Noises Off
Sometimes people hear strange, possibly fictional, noises. In Bristol in 1979, a bunch of people heard a low buzzing sound through the city and environs. Efforts to track it down met with failure, and scientists are still trying to work it out. The most common explanation: it's all in their minds. It seems odd that a bunch of people could all share the same hallucination, but it's not without precedent.
There are also reports from all of the world, and more recently in America, of people hearing sonic booms when there was nothing sonic around to boom at them. The obvious explanation (that it's from an unseen aircraft) doesn't apply because many reports pre-date the invention of the airplane. There are other reasonable explanations, however, such as meteorites speeding through the atmosphere at an oblique angle (which could happen depending on how the atmosphere deflected it).
If you check out Bloop on YouTube, you'll hear an actual recording made by NOAA in 1997 that they have yet to explain. Clearly this is an actual noise, but theories vary widely as to what might have caused it. It's very, very loud, and it carried over 5,000 miles. Some highly-imaginative people have guessed that it might be some sort of giant sea animal that we don't know about, although more sensible explanations range from seismic activity to iceberg calving. My own guess is that it could be malfunctioning equipment. If there is some fundamental flaw in how these sound detection machines are made, then it would pick up this noise over and over again, and there would be no "sensible" explanation for it, which is what's been happening.
Malfunctioning equipment might sound far-fetched and somewhat unromantic, but it explained the flying rod flap of the mid-90s, where images of long, helix-like insects kept showing up in video footage, even though they were invisible to the naked eye. All sorts of reasons were proposed as to what the hell these things were. Suggestions included a new form of insect, "skyfish", or even alien invaders. Anticlimactically, it turned out to be a side-effect of the frame capture rate of the video cameras being used, as explained here. People who prefer to believe in aliens, or giant invisible animals flying around in the air won't believe that, but there it is.
If you have a better idea of what that Bloop thing is, let me know, so I can tell NOAA and win a Nobel Prize.
There are also reports from all of the world, and more recently in America, of people hearing sonic booms when there was nothing sonic around to boom at them. The obvious explanation (that it's from an unseen aircraft) doesn't apply because many reports pre-date the invention of the airplane. There are other reasonable explanations, however, such as meteorites speeding through the atmosphere at an oblique angle (which could happen depending on how the atmosphere deflected it).
If you check out Bloop on YouTube, you'll hear an actual recording made by NOAA in 1997 that they have yet to explain. Clearly this is an actual noise, but theories vary widely as to what might have caused it. It's very, very loud, and it carried over 5,000 miles. Some highly-imaginative people have guessed that it might be some sort of giant sea animal that we don't know about, although more sensible explanations range from seismic activity to iceberg calving. My own guess is that it could be malfunctioning equipment. If there is some fundamental flaw in how these sound detection machines are made, then it would pick up this noise over and over again, and there would be no "sensible" explanation for it, which is what's been happening.
Malfunctioning equipment might sound far-fetched and somewhat unromantic, but it explained the flying rod flap of the mid-90s, where images of long, helix-like insects kept showing up in video footage, even though they were invisible to the naked eye. All sorts of reasons were proposed as to what the hell these things were. Suggestions included a new form of insect, "skyfish", or even alien invaders. Anticlimactically, it turned out to be a side-effect of the frame capture rate of the video cameras being used, as explained here. People who prefer to believe in aliens, or giant invisible animals flying around in the air won't believe that, but there it is.
If you have a better idea of what that Bloop thing is, let me know, so I can tell NOAA and win a Nobel Prize.