Stuff You Should Know - How The Hum Works

Episode Date: December 9, 2014

There is a mysterious droning sound often described as like a diesel engine idling that is severely impacting the quality of life of 2 percent of people in places around the world. The thing is, no one knows what's causing it - or if it actually exists. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. On the podcast, Hey Dude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and I would say it's Stuff You Should Know, but it's not because I haven't said Jerry, and now I did, so this is Stuff You Should Know.

Yes? Are people going crazy yet? I don't know. There's probably some people who started going crazy the moment they hit play. Yeah, that's Chuck's version of the hum. Yeah, capital T, capital H. Yeah, so the hum you just did, it makes sense it's a hum, but apparently like if you'd listened, then I wonder if you can hear the same thing I'm hearing because you're hearing it in your head, but there's like a gravelly quality to it. A vocal fry. Okay, if you want to call it that. Yeah, I say gravelly, but it's not, it wasn't constant. The gravelly thing gave it texture and it was kind of broken up a little bit. That is more akin to the hum than the unbroken part that was going through out. So apparently, while this is called the hum, and we should eventually explain what

we're talking about, it's not the classical definition of a hum that people hear. Right. It's not, it's like a diesel truck idling, an engine idling is the classic description of it. Yeah, that term vocal fry is one of those. You ever hear or learn of a new expression or a thing that you've never heard of and then you see it everywhere? That is called the Bader Meinhof phenomenon. And it's happening to me with vocal fry. Where'd you hear that? I can't remember where I initially heard it, but it's a thing now that they say, like Kim Kardashian is who they always blame. It's a vocal affectation that supposedly young women are using now, where they go into that lower tone, that gravelly tone on certain,

like the ends of sentences. I know what you're talking about. I heard that too, and that supposedly keeps them from being promoted at work or something. Yeah, yeah. And it's the female equivalent of the guys who speak up. Yeah, or although Valley Girl thing, which is upspeak. Yeah. Like the Valley Girls talking like that. But now it's, you know, he was a nice guy, but I really wasn't sure what his motivation was.

Oh, okay. Yeah. That's a great impression. That's because it was dead on. Yeah. I totally got that. You were suddenly, you had pigtails just now. Yeah. I was talking to Emily about it the other day. She was like, do I do that? I was like, no, you don't do that. No, you don't. I just did that, didn't I? A little bit, but you, you were doing a different voice. So it makes sense.

Yeah. Anyway, I can't escape it now. It's like every other day since I've heard it, I've seen something about vocal fry. And have you noticed people with vocal fry more? All the time. Okay. Yeah. It's annoying. Like what you're describing now has really nothing to do with the hum, but it actually does have a lot in common with the hum and that people who hear the hum kind of,

people who hear the hum tend to be able to focus in on it more and more easily, the more that they're exposed to it, which is the opposite of what should happen to a noise that really is inconsequential in the environment. That's right. So what we're talking about here, Chuck, is the hum with a capital H. That's right. What is it? Well, it is a sound, a mysterious sound that is heard in places around the world by about

2% of the local population. It is a low freak and we're going to get into the frequencies and all that, but let's just call it a low frequency rumbling right now. It's a drone. It's a vibration described sometimes as it sounds like it's coming from nowhere or inside my own head. There are places all around the world where, like I said, a very small population of people experience this hum and depending on where you are, they will name it that hum, like the Auckland hum, the Windsor hum. The Bristol hum.

Yeah, the Tows hum. It's been described, going back to the 1800s, people have talked about it in literature, but really in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s in the modern world is when people have started describing, hearing this thing that drives them baddie, basically. Right. And one of the ways that it drives them baddie is they'll say, do you hear that? And everyone else in the room will say no. The other 98% of people said no. Yeah. And they'll be like, what do you mean you don't hear that?

Yeah. And everybody else in the room goes, okay. Right. Maybe you're a little wacky. Is it generally at night? It's worse at night for sure. And generally in more rural areas, which makes sense because it's not as much noise pollution, I think.

