- Nah, nothing.
Have you ever heard an unexplained sound?
Like a bump in the night or a voice from an empty room
something like that?
Well, you're not alone.
There are a lot of unexplained sounds out there,
and some are pretty famous.
Here are just four of them:
Back in 1977, Jerry Amon, who is a researcher
at Ohio State's Big Ear telescope, was pouring over data
when he noticed a radio transmission
so loud and so significant that he circled it
and wrote "Wow!"
in the margin.
Exclamation point and all.
The radio transmission that caught Amos' attention
was 30 times louder than ambient sound around it,
and it lasted for 72 seconds, which is about the amount
of time it would have taken the Big Ear to pass by
the fixed location in space.
Plus, it was broadcast near 1,420 megahertz,
which is where scientists had already predicted
an alien civilization would probably broadcast
a radio transmission.
Despite over a hundred attempts to replicate the findings,
no one's ever been able to find anything
like the Wow signal again.
But, it's also never fully been fully explained
to everyone's satisfaction,
making it still an unexplained noise
and a pretty significant one, too.
The undersea world is full of sounds.
Tons of them, and because of that,
the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,
or NOAH, has an eavesdropping network setup below the sea.
This network of hydrophones has picked up a lot of sounds,
but most of them have been explained.
One is perennially inexplicable
and it's called the "upsweep".
The upsweep is a narrow band of rapidly increasing tones,
lasting for several seconds,
and they've not been able to explain it.
It actually sounds like this.
(upsweeping noise)
Yeah, that's it.
One of the interesting things about the upsweep
is that it appears to be seasonal.
It peaks between spring and fall.
Even though NOAH has no idea what it is,
they're still listening.
(low beeping noise)
Back in the 1980s, a radio tower north of Moscow
started transmitting a series of beeps,
and I guess to mix things up,
in 1992, it started transmitting buzzes.
Each of the buzzes lasted about a second,
and they were between 21 and 34 buzzes a minute.
Every few weeks, a male voice would interrupt
this weird buzzing transmission
and repeat strings of numbers in Russian names like
"Boris" and "Olga" and "Mikhail",
and the buzzes themselves would change amplitude
and pitch and tone sometimes.
It was odd.
In 2010, the station caught the world's attention
by stopping transmitting two different times.
When it came online the second time, everything changed.
The buzzes had been replaced by weird shuffling sounds
and thuds,
and now they played snippets of music
from things like "Swan Lake".
They're probably only a handful of people
in the entire world who know what these buzzings
and Russian names and thuds and shufflings actually mean,
but what the UVB-76 tower is is not much of a mystery.
It's most likely what's called a "number station",
which is one way communication using short wave radio
between handlers and spies.
Pretty cool stuff.
There are hums reported around the world,
but the Taos Hum in New Mexico
is probably the most famous of all.
It's compared to the low rumbling of a diesel engine
idling off in the distance.
The thing about the Taos Hum and all hums
is that not everybody can hear it.
People who can hear the Taos Hum
report everything from mild annoyance to nose bleeds
and insomnia as a result.
Conspiracy theorists think that it's the government
testing out some sort of new ultrasonic or subsonic weapon
or it's a government communications program
that's still secret.
Because not everybody can hear the hum,
doctors tend to dismiss it as tinnitus or mass hysteria,
much to sufferers' dismay.
Recently, some researchers suggested
that the hum is a real thing and that it originates
either deep in the Earth's crust or up in the atmosphere
and are low frequency sound waves that are transmitted
throughout the world's ocean.
Only some people can hear them.
Some poor, poor people.
Those sounds are pretty awesome, huh?
You got any favorite unexplained sounds?
Leave them in the comments below.
And if you have some explanations for these,
we want to hear those, too.
And check out 10 unexplained sounds
that scientists are seriously looking into
on "How Stuff Works".