked by multiple observers. Objects appearing and disappearing. Spontaneous fires. Animals found in places they had no biological business being. Fort spent thirty years in the New York Public Library and the British Museum reading room, copying these reports onto thousands of index cards kept in shoeboxes, assembling what amounted to an enormous filing cabinet of things that weren’t supposed to happen but apparently did anyway.

    Fort didn’t claim these events were supernatural. He didn’t build a theory of the paranormal. He didn’t start a religion or declare that aliens were responsible. What he did—and this is the part that gets lost in a century of people projecting their own agendas onto his work—was point at the data and say: science claims to have a comprehensive model of how the world works, and here are several thousand documented instances where that model doesn’t account for what was observed. He called this data “damned” because it had been excluded from polite scientific conversation, not because it was demonic. The exclusion was the point. As the writer Colin Wilson later summarized Fort’s operating principle: “People with a psychological need to believe in marvels are no more prejudiced and gullible than people with a psychological need not to believe in marvels.”

    That’s Forteanism in one sentence. And it’s a more intellectually rigorous position than it gets credit for.

    What actually counts as Fortean

    The term “Fortean phenomena” now functions as a catch-all for anomalous events that sit outside the boundaries of currently accepted scientific explanation. The taxonomy—developed by Fort and expanded by researchers since—covers a genuinely enormous range of stuff, and the breadth is part of the point. Fort didn’t specialize. He collected everything.

    The major categories, roughly organized:

    Anomalous falls from the sky. This was Fort’s bread and butter—his books are packed with documented reports of things falling from the atmosphere that have no obvious atmospheric origin. Rains of fish, frogs, tadpoles, insects, larvae, worms, mussels, snails, and even snakes. Falls of ice blocks, stones, and chunks of calcium. Falls of red, black, or yellow rain. Falls of sulphur, hay, and unidentifiable organic matter. These aren’t all ancient. Fish falls are still reported regularly—hundreds of small fish raining onto the town of Texarkana, Texas in 2021 made national news. The standard meteorological explanation is waterspouts picking up aquatic organisms and depositing them miles inland, which accounts for some cases convincingly and others not at all, particularly when the species involved don’t inhabit any nearby body of water.

    Unidentified aerial phenomena. Fort cataloged unexplained lights and objects in the sky decades before Kenneth Arnold’s 1947 sighting kicked off the modern UFO era. His records include reports from ship captains, astronomers, military personnel, and weather observers describing luminous objects, formations of lights, and structured craft-like things visible for extended periods. Fort invented the word “teleportation.” He also proposed, with characteristic deadpan, that Earth might be the property of some unknown intelligence—”I think we’re property,” he wrote in The Book of the Damned—though whether he meant this literally or as a satirical provocation aimed at scientific arrogance is a debate that Forteans have been having for a hundred years.

    Cryptozoology. Reports of animals that haven’t been formally identified by science—Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, the Chupacabra, Mokele-mbembe, the Yeti—fall under the Fortean umbrella, though Fort himself was less interested in specific creatures than in the pattern of scientific dismissal that preceded eventual discovery. More on this below.

    Spontaneous human combustion. Documented cases—some backed by coroner reports and forensic investigation—of human bodies found almost completely incinerated in circumstances where the surrounding environment showed minimal fire damage. The wick effect hypothesis (where body fat acts as fuel after ignition from an external source like a cigarette) explains some cases. Others remain genuinely perplexing.

    Anomalous animal behavior. Mass die-offs, mass strandings, animals appearing far outside their known range, coordinated behaviors that defy current ethological models. Fort was particularly interested in cases where conventional explanations required more assumptions than the anomaly itself.

    Earth mysteries. Unexplained sounds (the Taos Hum, the Bristol Hum, the “Bloop” recorded by NOAA hydrophones in 1997), earthquake lights, ball lightning, crop circles (most of which are obviously human-made, though the plasma vortex hypothesis for the handful that aren’t has some interesting physics behind it), and geomagnetic anomalies.

    The surprisingly rigorous intellectual tradition

    Here’s where Fortean phenomena get genuinely interesting from an epistemological standpoint, and where the field diverges sharply from the conspiracy-theory adjacent content it’s often lumped in with.

    Fort’s actual intellectual contribution wasn’t collecting weird stories. It was developing a framework for thinking about how science handles outlier data. His argument—stripped of the deliberately provocative style—was that the scientific establishment has a systematic bias toward excluding observations that don’t fit existing theoretical models, and that this exclusion is driven not by the data itself but by the social and institutional structures of science. Papers that report anomalous findings are harder to publish. Careers are not built on documenting things you can’t explain. Grant funding does not flow toward investigating phenomena that might turn out to be measurement error. The incentive structure of professional science is optimized for extending existing paradigms, not for cataloging their failures.