Exactly. It also tends to be worse indoors. So at night, indoors means that you don't get much sleep because this is something that you can't not focus on. People who suffer from the hum tend to say that it dominates the soundscape. It's not something they can just tune out. Right. It's not something that they're getting used to.

And again, the more they're exposed to it, the easier they say it is to tune into it and I guess become cognizant of it yet again. Yeah. And obsess about it. Yeah. And imagine being plagued by a sound that does this to you and that everyone else says is not real because they don't hear it. Yeah.

And it's been, I mean, we'll get into the reasons that it may be or may not be happening, but it's been passed off as mass hysteria or mass delusion from everything from that to like government conspiracy, to legitimate noise, whether or not it's acoustic or electromagnetic. Right. And that's part of the problem is, is there one hum, are there lots of hums? Is there no hum? Hum, you know, your skeptics will say there is no hum. It's tinnitus or it's something like that or some other inner ear noise, like autoacoustic

noise. Yes. So who knows? Well, that's, there are two ways that the hum, okay. So again, let's restate this and let's put ourselves in the position of the outsider. Okay. Because I don't experience the hum. So I am an outsider.

I don't either. Knock on wood because the more I research this, the more I'm like, oh God, I hope I never do. Well, we left out one quality of it that is common around the world. And when we say around the world, it tends to be curiously concentrated in the West and in the Euro. I didn't notice that. Euro ancestry West. Yeah.

I didn't really see anything about any countries in the East. If you look at, if you look at, there is a guy who runs a... Is this Glenn McPherson? Yes. Glenn McPherson runs something called the World Hum Map and Database. And we ran into Glenn McPherson before we get too far. We should give a huge shout out to Jared Keller over at Mike who wrote this amazing article called A Mysterious Sound is Driving People Insane and Nobody Knows What's Causing It.

Totally worth reading. And he talks about a guy named Glenn McPherson who's a professor in British Columbia. And he set up a website called the World Hum Map and Database. And so anybody who hears the hum can go and fill out a questionnaire. And then it takes that data and puts a dot on the map. And you can hover over the dot and get the data, right? Yeah. But if you look at it, it's just the United States, Great Britain, Western Europe.

Yeah, Canada. South Africa, it's pretty... It's unusual that there's nothing in Africa except South Africa. And it's just in these European ancestry Western countries, right? On the one hand, you could say, well, that's because this is an English language database. Oh, that makes sense. And so, of course, somebody who's native language is like Swahili. Sure.

Isn't going to go on to this and be like, I have no idea what I'm typing here. But yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. So that's one explanation. There are other explanations too. And now we arrive at one of them. We're going back on the outside because you don't hear the hum. I don't hear the hum.

And let's say that we're ear, nose, and throat guys and somebody comes to us and says, I'm going crazy. Like, I'm seriously contemplating suicide because this hum is keeping me up at night. I haven't slept at weeks. I'm irritable. I have headaches, nosebleeds. I'm nauseated all the time. These are all common symptoms of hum sufferers.

You're going to think one of two things is a doctor, a physician. One is tinnitus. Yeah. And then the other one is you're crazy. That you're driving yourself crazy. Yeah. Both of them can kind of be explained away. And they are explained away by this guy named David Deming.

And he is a geoscientist from the University of Oklahoma. And he wrote what is probably the definitive study on the hum so far back in 2004. That's right. So Deming, apparently if you look at his research, there is another theory. And this is where the US government comes into play. Because there's a couple of theories revolving around the US military. And whether or not they are causing this. One is with their high frequency active auroral research program, HAARP in Alaska.

And they transmit RF signals into the atmosphere. And very well, should we go ahead and start talking about the frequency ranges? VLF. Yeah. And ELF. Yeah. VLF is very low frequency. And those are waves at 0.1 Hertz.

