Readers of Darklore Volume 1 will (hopefully!) have perused my article “Her Sweet Murmur: Exploring the Aural Phenomenology of Border States” (aw heck, for all you cheapskates – it’s also available as a free PDF download at the Darklore website). In it I note how various ‘paranormal’ phenomena seem to be preceded by certain sounds. As such, I was very interested to read Colin Keay’s article in the Journal of Scientific Exploration (Volume 7, Issue 4), “Progress in Explaining the Mysterious Sounds Produced by Very Large Fireballs”:
For about ten percent of those who do witness a very luminous meteor fireball, the mental impression is heightened by strange swishing, hissing and popping noises coincident with its passage across the sky. Such sounds are quite anomalous in that they imply acoustic propagation at the speed of light. This anomaly was first recognized more than two centuries ago, and has defied explanation until quite recently.
To clarify the ‘anomaly’ part – these bolides are often more than 50km away, so no noise should be hear (or if so, at the very least it should be delayed by a significant time due to the difference between the speed of light and the speed of sound.
Keay catalogues various historical instances of these strange sounds – including ‘swishing’/wind blowing and ‘buzzing’ aural phenomena, similar to those I listed in my article, preceding strange sightings of UFOs, entities and ‘the Virgin Mary’. Additionally, sometimes only certain people in a group of witnesses reported ‘hearing’ the sounds – again, another point of intersection with my article.
I’m certainly not saying that these fireballs were paranormal events. In fact, Keay points out that James Oberg has noted a similar effect in witnesses to Space Shuttle re-entries. He also points out that ‘rushing’ sounds have also been documented preceding earthquake events. This suggests that the mechanism underlying paranormal events (at least, those that I concentrated on which were preceded by a certain noise) may be the same as that which lies behind meteor and earthquake phenomena. Keay’s conclusion is that this is ELF/VLF electromagnetic radiation (which would probably go far to explaining various other aspects of UFO close encounters).
Dr Michael Persinger has already explored some of these avenues, but there’s not really space here to discuss in detail. But, as I mention in my Darklore article, there are still questions as to how such a ‘prosaic’ explanation (relatively speaking) can explain other aspects of paranormal encounters – not least, when groups of people see the same thing.
Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice would say…