    This is not a crackpot position. Thomas Kuhn made essentially the same argument in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962—that normal science operates by suppressing anomalies until enough of them accumulate to trigger a paradigm shift—and nobody called Kuhn a crackpot. He got tenure at MIT. Fort made the same observation forty years earlier, in a more entertaining and less academic style, and was written off as an eccentric. The difference was packaging, not substance.

    The anthropologist Roger Wescott coined the term “anomalistics” in 1973 to describe the interdisciplinary study of scientific anomalies—essentially a formalized version of what Fort had been doing since the 1890s. The field has since developed genuine methodological rigor. The Fortean Times, published since 1973, combines humor and skepticism with original research. The Society for Scientific Exploration publishes peer-reviewed work on anomalous phenomena. Modern Fortean researchers use satellite imagery, digital archives, eDNA sampling, acoustic analysis, and the same statistical tools as any other field to investigate claims.

    The phenomena science denied until it couldn’t

    The strongest argument for taking Fortean data seriously isn’t the data that’s still unexplained. It’s the data that was once “Fortean” and is now just science.

    Ball lightning was reported for centuries—glowing spheres of light appearing during thunderstorms, passing through walls, hovering for seconds before vanishing. Scientists dismissed the reports as hallucinations, optical illusions, or misidentified St. Elmo’s fire until laboratory-produced ball lightning was achieved in 2006 by researchers in Tel Aviv and again by a team in China in 2012 using microwave discharge. It’s now an accepted atmospheric phenomenon with multiple competing physical models.

    Rogue waves—walls of ocean water two to three times the height of surrounding waves, appearing without warning—were considered sailor folklore until the Draupner wave was measured by instruments on the Draupner oil platform in the North Sea on January 1, 1995. The wave was 25.6 meters high in a sea state of 12-meter significant wave height. It was real, it was measured, and it immediately invalidated the standard statistical models for ocean wave height distribution. Sailors had been reporting these waves for centuries. Oceanographers had been explaining to them that such waves were statistically impossible.

    Meteorites. Before 1803, the idea that rocks fell from the sky was considered superstitious nonsense by the scientific establishment. The French Academy of Sciences had formally dismissed the possibility. Then, on April 26, 1803, roughly 3,000 stones fell on the town of L’Aigle in Normandy, witnessed by the entire town and investigated by physicist Jean-Baptiste Biot, who confirmed the fall. The scientific consensus flipped overnight. Rocks from space had been “Fortean” the day before and were geology the day after.

    Continental drift. Alfred Wegener proposed in 1912 that the continents had once been joined and had drifted apart. He was ridiculed for decades—the mechanism he proposed was wrong, and geologists couldn’t accept the conclusion without an acceptable mechanism. Plate tectonics wasn’t established until the 1960s. Wegener was right about the observation and wrong about the explanation, and mainstream science rejected the observation because it didn’t like the explanation. Fort would have had a field day.

    The pattern is consistent: observation precedes explanation, sometimes by centuries, and during the gap, anyone who takes the observation seriously is treated as a crank. Fort’s entire body of work is essentially a catalog of phenomena sitting in that gap—things that have been observed repeatedly but not yet explained to anyone’s satisfaction.

    Why rational people engage with this

    The most common misconception about Fortean phenomena is that interest in them requires credulity—that you have to “believe” in Bigfoot or UFOs or spontaneous combustion to find the field worthwhile. Fort himself would have rejected this framing completely. He wasn’t a believer. He was, if anything, a professional skeptic—skeptical of claims of the anomalous, skeptical of claims of normalcy, and especially skeptical of anyone who claimed to have a complete model of reality. His position was that the only honest intellectual posture in the face of anomalous data is to document it, resist the temptation to explain it away prematurely, and maintain a suspension of judgment that he called “intermediatism”—the idea that nothing is entirely real or entirely unreal, and that all knowledge is transitional.

    That’s a position that would fit comfortably in any philosophy of science seminar. It just happened to come wrapped in stories about rains of frogs and mysterious lights over the Atlantic, which made it easy to dismiss.

    The Fortean approach doesn’t require you to believe anything. It requires you to take observation seriously even when the observation is inconvenient, to resist the reflexive urge to explain away data that doesn’t fit your model, and to recognize that the history of science is littered with phenomena that were “impossible” until they were measured, at which point they became textbook material and everyone pretended they’d never doubted them.

    That’s not credulity. That’s intellectual honesty with better source material than most people expect.

    We cover the full landscape of Fortean phenomena—anomalous events, cryptozoology, legendary conspiracies, and the science of why humans believe what they believe—across our Fortean Phenomena & Anomalistics course. If the rogue wave story made you want to know what else science got wrong before it got it right, that’s where to start.