occult crackles , hisses and whistles have been heard 36 kilometers ( 22 miles ) above the Earth ’s aerofoil . Unsure of their precise origin , NASAplans to send more microphones up into this region of near space to retain eavesdropping .
“ It sounds kind of like ' The X - Files , ” Daniel Bowman , who built the equipment that made the recording , toldLive Science . Known as atmospheric infrasound , the noise are at too grim a frequency to be heard by the human ear , in the main souse below 20 Gustav Ludwig Hertz . rush up , however , and the eerie sounds are revealed . Listen to the recording below .
Bowman , a graduate student from theUniversity of North Carolina , hop that these recordings might boost more people to start heed to atmospheric infrasound again . The last experiments that recorded these wave from such pinnacle occur in the sixties , when scientist were trying to mind out for nuclear explosions . Since then though , they ’ve largely been forgotten about . “ There have n’t been acoustic recording in the stratosphere for 50 years . for certain , if we place instruments up there , we will find things we have n’t seen before , ” say Bowman .
The infrasound mike he built were sequester to NASA’sHigh Altitude Student Platform(HASP ) . The large helium balloon is an annual project run by NASA in which university students can design experiments to be broadcast up into near space — the region of the atmosphere above the altitude at which carpenter’s plane fly , but below the limit of the stratosphere at 100 kilometers ( 62 mi ) up .
The escape happen last year and lasted a total of nine hour as it drifted over New Mexico and Arizona , attain a maximal tallness of 37.5 km ( 23.5 mi ) . This is the in high spirits any infrasound experimentation has reached , concord to Bowman . In fact , the recording were so challenging that NASA is plan to transport more recording devices up there on this year ’s HASP escape .
Because of their low frequency , the infrasounds convey for prospicient distances . They can be produced by all sorting of natural event , such as volcanoes , quake or thunderstorms . It ’s thought that listening to these waves might even be a way ofmonitoring the atmospheric condition . Bowman has similar design , as he ’s looking to record the infrasound above an erupting volcano .
Rather than aliens or robots though , the reference of these spectral sounds are probably closer to home . salutary guessing so far range from signals from wind farm , sea wave doss , wind Sturm und Drang , or even just the vibrations stimulate by the balloon cable . look like we wo n’t be needingMulder and Scullyafter all .