And the other one is ELF, right? Those are extremely low frequencies. And they're in the range of the same amount of Hertz. But their wavelength is up to like 100,000 meters. Right. That's an extremely long wavelength. That's right. And people who think, they call them hum investigators,

they believe pretty much that it is VLF and ELF tones that are driving these people crazy. And those tones can drive you crazy. They do have adverse effects on the body. You know, you probably heard it about a lot when it comes to like cell phone radiation. That kind of thing. Yeah. But whether or not ELF and VLF is or are the hum is what's a matter of much debate. It is a matter of debate because, and it's also kind of a matter of faith,

because what you're talking about there with ELF and VLF frequencies is tones, those are radio waves. And radio is part of the electromagnetic spectrum, right? Yeah. So it has been shown at very, very high frequencies, humans can detect electromagnetic sound. We take it as sound, which is weird because it's not supposed to happen like that. But that's how we experience it. It's not like at a high frequency, we suddenly see it, we hear it.

And if you are familiar with the Comet 67P that the European Space Agency recently landed on. Which is crazy. That comet was found to emit an electromagnetic clicking sound. Yeah. Which is how we experience electromagnets or electromagnetic sound at a certain frequency. And so because it's a clicking sound, it's not a hum at all. Some people are saying, well, that doesn't make any sense. This is a hum.

It doesn't, if we can hear it, it's, it's, it doesn't sound like an idling diesel engine. Right. It sounds like a clicking sound or something like that. And then what's more, what this guy is saying is that if it's a very low frequency or extremely low frequency, that's the opposite of how we hear electromagnetic radiation. We hear it at a very high frequency, not a very low frequency. So which one is it? So yes, it's still a huge matter of debate, even as to whether the hum, first of all, if it does exist.

Yeah. If it's a single source. Single source. And then if it is a single source or any kind of source, is it electromagnetic or is it acoustic? Right. And we'll unpack the difference between those things right after this. Attention Bachelor Nation. He's back.

The man who hosted some of America's most dramatic TV moments returns with a brand new Tell All podcast. The most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison. It's going to be difficult at times. It'll be funny. We'll push the envelope. But I promise you this, we have a lot to talk about. For two decades, Chris Harrison saw it all.

And now he's sharing the things he can't unsee. I'm looking forward to getting this off my shoulders and repairing this, moving forward and letting everybody hear from me. What does Chris Harrison have to say now? You're going to want to find out. I have not spoken publicly for two years about this. And I have a lot of thoughts. I think about this every day.

Truly, every day of my life, I think about this and what I want to say. Listen to the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the co-classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it, and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So whether or not the hum exists, the Canadian government actually, part of the problem is it's hard to get research done on this, because a very small number of people experience it,

and a lot of them are called crackpots, so it's tough to get funding for research. But luckily, there's a country called Canada that will fund things like this, and Dr. Colin Novak spent a year listening to the Windsor Hum in Ontario, and what they found was the hum is real, and they traced the source in that case to on the Michigan side of the Detroit River, and basically a steel plant on Zug Island. Doesn't it sound like an industrial plant island? It totally does, and it supposedly generates a lot of VLF waves when they're operating. So in this instance, at least, the hum was a real thing,

and they found out it was a tone created from basically an industrial plant. Right, so they apparently took steps to cut down on whatever energy it was emitting? Yeah, they turned off the hum machine. And all of a sudden, some people said, hey, that worked. A lot of people said that did absolutely nothing. The hum's still out there. And then the most people said, I still don't know what you're talking about. So that wasn't actually the first time government has looked into the hum.

In Taos, New Mexico, there is something called the Taos Hum. And apparently, somebody wrote in to complain about it to a local newspaper, and all of a sudden, hundreds more people said, yes, I hear the same thing. I've been hearing the same thing for years. What is going on? And enough people said something in New Mexico that it prompted an investigation by the University of New Mexico in Sandia Labs, which I think is like a government-affiliated kind of,

well, it's a neat research lab. They do all sorts of cool clandestine stuff. Nice, X-Files. Very much so. And actually, the X-Files mentioned the hum in an episode called Drive. Yeah, interesting. They talk about it. There was a couple of characters had to constantly move westward,

or else they would suffer from the pressure of this hum that no one else could hear. Let me guess. Mulder believes Scully did not. Exactly. How did you saw that one? No, I didn't, but you know. So they looked into the Taos Hum, and they could never figure out what it was. So I think they kind of wrote it off as either mass delusion, or a bunch of people had tinnitus, or what have you. Which is, again, that's the easy answer.

