A Strange, Unexplained Hum Is Keeping a Scottish Isle Awake at Night

Residents of the Scottish Isle of Lewis successful the Hebrides are claiming to perceive a unusual humming noise. No 1 knows wherever it’s coming from—or if it’s adjacent real. Nevertheless, immoderate hum-hearers assertion it’s severely disrupting their lives.

Lauren-Grace Kirtley, laminitis of The Hebridean Hum: Low frequence sound disturbance enactment and enactment radical connected Facebook, described it to BBC Radio’s Good Morning Scotland programme arsenic “a precise debased humming, droning, pulsating noise. It’s incredibly intrusive and distressing.” She said the sound is making it hard to slumber and concentrate. “I get a batch of fluttering successful my ears,” she added, “It’s making maine dizzy and giving maine headaches,” according to the BBC.

In a Facebook post, Kirtley wrote that the radical has made spectrograph recordings—graphs that amusement dependable frequence implicit time—at each determination wherever radical reported proceeding the unusual humming sounds. They identified a “persistent, recordable 50 Hz awesome of adaptable spot contiguous successful each locations,” indicating that the hum isn’t being produced from the halfway of the island. Using this approach, they ruled retired each known imaginable on-island sources, including ports, turbines, and different infrastructure. The radical is present exploring offshore origins.

The radical says it has reached retired to assorted organizations for support, but there’s inactive nary wide statement connected the imaginable cause. Kirtley, however, believes that it is of human, and not natural, origin.

Pamela Weaver Larson, a subordinate of the 546-person Facebook group, suggested successful a post that the improvement mightiness beryllium caused by otoacoustic emissions—low-intensity sounds produced successful the cochlea, a portion of the interior ear. In different words, hum-hearers mightiness beryllium proceeding noises created by their ain ears, alternatively than an outer sound.

“But past wherefore wouldn’t I perceive the hum wherever I go?” Larson mused successful the post, explaining that she didn’t perceive the hum successful Florida oregon precocious Michigan.

The caller reports articulation a big of different mysterious hums that person been reported astir the satellite for decades. There’s adjacent the World Hum Map and Database Project, founded by hum-hearer Glen MacPherson, a erstwhile University of British Columbia lecturer, which documents and maps self-reported information connected what is often called the “Worldwide Hum.”

According to the website, the hum is typically compared to a “car oregon motortruck motor idling extracurricular your location oregon down the block,” oregon arsenic “a debased rumbling oregon droning sound. It’s often perceived louder astatine nighttime than during the day, and louder indoors than outdoors.” The statement besides claims, however, that sufferers perceive it wherever they are—which isn’t accordant with Larson’s experience.

Comhairle nan Eilean Siar, the section assembly connected the Isle of Lewis, confirmed receiving reports from immoderate islanders astir debased frequence sounds and said that the biology wellness squad is investigating the situation, arsenic reported by the BBC.

That said, Kirtley, successful speech with The Times, said they’re “now beauteous definite that immoderate is causing this has a marine source,” and is apt impacting marine wildlife. “It makes it adjacent much important that the root is traced and the hum is silenced for good.”

It remains to beryllium seen whether the radical volition really hone successful connected the root of the reported hum—and what experts volition person to accidental astir it.