I'm Laura Norton, and this is one strange thing, the show where we searched the nation's news archives for stories that can't quite be explained. This episode, we start with a sound.

Way back in 1979, a magazine called The New Scientist ran an article about a strange phenomenon.

Individual people, all over Britain, were hearing a strange, deep hum.

And because most people around them couldn't hear it, no one believed them.

According to that new scientist article, the British public first became aware of the hum in

1978 when the Sunday mirror profiled a postal worker.

This postal worker complained about the low, persistent noise that she could make out, but her coworkers couldn't.

It was a strange story, so you can imagine the editor's surprise when close to a thousand readers sent in their own letters describing experiences with the same sound.

These letters came in from all over the British Isles.

According to the new scientist, what these people heard wasn't the usual environmental noise like traffic or airplanes. Those sounds tend to be much higher in frequency.

As the new scientist explained it,

most people who could hear the hum were from the suburbs or rural areas

and described, quote, a constant throbbing hum,

something like the base frequency of a lorry with its engine on idle.

Eventually, the Sunday Mirror wrangled a group of test subjects

and employed a local professor to try and figure out what it was that their readers were hearing.

Through those tests, he was able to nail down a frequency about the same as a human pulse that

best matched what they were hearing.

But that identification, it didn't explain what exactly was producing the noise.

The experiment attempted to separate those who were hearing a hum internally, say that their ears were ringing, from those who were hearing it externally.

So the professor conducted a simple hearing test.

And the results? After sifting out people who were experiencing ringing in the ears, they found out

...