TAOS HUM

Opening

In the early 1990s people in and around Taos, New Mexico, began reporting a low, steady hum that would not go away. Only some ears heard it. Hearers put it between a diesel idling in the next valley and a tone inside the head. Sleep broke. Congress asked laboratories to look.

From 1993 a team out of the University of New Mexico, with Los Alamos, Sandia, and the Air Force Phillips Laboratory, took microphones, geophones, and magnetometers into houses while people said they were hearing it. They found gophers, the power grid, lightning, and no acoustic line that matched the complaint. Joe Mullins's group wrote that there were no acoustic signals that might account for the hum and no seismic events that might explain it.

Timeline

1989-1991Albuquerque and then Taos collect complaints of a low tone. The Taos cluster becomes the one that reaches Washington. Hearers describe a sound stronger indoors, sudden in onset, worse at night.

1993Rep. Bill Richardson and Rep. Steven Schiff help stand up an interdisciplinary team. Field kits go into homes. Hearers match the pitch they hear to generators in the 33 to 80 hertz band, the same band British hummers had already pointed at.

Late summer 1993The first public scientific line: no unusual acoustic, seismic, or electromagnetic source found that explains the reports. Work continues into 1996 in interim UNM papers. Sandia files electromagnetic and other-source reports with the Albuquerque DOE office.

The hum does not stop for the hearers when the reports are filed. Similar complaints exist in other towns and countries. Taos is the American case that national laboratories investigated.

Key figures

The hearers are the first layer. Roughly two percent in local surveys. Horace Poteet of Sandia was both a scientist on the team and a hearer, so the study was not simply sufferers on one side and instruments on the other.

Joe Mullins at UNM chairs the field effort. James Kelly brings hearing science. Rod Whitaker, Mark Leher, and Poteet bring the weapons-lab and Air Force kits. They are not a UFO committee. They are an acoustics and EM committee that came home empty of a source.

Richardson and Schiff got the study started. Without their letters, Sandia would not have spent nights in Taos living rooms. The team did not find the tone either.

Physical and documentary trail

The sources:

One: consistent hearer reports of a low tone, mostly indoors, in a town small enough that a factory or a fan should have been easy to walk to.

Two: in-home measurements taken while people said they heard it, with no matching acoustic signal in the room.

Three: seismic and electromagnetic sweeps that caught the grid, a golf-course generator, lightning, and a gopher, and did not catch a hum source.

Four: the UNM and Sandia write-ups. University of New Mexico Taos Hum investigation interim reports, 1993-1996, and the Sandia electromagnetic test report, are the official negative.

There is no confiscated transducer. There is no secret antenna the team missed in the first summer and found in the second. There is no medical lesion common to all hearers that closes the case as disease alone.

There are no acoustic signals that might account for the hum nor are there any seismic events that might explain it.

Things you might not know

• Only about 2 percent could hear it. The Taos study found at least 2 percent of residents heard the hum, each at a slightly different pitch between 32 and 80 hertz.
• Middle-aged people hear it most. Men and women reported it in roughly equal numbers, but middle-aged hearers were more common.
• Another town's hum was switched off. The Windsor Hum in Ontario was traced to the steelworks on Zug Island, and the reports stopped when its blast furnaces shut in April 2020. One evening in 2012 brought 22,000 reports.
• Fixing a source does not always help. In Kokomo, Indiana, a cooling tower and an air compressor were found humming and corrected, and some people kept hearing it anyway.
• One hum was fish. A hum on houseboats in Sausalito, California, turned out to be the mating calls of male midshipman fish, carried through the hulls.
• Many ears make their own sounds. Between 38 and 60 percent of adults with normal hearing have spontaneous otoacoustic emissions, faint tones produced by the ear itself.

Competing explanations

External source not caught. A distant plant, a pipeline, a military transmitter. The team looked. Weak EM fields were present. They could not tie them to the tone, and they could not rule out unusual human sensitivity to ordinary electrical noise.

Tinnitus or otoacoustic emission. Sound made in the ear, heard as if it were in the room. This fits the indoor emphasis and the missing microphone line. It does not automatically fit sudden shared onset in a town, unless a lot of ears changed at once.

Psychogenic spread. One household names a hum, neighbours listen for it, some find it. Contagion can recruit ears. It has a harder time with hearers who were already miserable before the word Taos Hum was public.

Later life of the case

Hearers still report the hum. No source has been identified since the studies ended.

Finding

People in Taos heard a low tone in their houses and they were not performing. Labs sat in those rooms with quiet instruments while the tone was being heard, and the tape came back empty. Horace Poteet heard it and also held a meter. A sound that ruins sleep does not need a committee's permission to be real to the person lying awake.

What still will not resolve: a captured acoustic line that matches the pitch they pointed at, or a source you can walk to and switch off. The reports are honest. They are also still missing a speaker.