In January 1992, residents of the mining town of Hueytown, Alabama, began waking up at midnight with strange sounds.
It is curious that the sound that was heard at night was described in different ways - buzzing and so on.
But only one in ten people heard him. The sound was not very loud, but annoying, those who heard it began to have headaches, nausea and nervous disorders.
In this regard, the public began to put pressure on the city hall to find and eliminate the source of the strange noise. However, this proved to be difficult. Those who heard the sound could not understand where it was coming from, and therefore the experts did not have the slightest idea about the reasons for its occurrence.
Assumptions were advanced one after another. It was suspected that the noise was produced by road transport and partly by industrial production. Then these versions disappeared, since at night there was little transport on the roads, and the factories were closed. The next version was that the hum comes from the power generators in power plants.
This version was tested, as a result of which it became clear that this was not the cause of the strange noises. Another version was that the hum could be heard from the depths of the coal mines, of which there were many in the town. She seemed the most believable. But this did not come true either.
For the previous twelve months, deforestation has been carried out near the city, so another explanation has been proposed: the combination of air pressure, humidity, temperature and physical features of the area creates something like a natural echo. The idea, of course, was new, but since the noise was heard both on cold damp nights and on warm dry nights, it did not satisfy everyone.
Whatever it was, the annoying buzz did not turn into insomnia in the residents of Haytown until 1993. And then, suddenly and without any explanation, the strange noises of the night stopped.
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Surprisingly, residents of a small mining town in Alabama are not the only victims to suffer from unexplained noises at night. In England, the inhabitants of Gloucestershire suffered from similar annoying sounds; complaints were mainly from the Cheltenham and Stroud areas. Several hundred people hearing this strange manifestation of the phenomenon experienced the same ailments as described above.
Others suspected that the noises were connected with secret electronic communications of the military complex located near Stroud. The authorities denied this. After all, the center has been working for many years without causing any trouble to others, so this version also disappeared. As in the example above, the Gloucestershire Mystery ended as unexpectedly as others like it in 1993.
The strange manifestations of the phenomenon of unexplained sounds that took place in 1992, of course, were not the only ones. Overall, this is a major problem that has existed for thirty-five years. Previously, official explanations boiled down to one thing: ringing in the ears was caused by extraneous noises heard by a person.
However, when the phenomenon became widespread, this explanation had to be abandoned. Then everyone turned to the following version: the mass fascination with television is to blame for the extraneous noise. In 1960, the British government conducted a series of tests. People who claimed they suffered from such "auditory hallucinations" were placed in soundproofed laboratories, where strange noises still did not leave the test subjects.
Scientists have come to the conclusion that this phenomenon can only be explained by "internal noise". And since only a minority of those living in the area heard the annoying noises, this version seemed quite reasonable. However, many things remained unexplained: why the noises were heard only in certain areas, why they were heard only at night, and why they started and stopped so suddenly.
For some, the annoying noise only caused headaches and nausea; for others it was much worse. In the 60s and 70s, the Department of Ecology received about a hundred thousand complaints from the population, which spoke of nervous disorders and even cases of insanity, as a direct result of constant exposure to strange nocturnal sounds.
Recent reports have reported cases of suicide on this basis. It is clear that for some people, strange sounds were not a simple nuisance, and therefore this phenomenon required careful study. However, all attempts to establish the cause of the annoying noises did not lead to success. Scientists were at a loss.
In March 1992, the British government allocated $ 50,000 to the Department of the Environment to help its employees study this phenomenon more fully. The Department directed the first investigations to check the version of the high pressure of underground natural gas.
Special British services denied the assumption about the "fault" of the gas pipelines, and since the gas pipeline was laid after the first reports of strange sounds arrived, they were absolutely right.
Another possibility under consideration was auditory defect syndrome. Twenty-five people, regularly suffering from audible annoying extraneous noises, were carefully examined by medical specialists. None of the examined had any abnormalities in hearing. On this, the version about the violation of the eardrums disappeared once and for all.
However, having decided quite definitely what caused the strange sounds, scientists still did not know what caused them. By the time the money allocated for the investigation ran out, the Department was not one step closer to solving the mystery.