{"id":9960,"date":"2016-04-30T14:30:45","date_gmt":"2016-04-30T21:30:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/emrabc.ca\/?p=9960"},"modified":"2017-04-30T14:38:47","modified_gmt":"2017-04-30T21:38:47","slug":"have-you-heard-the-hum-bc-man-investigates-strange-sound-heard-around-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/emrabc.ca\/?p=9960","title":{"rendered":"Have you heard the Hum? BC man investigates strange sound heard around the world"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Jon Azpiri<\/a>\u00a0 Online News Producer \u00a0Global News<\/p>\n

April 17, 2016<\/p>\n

Glen MacPherson first heard the Hum in 2012.<\/p>\n

He was in Sechelt when he detected a low-level drone that he thought\u00a0was\u00a0coming\u00a0from nearby float planes.<\/p>\n

Over time, he started to realize the Hum had nothing to do with planes and tried to figure out what\u00a0exactly\u00a0was going on. So,\u00a0he did what most people do when they have an unanswered question: he Googled it.<\/p>\n

He found out he wasn\u2019t alone.\u00a0MacPherson\u00a0discovered an online community of people who say they\u00a0have been\u00a0hearing a mysterious drone that has been dubbed The World Hum.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

WATCH: Torontonians report hearing the Hum<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cMuch to my surprise, it turns out I was one of the people who can sense what seems to be a very unusual low-frequency sound,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Four years later, when curious people like MacPherson Google information about the Hum, they come across his website, The World Hum Map and Database<\/a>.<\/p>\n

MacPherson, a schoolteacher in Gibsons who has also worked as an instructor at the University of British Columbia, says he wanted to apply a measure of scientific rigour to this unexplained phenomenon, so he created the database to track reports from people around the world who say they too hear the Hum.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

MacPherson has heard from thousands of people from locations as far as Iceland, New Zealand, Kazakhstan and the\u00a0Philippines. The data, he admits, is skewed since the site only reaches\u00a0English speakers. He plans to translate the site into Chinese, which means he could get a flood of new data from the world\u2019s most populous country.<\/p>\n

He says if you look at the data he has accumulated, a few things stand out.<\/p>\n

\u201cI caution anybody who looks at the Hum Map to not be distracted by the high concentration of points on the Eastern Seaboard of the US and, in particular, over in England. Over in England, it would appear that they\u2019re being absolutely clobbered,\u201d MacPherson said.<\/p>\n

He also notes that Vancouver Island has a \u201csignificantly higher concentration of Hum reports.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

So what is the Hum?<\/p>\n

MacPherson says the Hum may be a relatively recent phenomenon, with a significant number of reports first emerging in the late 60 and early 70s.<\/p>\n

There are three major theories as to what is causing the Hum.<\/p>\n

The main suspect is very low-frequency (VLF) radio emissions that are used by the military to communicate with submarines.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I say VLF, I\u2019m not referring to sound,\u201d MacPherson said. \u201cThat leads to another striking and startling conclusion, the fact that the Hum may not be a sound in the traditional sense. It may be the body\u2019s reaction to a particular band of radio frequencies<\/b>. That\u2019s not an outrageous idea. The concept that the body can interpret certain electromagnetic frequencies as sound is reasonably well-established in research literature.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another theory is that the World Hum is \u201cnothing more than the grand accumulation of human activity\u201d that could include noise from highways, marine traffic, mining, windmill farms, hydroelectric\u00a0dams and other forms of industry.<\/p>\n

In 2014, a\u00a0federally funded study confirmed a humming noise in Windsor, Ont.,\u00a0known as the Windsor Hum,\u00a0emanated from an island across the Detroit River<\/a>.<\/p>\n

An acoustic monitoring study showed the rumbling was real and reached Windsor from heavily industrial Zug Island in River Rouge, Mich.<\/p>\n

However,\u00a0the investigation \u2013 done by scientists at the University of Windsor and Western University \u2013 failed to pinpoint just what was causing the phenomenon.<\/p>\n

A third theory is that the noise stems from geological processes at work.<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s the idea\u00a0that people who hear the Hum are just suffering from tinnitus, a medical condition that results in a ringing of the ears.<\/p>\n

David Deming,\u00a0a University of Oklahoma professor who was one of the first researchers to examine the Hum<\/a>,\u00a0noted that \u201cHum symptoms are distinctly different from classic tinnitus. Tinnitus is typically a high-frequency ringing sound \u2014 not a low-frequency rumble.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat I always like to point out about tinnitus is that it\u2019s self-reported,\u201d MacPherson said. \u201cThere is no external metric for it. If we believe that tinnitus is real, then the question is what differentiates it from reports of the World Hum?\u201d<\/p>\n

There are plenty of other more far-fetched theories out there, and MacPherson has heard them all.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhenever you\u2019re dealing with something unexplained, it invites all manner of people who have creative ways of interpreting reality,\u201d he says diplomatically.<\/p>\n

Part of his work, he says, is using his science background to separate plausible theories from crazed conspiracies that circulate online.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s plant life, it\u2019s huge boring tunnel machines, it\u2019s\u00a0weather projects, it\u2019s aliens,\u201d he says. \u201cAt least we didn\u2019t hear about the Illuminati.\u201d<\/p>\n

MacPherson understands that some might think that he is no different than some of the conspiracy theorists who visit his site.<\/p>\n

But he says his dedication to the scientific method is what separates him from the tinfoil-hat crowd.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

What\u2019s in the box?<\/p>\n

A recent article in the\u00a0New Republic<\/a>\u00a0outlined MacPherson\u2019s experiment with a so-called Deming Box. Named after the professor who first delved into this phenomenon, the steel box is designed to \u201ccreate within it a VLF radio free space.\u201d<\/p>\n

If a person who can hear the Hum gets into the box and no longer detects the noise, that could suggest VLF radio waves are the culprit.<\/p>\n

Shortly after the article was published, MacPherson got inside the box to see what would happen. He said he got \u201cmixed results\u201d and plans to move the box to an undisclosed location on the\u00a0Sunshine Coast and try again.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf I get a positive result, I\u2019ve got a handful of volunteers on the Sunshine Coast who can hear the Hum and who are ready to go in as well,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

He also plans to continue maintaining the database, which he says has helped him connect with people who are also looking for answers.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are large numbers of perfectly sensible, everyday\u00a0individuals\u00a0and this is what we all have in common. We can hear this noise.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2013 With files from The Canadian Press<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

http:\/\/globalnews.ca\/news\/2644848\/have-you-heard-the-hum-bc-man-investigates-strange-sound-heard-around-the-world\/<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Jon Azpiri\u00a0 Online News Producer \u00a0Global News April 17, 2016 Glen MacPherson first heard the Hum in 2012. He was in Sechelt when he detected a low-level drone that he thought\u00a0was\u00a0coming\u00a0from nearby float planes. Over time, he started to realize the Hum had nothing to do with planes and tried to figure out what\u00a0exactly\u00a0was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,28,3,387,423,353,422,208,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9960","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bc","category-cell-tower","category-health_and_safety","category-high-pitched-ringing","category-hum","category-newspaper","category-sechelt","category-symptoms","category-wireless_devices"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/emrabc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9960","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/emrabc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/emrabc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emrabc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emrabc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9960"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/emrabc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9960\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9961,"href":"https:\/\/emrabc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9960\/revisions\/9961"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/emrabc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emrabc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emrabc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}