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Gibsons teacher tracking Worldwide Hum

Science
hum
Gibsons teacher, researcher and university lecturer Glen MacPherson with the World Hum Map and Database Project ( www.thehum.info ) he created online to track the phenomenon known as the Worldwide Hum.

There’s a phenomenon called the Worldwide Hum that only some people can hear, and one man on the Sunshine Coast is looking to analyze, locate and stop it, if possible.

Gibsons teacher, researcher and university lecturer Glen MacPherson has created an online World Hum Map and Database Project that asks hearers to peg their location on a virtual map and write a short report on the sound they’re experiencing.

Most hearers of the Worldwide Hum say it sounds like a truck engine idling, although some describe it as more of a distant rumbling. For the majority of hearers, MacPherson said, relief is found by drowning out the low frequency sound with other noises.

That’s why most people suffer more at night, when it’s quiet, according to MacPherson.

Currently he has just over 13,000 people who have reported hearing the hum on his database at www.thehum.info. He suspects there are well over a million hearers worldwide, but suspects many wouldn’t be able to access his website due to language and technology barriers.

He’s recently transcribed the site to Chinese and he hopes that once word gets out in China, more people in that part of the world will report hearing the hum. Currently there is just one report from China and it’s written in English.

MacPherson didn’t start hearing the hum until the spring of 2012, when he lived in Wilson Creek.

He assumed it was noise from planes at first, but because of the sound’s frequency he quickly abandoned that idea and started looking for a different answer.

Online he found a lot of conspiracy theories and people who weren’t taking the sound seriously.

“It’s been connected to all manner of wild conspiracy and spooky sort of shows. It’s been mentioned on The X-Files, for example,” MacPherson said.

He felt making a website and database of his own would unify the serious seekers of information, because he could “filter out some of the conspiratorial nonsense.”

The database is just a start for MacPherson, who wants to bring credibility to hum hearers who, he believes, should be treated the same as those who have tinnitus (a high-pitched ringing in the ears).

One of the four theories of the hum’s origin is that it’s an internally generated low frequency sound that only a portion of the population has, similar to tinnitus, which is a self-reported illness and has no doctor’s test to prove it exists.

“We believe people who complain about high frequency noise, but for some reason we’re not as quick to believe people who complain about low frequency noise,” MacPherson noted.

He thinks that theory is plausible, as well as two others (that it’s the grand accumulation of the sound of all human activity on earth or a geological phenomenon) but believes he’s disproved the fourth theory – that the sound is coming from very low frequency (VLF) radio waves, such as those used to communicate with submarines.

MacPherson tested the theory by creating a steel VLF blocking box with a specially fitted gasket to seal it completely from outside noise, and he went inside to listen.

“Those VLF radio waves could not penetrate that box. Therefore if VLF radio waves were the source of the hum, the hum should have been silenced inside that box and it was not,” MacPherson said.

He plans to continue investigating the theory of the geological phenomenon later this year by trying to get down into the bottom of the Britannia Copper Mine with a few hearers of the hum to see if the sound is prevalent there. “If it’s silenced, it will be a major discovery,” MacPherson said.

His work received widespread notice in 2016 with interviews on Coast to Coast Radio, CBC, Al Jazeera and Global News.

Since the exposure he’s had “a flood of serious inquiries” from people wanting to know more, and he’s hopeful that in 2017 the exposure will result in more scientific study, perhaps by someone with more time and money to devote to it.

“It would be nice to be engaged by a serious laboratory. I’ve got things that I very much love doing that I’ve put on hold and I’d very much like to get back to them,” MacPherson said, noting he doesn’t care who gets the credit for discovering where the Worldwide Hum is coming from.

“I just want this solved.”