THE TAOS HUM
About two percent of the people in Taos, New Mexico hear a low droning noise that nobody else can hear. Congress sent a team of physicists in 1993. They found nothing, and the hearers kept hearing it.
In the spring of 1993, residents of Taos, New Mexico began complaining about a noise. They described a low droning, like a diesel engine idling in the distance, persistent, worse indoors than out, worse at night. It kept them awake. Some reported nosebleeds, headaches, and pressure in the ears. What made it strange was that most people in Taos heard nothing at all. Surveys put the proportion of hearers at roughly two percent.
The complaints reached Congress, and in 1993 a genuinely serious team was assembled: acousticians from the University of New Mexico working with Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, and the Phillips Air Force Laboratory. They took sensitive low-frequency and infrasound equipment into the homes of people who reported hearing the hum, and they measured while those people were actively hearing it [1][2].
They found nothing. The instruments recorded no acoustic signal in the environment that corresponded to what the hearers described. The background sound level in the quiet homes was extremely low, and there was no source, no tone, no infrasonic pressure wave matching the reports. The team also found no consistent hearing abnormality among the hearers, though some had elevated sensitivity in particular frequency bands [1].
This left a result that satisfies nobody. A group of people reliably perceive a specific, consistent sound. The best instruments available, brought into the room while they perceive it, detect no sound. The hearers are not lying and the instruments are not broken.
The mainstream explanation follows from that impasse. The sound is most likely being generated within the auditory system itself rather than arriving through the air. The ear is not a passive microphone: it produces its own emissions, and the brain fills gaps in what it receives, so a percept can be entirely real to the person having it and have no external cause [4]. Taos is also unusually quiet, and a very low ambient noise floor makes internally generated sound easier to notice, which may explain why the phenomenon clusters in quiet rural places.
The name has since spread. Similar hums are reported in Bristol, in Windsor, Ontario, in Auckland, and in dozens of other places, and researchers who have surveyed them, including David Deming, note that the reports share a striking consistency across countries [3]. Whether that means one phenomenon or many wearing one label is the open question.
- [01] Mullins, J.H. & Kelly, J.P. (1995). The mystery of the Taos Hum. Echoes, Acoustical Society of America, on the 1993 investigation.
- [02] Congressional inquiry (1993). The joint investigation by the University of New Mexico, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, and Phillips Air Force Laboratory.
- [03] Deming, D. (2004). The Hum: An anomalous sound heard around the world. Journal of Scientific Exploration 18.
- [04] Cox, T. (2014). The Sound Book. Norton. On otoacoustic emissions and the limits of human hearing.
A sound that two people in a hundred can hear and no microphone can record. Each claim about it has a traceable origin and a documented response. They are laid out in full so you can weigh them yourself.
It is a real sound the instruments missed
The hearers' argument is the strongest one they have: their descriptions agree with each other, across strangers and across continents, in a way that pure internal noise should not produce. They point out that the 1993 team measured for a limited time in a limited number of places, and that a sound which comes and goes can be missed [1]. There is a precedent that supports them. The Windsor Hum in Ontario was reported for years, doubted, and then traced by a government-funded study to a real industrial source across the river on Zug Island [2]. So a hum being real and external is not a fringe outcome. It has happened. What weakens the case at Taos is that the team measured while hearers were reporting the sound in the room, and still recorded nothing [3].
There is an undisclosed military or industrial source
Taos sits in a state with Los Alamos, Sandia, and a significant military presence, and the suspicion writes itself: a submarine communication transmitter, a classified facility, something buried. The response is that the investigating team included Los Alamos, Sandia, and an Air Force laboratory, which conspiracy-minded readers treat as the problem rather than the answer. Set that aside and the physics still resists: a source powerful enough to be audible indoors across a region would be trivially detectable by instruments far cheaper than the ones deployed, and it would not skip ninety-eight percent of the population.
The name covers several unrelated things
The quiet possibility, and the one that best fits the whole record, is that "the Hum" is a label rather than a phenomenon. Some cases are industrial and locatable, as Windsor turned out to be. Some are almost certainly internal, generated by an auditory system in an unusually silent environment. Some may be a genuine sensitivity to infrasound below the conventional threshold of hearing. Lumping them together under one name creates a single mystery out of several ordinary problems, and then the mystery becomes harder to solve than any of its parts.
- [01] Deming, D. (2004). The Hum: An anomalous sound heard around the world. Journal of Scientific Exploration 18.
- [02] Windsor Hum Study (2014). University of Windsor and Western University report for Health Canada, which traced that hum to an industrial source on Zug Island.
- [03] Mullins, J.H. & Kelly, J.P. (1995). The mystery of the Taos Hum, on the null instrumental result.
INFORMAL READER POLL, NOT DATA. WHICH EXPLANATION DO YOU FIND MOST CREDIBLE?