Like, you have tinnitus. The problem is, if a person has tinnitus, the sound is internal. Like, remember there's like the idea that the... And isn't it a high pitch ringing? Yes, usually. It can vary in pitch. Right. But for the most part, you can tell it's internal.

With the hum, everyone who experiences the hum says, No, this is external. And they're so convinced it's external that they'll go out at night when it's worse. And try to find the source of it. They'll drive around their city, or their neighborhood, or walk around, and look for what it is that's driving them crazy, and they'll never find it. Yeah, or they'll turn off the power of their house, or, I mean, there's all sorts of extreme. And of course, it's all like anecdotal.

But people that are driven to suicide are this one guy who intentionally deafened himself. With a chainsaw. Yeah, which I'm not sure how you do. I guess you just hold the chainsaw up to your ear for a long time. Yeah, exactly. And possibly even murder, which we'll get to in a bit, which is pretty interesting. But the point is that it's not just something that's just bugging people. Like it is having the hum.

There are people all over the world that don't know each other, that have never met, that are suffering from something that they hear that other people can't hear. In concentrated areas. Yeah, and that's affecting their quality of life. I don't know if I ever finished the sentence, which is weird. That means I'm really interested in something. But did we say, or did I say that people who suffer from the hum tend to be in their 50s and older? Yeah, that's one of the markers between like 50 and 70.

Okay, so this is something in the favor of acoustic sound. So acoustic sound is a compression wave. And it's something that's carried through and propagates through media. So it's a vibration in the air. Whereas an electromagnetic wave comes from an electrical or a magnetic or both source. This is like the vibration. It's a sound wave that's an acoustic wave, right? So as we age, say you get to around 50 years of age,

your ability to hear high frequency and mid frequency acoustic sound diminishes. Your low frequency capabilities go undiminished. So it's not like they increase, but comparatively speaking, you get better at hearing low frequencies around age 50. Interesting. So what some people think is that if it is electromagnetic, then there are some people out there who are capable of hearing electromagnetic waves. Right.

While the rest of us can't. Right. And they're being driven crazy by some source that we have yet to identify. Right. Or if it's acoustic, that there are some people out there who are superhears of low frequency sound, which would also kind of do away with another diagnosis that a lot of doctors give people, which is hyperacusis, which to me is worth a whole other podcast.

It's another people kill themselves over. Yeah. Yeah. This heightened hyper hearing to where like this, the rustle of clothes is unbearable. Right. Oh man. The thing is, is if you have hyperacusis, it's not just going to be some hum that you hear and everything else is normal, which is what hum sufferers experience.

You would hear everything on this grand scale. Right. You'd be like Spider-Man. Exactly. So what they think is that there are people who are predisposed to hearing low frequency sounds way better than other people and that it comes as their higher and mid frequency capabilities diminish with age. Right.

But again, what are they hearing? Well, that's right. I mentioned earlier the HAARP program that the U.S. government military is doing in Alaska. The other one that I teased is the Takamo, the take charge and move out system on the 1960s. The U.S. Navy basically adopted this program to be able to communicate with submarines, long range bombers, ballistic missiles during nuclear war. And they use very low frequency radio waves to do so. And, you know, it's a real thing, but is it the hum?

Other conspiracy theorists will say that the U.S. government is also using these things to target individuals, and of course, that's, you know, you want to say that's probably bunk, but you never know. Well, you know what the cool irony is that Jared Keller points out is that if the hum is electromagnetic in nature, a tinfoil hat, an aluminum foil hat, would actually work because it blocks out about Yeah, it's a humor about it at least, too. Right. But like just a thin layer of aluminum can block out like 98% of electromagnetic waves.

So that's pretty ironic that it might actually work, although I don't, I haven't heard whether that helps people with the hum if they put on a tinfoil hat, if that would help or not, or if it has. But speaking of Takamo, if you read David Deming's journal article, it's called The Hum, an anomalous sound heard around the world. And there is a journal called the Journal of Scientific Exploration, which is a peer reviewed scientific journal that accepts articles on things on the fringe of science. Sure. Which the hum most decidedly is.

