The Taos Hum

All right, here is a genuine unsolved mystery, and I like it because nobody has ever explained it and it is still going on right now, a few miles from where you are sitting.

In the early nineteen nineties, people around Taos started reporting a sound.

Not a loud sound. A low-frequency hum — people describe it as a distant diesel engine idling somewhere it shouldn't be, or a subwoofer through a wall three houses away. Persistent. Always there. Worse at night, worse indoors, and impossible to locate; you cannot walk toward it because it does not come from anywhere.

And here is the strange part. Only some people hear it. The estimates run at around two percent of the local population — but those people hear it clearly, consistently, and to the point where some of them cannot sleep. Meanwhile their spouse standing next to them hears absolutely nothing.

So of course the first assumption was that the hearers were imagining it. Except they described the same sound independently, in the same terms, and some of them were sufficiently miserable about it to move away — which is not a small thing to do about a noise you invented.

It got serious enough that in nineteen ninety-three, a formal investigation was mounted. Researchers from Los Alamos National Laboratory, from the University of New Mexico, from Sandia — real acoustic scientists with real instruments — came to Taos to find it.

They put sensitive equipment in the homes of people who were hearing it. They surveyed. They measured.

And they could not find it. No acoustic source. Nothing in the environment that matched what people were describing.

The theories since have run the full range. Industrial equipment somewhere far off, carried oddly by the terrain. Distant military activity. Something to do with the geology of the rift. An internal effect — some quirk of the inner ear or the brain that a small fraction of people are prone to. Colliding ocean waves generating infrasound that travels continental distances.

And then there are the theories that involve secret government installations, which around here you will hear confidently and at length. Los Alamos is over the hill, after all, and this is a part of the world where people have historical grounds for assuming the government is doing something in the mountains and not mentioning it.

What makes the Taos Hum properly interesting to me is that it is not unique. Similar hums have been reported in Bristol in England, in Windsor in Ontario, in Auckland — always the same profile: low, constant, heard by a small minority, never satisfactorily traced.

So if you stay the night in Taos and you wake at three in the morning convinced that somebody has left a truck idling outside — get up and look, by all means.

But there might not be a truck.