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The "Hum" is also heard in a certain area here in
Denmark. The Ministry of the Environment, has used the usual debunkering tactics
against the complainers.
Kind regards, Ole Gerstrom, Denmark
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, July 27, 2001 1:19 AM
Subject: [CTRL] The "Taos Hum" Is Back In
Indiana
http://www.unknowncountry.com/news/?id=663
Remember the Taos Hum? It's Ba-a-a-ck...in Indiana
26-Jul-2001
A mysterious
humming sound, similar to the one reported in Taos, New Mexico 9
years
ago, has recently turned up in Kokomo, Indiana, where dozens of people
say
it’s making them ill. Like the Taos hum, the Kokomo one has affected a
group of people who say they are bothered by the unexplained low-frequency
vibrations.
In June, the Kokomo Tribune ran a five-part series
plus an editorial based on
interviews with about 40 locals who say they
began hearing or feeling “a
low-pitched droning” about two years ago.
Steve Kozarovich, a Tribune
assistant editor whose wife wrote the series,
says that since publication,
others have called to say they too hear a
low-pitched sound. “Almost
immediately after the noise began, nearly every
resident reported having
chronic and severe headaches, were awakened
several times at night and were
fatigued,” wrote Lisa Hurt Kozarovich.
“About 30 residents said they were
also nauseated and had other symptoms -
the most common being pressure or
ringing in their ears, chronic joint
pain, dizziness, depression and
diarrhea.”
One of those
interviewed for the article was Kathie Sickles of Greentown,
Ind., a city
of 45,000 located 10 miles east of Kokomo, who says she began
feeling a
low vibration in late 1999. “When the paperwork [documenting the
vibration] was first brought to me and I read it, I knew immediately what
had
plagued my house,” she says. “You can feel it here. We have bedrooms
that
vibrate. We have people with patios that vibrate by the back door.”
Sickles has formed a group called Our Environment to investigate what
she
believes is an environmental condition from heavy industrialization in
north-central Indiana. “Some people think [we] are crazy,” she says. The
Kokomo hum, which Sickles says has been measured at 10 to 30 hertz (cycles
per second), appears to cause worse problems than the sleep deprivation
and
irritability reported in New Mexico almost a decade ago.
In
the summer of 1992, a half dozen residents of Taos said a low-pitched buzz
was keeping them awake at night. Bob and Catanya Saltzman, who lived south
of
Taos, hired an acoustical engineer who reported a tone of 17 hertz with
a
harmonic rising to 70 hertz near the area. The low range of human
hearing is
20 to 30 hertz.
Bill Richardson, a Democratic U.S.
congressman for Northern New Mexico at the
time, stirred up speculation in
early 1993 when he said the hum could be
defense related. Two months
later, Republican Senator Pete Domenici said the
Pentagon had assured him
there was no defense involvement.
Scientists and engineers organized
by the University of New Mexico set up
acoustical, seismic and
electro-magnetic instruments near the Saltzmans’ home
in May 1993. But the
report issued that August failed to pinpoint any source
or isolate the
exact vibration, which was said to be between 30 and 80 hertz.
The study
estimated that two percent of Taos County’s population heard the
vibration.
The Taos hum became an major news story, and was
reported on in the Wall
Street Journal and on the cable TV show Sightings.
A California rock band
called itself The Taos Hum and the Range Cafe in
Bernalillo named a dessert
after the sound.
Taos residents who
first complained of a hum have left the area or simply
stopped trying to
solve the mystery. Bob Saltzman and his wife moved the next
year to Baja
California where, they say, they do not hear a hum. Another
couple, Paul
Loumena and Alexandra Lorraine, sold their Laughing Horse Inn in
Taos and
also moved away.
Hum hearer Sara Allen, an engineer with KTAO radio in
Taos, says she
continues to hear it but suffers no severe symptoms and no
longer tries to do
anything about it. “We didn’t get any real satisfaction
or any real
interest,” she says. “I have my own theories about it that
I’ve expounded on
many times, and I still believe them. I think it affects
people who don’t
sense it, too. They’re just lucky.” She believes the hum
is from
military-communication signals.
Shatzie Hubbell, who lived
on Canyon Road in Santa Fe, where she was bothered
by the vibration, moved
to a ranch near Fort Worth, Texas, where she no
longer senses the noise.
Hubbell has posted a map on a Seattle-based Web site
(eskimo.com) showing
the locations of 368 hum hearers, grouped generally on
the East and West
Coasts, the Rocky Mountains and upper Midwest.
Low-frequency sounds
also have been reported in other parts of the world,
including one case in
the early 1960s and again in the late 1980s in southern
England, as well
as in Sweden, South Africa and Australia.
“Yesterday, it had me
completely knocked out,” says Winona Whitted of Santa
Fe. “All I could do
is just [lie] there in a microwave coma.” Like many
other hum hearers,
Whitted participates in Internet discussions where
theories about the
source of such hums range from UFOs, military-industrial
plots, secret
experiments, electric-power plants and cellular telephones to
natural
phenomena, hysterical paranoia, drug use, hypochondria and
differences in
how we perceive sound.
“It’s horrible. It’s killing me,” says Whitted.
“I went to see my doctor
about a year ago, and I told him that I just
couldn’t make it any longer.
I’m just in so much pain. And he gave me a
prescription for an
antidepressant, not for its antidepressant qualities,
but because it helps
with what they call undefined pain and a lack of
sleep.”
David Deming, an associate professor of geology at the
University of
Oklahoma, says he believes the hum is caused by ELF, or
extra-low-frequency
radio signals, used for communications between
submarines and aircraft. The
signals use antennae buried in the upper
peninsula of Michigan and in
Wisconsin, though Deming says its
headquarters are at Tinker Air Force Base
near Oklahoma City, about 20
miles from Norman.
When he began sensing the low-frequency vibrations
in 1994, he thought it was
something in his neighborhood. But after he and
his wife moved to a new house
a few miles from Norman, both of them began
hearing it. He says it often is
at its worst late at night, just before he
hears the engine sounds of an
airplane overhead.
After the Norman
Transcript published an article about their experiences,
Deming says, they
heard from dozens of other people bothered by the same
thing. “I’m
normally not a person who is worried about that sort of thing,”
he says.
“I live underneath power lines. I use a cell phone all the time. But
at
times when it’s most intense and painful, what scares me is the ignorance.
We don’t know what causes it and what the effects are.”
But Deming
says he has stopped participating in the internet discussion
groups
because “it attracts the misinformation people - the kooks.”
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