Yeah. David Deming gets into Takamo and he basically says, this is a secret government program. So obviously we can't get any real answers. We don't know how often it works or how often they're transmitting or anything. But we do know it is a real thing. And he correlates some dates when there's like upgrades to the system. And then all of a sudden in this one area around the same time, there's the cocoa bar where the cocoa mo Indiana hum starts.

Right. So he does a good job of correlating it. And I think that's kind of what he settles on. He believes that it's probably the Takamo program, that this very low frequency transmission to submarines underwater from airplanes above is being propagated around the world. And that would suggest that it's a global source. Right. It's just some people can hear these radio waves that you're not supposed to be able to hear.

Yeah. Or it's multiple sources combined like a combined effect. Like if you live near an industrial plant that has a machine that's making the sound that maybe certain people are attuned to or not. I don't know. Well, that's another characteristic is that it's mostly experienced in the country. See, I just chalked that up to noise pollution being raised, like when I worked at a convenience store in the midnight shift.

When I worked during the day, I would not notice anything, but when I worked up there at night at 3 a.m., I would hear the buzzing of the fluorescent lights and it would drive me crazy. I would turn them off and people would think we were closed. So the thing is you eventually stopped hearing that, right? Well, yeah, when I left work. That's called habituation. So habituation means that you are capable of, so like you'd focus on these things the

whole time? You were there? Well, yeah, in the middle, I wouldn't focus on it, but I would notice I'd be reading a book and I would just hear that sound, you know? But I'd never noticed it during the day when the lights were on. So like when you didn't hear it, that's habituation where like you're exposed to something, your brain says, this is totally, it's not a threat. I don't have to pay attention to it anymore.

So anytime in this context that I hear that sound, I don't have to become cognizant of it. Now, apparently you did, you kind of like fell into cognizance like here or there and like you'd notice it again. But for a normal human being, when you're exposed to something like that over and over again, the less you notice it, but like we've said, with the hum, the more you're exposed to it, the easier it is to tune in. And what that's called...

You can't escape it. No. If you can, you not escape it, you can catch it easier and easier. Like you can become cognizant of it easier and easier the more you're exposed to it. That's called sensitization where I guess another explanation for the sufferers of the hum. If they are hearing something, one of the reasons that it drives them so bad is because their habituation levels are low, but their sensitization levels are high.

So they're not able to ignore it and some part of their brain is focusing in on it. And this creates this, I guess, a perfect storm of hellaciousness. All right, well, right after this break, I did mention murder. So we're going to talk about one of the more interesting parts of the effects of the hum right after this. Attention, Bachelor Nation, he's back, the man who hosted some of America's most dramatic TV moments returns with a brand new tell-all podcast. The most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison.

It's going to be difficult at times. It'll be funny. We'll push the envelope. But I promise you this, we have a lot to talk about. For two decades, Chris Harrison saw it all. And now he's sharing the things he can't unsee. I'm looking forward to getting this off my shoulders and repairing this, moving forward and letting everybody hear from me.

What does Chris Harrison have to say now? You're going to want to find out. I have not spoken publicly for two years about this and I have a lot of thoughts. I think about this every day. Truly, every day of my life, I think about this and what I want to say. Listen to the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the

cult classic show HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64?

Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to HeyDude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. So I mentioned murder, like I said, and one of the things that – what is the guy's name? Steve Colhaze. He's a mechanical engineer and home investigator in Connecticut. And I believe he was the one that traced the Windsor Hum to Zug Island.

And he has done some research that he believes the hum and others believe the hum could be responsible for – well, for killing other people, specifically in his case. He actually approached Connecticut State Police Investigators after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. And he said the hum from a nearby gas pipeline might have driven Adam Lanza to – well, have contributed to driving him to do something like this. And I don't think he's saying this made him crazy. So he did this.

I think he's saying fragile-minded people could be pushed over the edge. It could be the last straw for somebody. And I don't know how much credence it has, but investigators did at least include that in the documents they released to the public. So they thought it was worthy enough to put in among the 7,000 other documents to release to the public. And he's not the only one. Remember the Navy Yard shooting in 2013, Aaron Alexis?

