The Taos Hum: 161 People Heard It. The Machines Heard Nothing

The Taos Hum is a low, throbbing drone that people around Taos, New Mexico began reporting in the early 1990s, like a diesel engine idling somewhere past the hills. In 1993, a team of scientists went looking for it with microphones, seismometers and magnetic sensors. Their instruments recorded silence. In Case File 010, we treat this mystery as a contradiction between two kinds of witness: the listeners and the machines. We open three documents. First, the informal report of the 1993 Taos Hum Investigation (August 23, 1993), written by Joe Mullins of the University of New Mexico and Horace Poteet of Sandia National Laboratories, with researchers from Los Alamos and the Air Force's Phillips Laboratory, which found "no known acoustic signals that might account for the hum." Second, the questionnaire: about 8,000 mailed, 1,440 answered, 161 said they heard it, and researchers estimated roughly 2% of the wider population were hearers. Third, the pitch-matching tests by Mullins and hearing scientist James Kelly, which showed that hearers, even next-door neighbors, matched different pitches between about 32 and 80 Hz. We separate the record from the legend (no, Congress did not send its team in 1997, and no, the hum was never captured on tape in Taos), compare the Taos Hum with the Bristol hum of the 1970s, the Kokomo hum traced to industrial equipment in 2003, and the Windsor hum linked to Zug Island, then rank four theories by evidence: a secret military signal, an ordinary machine, "super hearers," and a sound generated inside the hearing system itself (low-frequency tinnitus or otoacoustic emissions), including a 2016 survey of 162 hearers and a 2026 study of 28 volunteers. Status checked November 1, 2026: no confirmed cause of the Taos Hum has been published; the newest research on "hum" hearers did not study Taos itself. All scenes are illustrated reconstructions; documents shown on screen are illustrations; theories are presented as theories. Facts and legend are clearly separated. This video is not medical advice; if you notice a persistent sound, an audiologist can check your hearing. Have you ever heard a low sound at night that no one else in the room could hear? Tell us where you were. Subscribe for a new case file every week — @UnsolvedArchiveCases CHAPTERS 0:00 2 a.m. in Taos: an engine that isn't there 1:03 Case file 010: the listeners vs. the machines 1:58 Taos, New Mexico: the quietest place to hear a sound 2:50 What the hearers described 3:44 The hearers organize: Congress and the 1993 investigation 4:56 Document 1: the August 1993 report 5:57 Document 2: the questionnaire (8,000 / 1,440 / 161) 7:11 Document 3: every hearer, a different pitch 8:15 Legend vs. record 9:34 Bristol, Kokomo, Windsor: the hum elsewhere 10:28 Theories ranked: military signal, machine, super hearers 12:15 Theory 1: a sound inside the hearer 13:49 Where the file stands 15:09 Your turn and the next file SOURCES: Mullins, J. H. and Poteet, H., ASA 128th Meeting (Austin, 1994), abstract on the Taos hum investigation: https://www.auditory.org/asamtgs/asa9... "The Taos Hum" (summary of the August 23, 1993 Informal Report, Mullins & Poteet): https://www.qsl.net/w/w5www/taoshum.html Mullins, J. and Kelly, J., "The Mystery of the Taos Hum," Echoes (Acoustical Society of America), Autumn 1995. HeraldNet (Oct. 29, 2004), survey figures from the University of New Mexico study: https://www.heraldnet.com/?p=391895 KRQE News 13, "The legend of the Taos Hum continues": https://digital-release.krqe.com/fox-... Live Science, "What is the Taos Hum?" (2014): https://www.livescience.com/43519-tao... Frosch, F., International Tinnitus Journal 20(1), 2016: https://www.tinnitusjournal.com/artic... The Debrief (June 2026) on the NTNU-led PLOS ONE study of 28 hum hearers: https://thedebrief.org/people-have-re... Wikipedia overview with Kokomo (Acentech, 2003) and Windsor/Zug Island references: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hum Deming, D., "The Hum: An Anomalous Sound Heard Around the World," Journal of Scientific Exploration 18(4), 2004. Facts vs. legend are clearly separated in this video; theories are labeled as theories. Subscribe for more case files: @UnsolvedArchiveCases #TaosHum #UnsolvedMysteries #UnsolvedArchive