A mysterious, low-frequnecy noise in Taos, New Mexico, has baffled dcientists and united "hearers" to find its source and stop it.

Paul Loumena tips the bottle of spring water skyward and takes a deep pull. The sparkling liquid bubbles and gurgles and disappears down his throat. Finally, he has had enough. "Ummmm," he says with a deep sigh, "that hits the spot."

A fit-looking man in his mid-thirties who wears his dark hair in a fashionable pony tail, Loumena has spent the early afternoon lovingly working his vegetable garden. Now he is at his real job: overseeing the operation at the Laughing Horse Inn, a charming, historic hostelry owned by him and his wife, Alexandra.

Carefully placing the bottle on the tile-topped dining table that runs the length of the room just off the inn's minuscule lobby, Loumena grins broadly. He looks happy, refreshed, and rested. "I sure didn't feel like this a year ago," he says lightly. "At that time, my life and my wife's was a nightmare."

To fully appreciate the contrast between then and now for the Loumenas it is necessary to first look back to the summer of 1991 when they packed up their young daughter and a few belongings and said goodbye to crowded, crime-ridden Oakland, California. Seeking a simpler, less stressful life, they invested everything they had in the Laughing Horse -- a humble, 127-year-old structure that served as a temporary home for D.H. Lawrence when he first came to northern New Mexico more than a half century ago -- and moved to Taos, a village of 4,000 permanent residents that nestles almost 7,000 breathless feet up in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains about halfway between Albuquerque and Denver.

"We had just moved into a new rental house and the first night there Alexandra woke up complaining about hearing a noise that sounded like an electrical transformer," says Loumena. The noise was so persistent and disturbing it kept her awake most of the night.

Forty-eight hours later Loumena began hearing it as well. "I was asleep and it woke me up," he says. Determined to find the source, he slipped on a pair of shoes, grabbed a flashlight, and began prowling through the darkness. "Everywhere I went I felt like it was just behind me, but I couldn't find it." Frustrated, he climbed back into bed, only to toss and turn until the noise unexplainably ceased shortly before dawn.

But from then on, things got worse. Every night, Loumena says, the noise was there, materializing at about 1 a.m. and lingering until 4. Disturbingly, it began to take on almost a physical presence was well. Loumena not only heard it, he felt it. It manifested itself variously as a throbbing in his chest or a dull pain behind his eyes. "There were nights," he admits with a frown, "when my whole head felt like a tuning fork."

For months after first noticing the phenomenon the Loumenas suffered in silence, assuming that the problem was theirs alone. Then, on March 19, 1992, a letter appeared in the reader's opinion section of the weekly Taos News that grabbed their attention. It was signed by Catanya Saltzman, a modern dancer whose husband, Bob, was a locally well-known photographer. Both she and her husband, she wrote, were being driven to distraction by an insidious sound that had suddenly materialized and refused to withdraw. "Who is making this noise?" she wanted to know. "Why are they making it? When will it end?"

The letter opened a floodgate. The number of people who reported hearing the noise began surfacing from various points in Rio Arriba County. In a matter of days about 40 area residents had linked up and formed a loose network of victims.

When they began comparing notes, they discovered that their individual experiences with the noise were not dissimilar. They agreed that it was more audible in the middle of the night; that it seemed more intense indoors than outdoors, and was more noticeable in small rooms than in large ones. What they could not agree on, however, was what it sounded like. To the Loumenas it resembled an electrically generated drone. To the Saltzmans it was a distant but omnipresent rumble. Many described it as sounding like a diesel engine idling in the distance. One young girl likened it to the buzz of a large bumblebee.

There was, nevertheless, one characteristic with which no one quarrelled: It was maddening. It was not only annoying, they concluded, but was detrimental to their physical and mental health as well. For one thing, it kept them awake night after night, which made them extremely irritable and sensitive to criticism.

Bob Saltzman, in a separate letter to the News, related how some friends, a couple with a previously happy marriage, had been irrevocably damaged by the phenomenon. The woman claimed it was driving her berserk. Her husband, however, was unable to hear it. When he began teasing her about her overactive imagination, Saltzman said, she became so angry about his lack of sensitivity that she filed for divorce.

"I believe that," says Alexandra Loumena, nodding wisely. "We were almost to the point of divorce ourselves." A normally placid and even-tempered person, she confessed that her anger and frustration at being unable to escape the hum grew so great at one point that she kicked a hole in the wall of her bedroom.

