— Have you ever heard the Windsor Hum?
— No, I haven’t.
— My dad has,
and I've heard a lot of people who have heard it, so...
I think it's very real.
— It's like a very low...
almost like a vibration.
You think you hear it,
but it could be your mind playing tricks on you.
— In Windsor, Ontario, across the river from Detroit, hundreds of residents complain of a low rumbling.
It’s one that keeps them up at night and rattles their windows—
and it’s been loud enough to crack eggs.
But no one knows for sure where the sound comes from.
— This is the west recorder, because that's west.
Back there in the corner, you can’t even see it,
is the south recorder.
And then way over here is the north recorder.
And they get synced and pulled off and put back out every 24 to 48 hours.
— There are 1,500 members in the Windsor Hum Facebook group,
who have dedicated themselves to tracking down the origins of the hum.
Mike Provost runs the group.
He lives in a town called Olde Sandwich,
and it’s apparently where the hum is loudest.
— So you guys have collected a terabyte of audio recordings on this thing.
— Actually, no. I've got about eight terabytes.
— Eight terabytes?
Okay, I wanna hear what this thing sounds like.
— You're sure? — I'm positive.
— Understand this vibrates on the floor and everything,
so you're not really getting it clear.
But it'll give you an idea.
— That would drive me insane!
— Provost is pretty sure that the hum is America’s fault.
More specifically, he thinks that it’s coming from Zug Island,
often known as “Detroit's Area 51.”
The island, located in the Detroit River nearly five miles from Detroit,
is owned by U.S. Steel,
and the company won’t say what specifically goes on there.
It’s closely guarded by private guards and Homeland Security officials,
but we tried to get as close as we could.
— You can’t go as the crow flies.
Unless we had a helicopter, which we don’t have today.
— Kevin Bacchus is a charter fishing captain who works in Detroit.
— I don't really know much about what's down there.
People say stay away from there, but I don't know why.
So all this black shit, that's Zug Island?
— That's Zug Island.
— I don't even know about none of this shit, brother.
— But you can hear it,
you can hear this horrible noise.
“This is a restricted area defined by Homeland Security regulations.”
Yeah, I mean, it's kind of similar to what we were hearing across the river.
— There's definitely some depth to what I hear.
In other words, deep.
Maybe across the river,
they may not be able to hear this machine.
They might only be able to hear that low rumble.
That's just what I'm guessing from what I'm hearing.
But what the heck do I know?
I'm a fishing charter captain, for Christ's sake.
— In a 2014, the Canadian government commissioned a report about the hum,
which we obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.
Researchers set up microphones around Windsor.
But, due to some cross-border politics,
they weren’t allowed to investigate on Zug Island itself.
The report concludes that the sound is most likely coming from Zug Island,
but that they can't be sure.
And no one’s positive why only the Canadian side of the river can hear it.
— As far as I'm concerned, it's the Detroit Hum.
It's not the Windsor Hum, because we don't emit it.
We just experience it.
There's nothing much we can do on the Canadian side,
we have nothing between Canada and the United States
that actually deals with noise and vibration.
You can call it what you want,
but, at the end of the day, it’s not good for international relations.
— It’s that frequency that is driving us crazy.
All’s we have to do is have somebody come up and say,
“Yeah, okay, we’re making a noise,”
“we’re working on muffling it, and we don’t think we can fix it…”
“We’re sorry.”
And then we’re happy.