He fully came out and said, quote, ultra-low frequency attack is what I've been a subject to for the last three years – I'm sorry, three months. And to be perfectly honest, that is what has driven me to this, end quote. And he scrawled and scratched ELF on the shotgun barrel that he used to kill 12 people at the Washington Navy Yard. And – Yeah, and he scratched my ELF weapon on the stock, I think. Yeah.

And basically, conspiracy theorists would say, well, this is clearly driving people to do things like this. Skeptics are going to say, no, these people are delusional, and they're the ones who believe the government is shooting them with these ELF tones and driving them crazy. But either way, it's a little startling that someone would scratch that in their shotgun before they did something like this and blame it on that outright. But that raises another point, like how exposed was he to those conspiracy theories? Like a lot of people would say, well, there's a Yahoo group dedicated to the hum.

It's that one world hum map and database, and people who go see these things, are they just suggestible? And they're like, oh, yeah, I can hear it too. David Deming points out, that's crazy. The idea that people are tuning into this thing that's having a really diminishing effect on their well-being as part of just a mass delusion or something like that kind of goes against the typical psychology of mass delusion where people join crowds to get some sort of positive benefit or effect from it.

And you can argue they're feeling a sense of inclusion or whatever by saying, I hear the hum too. Even in a very small minority. But apparently if you are a hum sufferer, like your life is screwed up and you're not a happy person. Yeah, I will say this. One thing I've noticed about conspiracy theorists is none of them ever believe one. It seems like they believe a lot of them.

Yeah. So that's all I have to say about that. Well, there's one other thing. So not only is this driving people crazy, there is evidence that if this does exist, if there is something that, if there's some sort of what's called low frequency noise that's in the environment, and it is, it's everywhere. But if people are being exposed to it, there's evidence that biologically speaking, it can have an impact and there just happened to be this incredible real world laboratory

that sprung up in Portugal in the late 70s because a guy named Casteo Bronco was put in charge of the Portuguese Air Force's maintenance repair and manufacturing plant. It's called Ogma. Or I don't know a Portuguese accent or else I do it, but we'll just call it Ogma. And he happened to just be sitting there and he watched a aircraft technician wander around aimlessly in what apparently looked a lot like an epileptic seizure to this doctor. It was during what's called an aircraft run up procedure where they're like going through all the systems and this guy was just standing there and all of a sudden he's wandering around.

So he looked into it and found that 10% of the workers at this aircraft repair shop were diagnosed with late onset epilepsy. And if you looked at this population and compared it to the population of Portugal at large, you wouldn't expect 10% to have it. You'd expect 0.2% to have it. So the fact that there are a lot of people who are being diagnosed with this really led them to believe that they were exposed to this low frequency noise or that it was having a dangerous effect on them.

And this one guy who was a worker there got really interested in all this and he created a living will. His name was Felipe Pedro and Felipe Pedro was like, you cut me open the moment I die and do an autopsy. And they found this guy was messed up. Like how? His aorta, his heart was thickened, the walls were thickened inexplicably. Fried chicken?

Yeah, pretty much. But no, that would be explicable. So he was a very healthy person then is what you're saying? Apparently what they found doesn't jibe with his lifestyle. He was diagnosed with late onset epilepsy. He died at age 58. He had a thickened heart tissue. He had a tumor in his kidney, he had a tumor in his liver.

And apparently now, thanks to this guy and his autopsy, he kind of like laid the groundwork for this investigation into low frequency noise being dangerous for humans. Even though we don't feel anything, but on a cellular level, being exposed to this stuff has these effects. So apparently if you have thickening of your heart tissue without any kind of inflammation response, that is a classic sign of low frequency noise damage. It's what's called a vibroacoustic disease. Which certain people may be susceptible to and others are not, in theory.

Supposedly anyone exposed to it would be susceptible to it. Oh really? The way that it ties into the hum is some people might actually be able to hear what they're being exposed to while most people might not. So we're all exposed to it then? Yeah, in this article, I can't remember the name of it, but it was basically an overview of this aircraft place by some Portuguese scientists. They said it's almost impossible to get a control group to compare because everybody's

exposed to low frequency noise, just most of us aren't aware of it. It's just everywhere, but it's not considered a nuisance except for that 2-11% of poor people who suffer from hearing the hum. And their accounts differ wildly as well, so it's tough to study and you can't get funding to study because it's fringe science unless you're in Canada. So they say, turn a fan on at night. Oh really? That's what one guy does.

Makes sense. Turn on a fan or like some sort of like they need white noise to drown it out and that helps. Yeah, get that out. Get the white noise out. There you go. That's what I sleep through. Again, go read the awesome article by Jared Keller.

Yeah, live science had a couple of good articles. Yeah. And then David Deming has the hum and anomalous sound heard around the world. And then if this kind of stuff floats your boat, you might want to check out some of our friend sites too. There's a great podcast by our friend Roman Mars named 99% Invisible who would be able to explain a lot of the science behind this kind of thing. Oh, did he do one on the hum?

No, but it's kind of up his alley, like the Vibro acoustic idea. I can totally see him getting into that. And I just think if somebody dug that, they'd dig 99% Invisible. And then damn interesting, another great site that would definitely probably have something about the hum on it. Yeah. And watch the X-Files. Yeah, right?

It's our pal Mulder. And of course, you can hang out at How Stuff Works. You can just type the hum in. I don't think it'll bring up an article, but see what happens. Yeah, we don't have one yet. No. But yeah, type hum into the search bar and see what comes up. It's just a fun game.

And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this limousine ranch. Hey, guys, I finally have a story for you after listening for over five years. I live in super rural South Dakota, not just the regular rural South Dakota. My town is only about 3,200 people, and it is the largest town within 100 miles radius. The main business here is agriculture and ranching, big surprise. After I married my plumber husband from St. Louis, we moved back to my little hometown six years ago where we started a plumbing business.

He started plumbing business. Shortly after moving here, we got a call to go to Anderson's limousine ranch, limousine ranch with no E on the end. After driving up to the country and lots of gravel roads later, he came up on the ranch and failed to see any limos. He said he couldn't figure out where all the limousines were and why there would be a limousine company dealership in the middle of nowhere on an Indian reservation. I guess he asked the owners and they explained that they run limousine cattle on their ranch,

which I looked up. It's a type of cattle from the limousine region of France. Oh, OK. They don't look like they're wearing cloaks or anything. My brother and I teased him for quite some time on this to get a mental image of the absurdity. Imagine the vast prairie of dances with wolves or Fargo and then expect to see a limousine dealership out there.

Or just a bunch of limousines is kind of meandering around the fields. That sounds like something that would happen in Fargo. Sure. That's very Coen Brothers-esque, but not Kevin Costner-esque. No. The donkka. He's pretty self-serious. Yeah.

He didn't look like he has much of a sense humor, does he? I don't know. He was in Boulderm. It's funny. Well, yeah. Back in the day when he was Bible, I watched the preview only for that movie Draft Day that he did recently. Yeah.

I can barely make it to the preview. Dude, the preview built it up. They were like, I can't believe he's doing it. Is he really going to do this? And it's about the NFL Draft. Right. And he's like a GM. Yeah.

And they built it up to this thing. And finally, when it was in the movie theater, the preview, I leaned over to my buddy Scotty who you know. And I was like, what does he do? Does he like open fire on the room and like shoot people or is it just some sort of trade for a football team? It's a trade, right? Yeah.

But they were building up like, I can't believe this is happening. Yeah. Did you ever see the movie? No. What was Scot's take on it? He just laughed and said, yeah, exactly. That sounds like our Scot. That's he's the guy that laughs at things like that.

That is from Jennifer Coleman. Oh, I forgot we were even doing Listen to the Mail. That's right, Jennifer. And you should tease your husband for that. That's pretty funny stuff. And he should stick to the plumbing business. Yeah. For real.

Not the limousine company finding business. If you want to mock someone you love on our show, you can tweet to us at S-Y-S-K podcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com. You also can do the most important thing you'll do today or any day, go to stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.