Other symptoms said to be induced by the hum ranged from headaches, nosebleeds, and chest pains to dizziness, nausea, and an inability to concentrate.
 

In an attempt to resolve the problem, the sufferers, who began calling themselves "hearers," exchanged experiences about how each had tried to track down the source. Since none had been successful, they recognized that the first thing they needed to do as a group was find the source of the hum. Only after they found it the origin of the noise could they eliminate it.

This goal, however, proved much more difficult than they anticipated.

Obvious sources were quickly examined and just as quickly rejected: a new electrical generator at the country club ... the whistling of the wind through telephone wires ... the city's power plant ... some unreported type of mining.

More esoteric theories also were proffered. One letter writer, perhaps with tongue in cheek (it is sometimes hard to tell in Taos, which has been infected from nearby Santa Fe with a malignant case of New Ageism) suggested it is being caused by a group of "spiritual feminists" from Uranus tunnelling upwards from their 10,000-year-old sanctuary beneath the proximate mountains -- a fact revealed to the writer in an interview with the leader of the group, a female calling herself Moonhawk. Another letter writer said it was caused by traffic. She knew this because she had left her body and made an airborne tour of the area.

On the more credible side, New Mexico Rep. Bill Richardson, a member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, weighed in with the opinion that the Hum is an emission from one or more of the military facilities scattered across the state, a plausible-sounding hypothesis considering New Mexico has an abundance of top secret installations, including the scientific laboratory at Los Alamos, about 50 miles from Taos, where the atomic bomb was developed and which currently is involved in a communications program for submarines which utilizes a technology called ELF, for Extremely Low Frequency transmissions.

Richardson quickly backed off from his pronouncement, however, when the Department of Defense adamantly denied participation in any type of activity that might precipitate the hum.

The theory that the hum originated locally was weakened as well when, as a result of the publicity given the phenomenon, hearers began clocking in from across the country, from North Chatam, New York, to Pacific Palisades, California. It also was pointed out that a similar curiosity is part of an ongoing research study in Great Britain where an unexplained humming noise was first reported 20 years ago.

To add to the confusion of what might be causing the hum, even the assumption that it is being created by an external source is disputed.

An engineer from Denver, summoned by the Taos hearers who chipped in to pay her expenses, determined after two days of testing that the hum was a low frequency emission, so low in fact that it is not detectable by many. Unhappily, the engineer was unable to pinpoint the source.

Conversely, other investigators contradicted her findings. A team of experts representing the highly respected Sandia National Laboratories, the Los Alamos National Laboratories, the Air Force's Phillips Laboratory, and the University of New Mexico camped at the Saltzman home for several days and salted the area with a variety of highly sensitive scientific instruments such as microphones, geophones, magnetometers, and electromagnetic antennae. After analyzing their data, they announced that the hum is neither acoustical nor electromagnetic, i.e., that it is not a sound wave with a specific origin. But what it is, they don't know.

While the scientists agree that the hum is "real" -- i.e., that the hearers are not a bunch of hysterics -- they have not yet been able to find the cause. But they are still trying.

A team from the University of New Mexico, headed by Dr. Jim Kelly, a hearing specialist and director of research at UNM's department of surgery, is currently in the middle of a multi-phased study designed to solve the mystery.

The study, which is being financed by the university, began with a series of questionnaires mailed out to residents of Taos and the nearby communities asking them if they heard the hum and giving them the opportunity to elaborate upon the experience.

"The response has been phenomenal," Kelly says. So far about 4,000 people have returned the forms. Kelly is quick to point out that not all the replies have been directed toward trying to solve the problem; some of the respondents merely used the opportunity to sound off against the study or attack those who claim to have heard the hum. Still, Kelly says, the questionnaires have given the team a significant number of leads to help narrow the search.

One of the more puzzling aspects of the hum, Kelly says, has been the fact that some people hear it while many more do not. This first led to physical examinations of the hearers to see if any were suffering from ear ailments or had other hearing problems. When that avenue was exhausted, more tests were ordered to determine if hearers were simply physically gifted individuals who were picking up a signal that eluded others.

This approach was given some credence when it was discovered that the sound detected by the hearers was, without exception, in such a low frequency range that it would be inaudible to most people. By artificially creating various signals, scientists were able to determine the frequencies that elicited responses among the hearers. The problem was, the frequencies were not consistent. Some hearers proved sensitive to signals at roughly 20 hertz, which is on the bottom threshold of human audibility, while others heard it at higher frequencies ranging upwards into the 80 hertz range. Human speech, by way of comparison, registers between 300 hertz and 3,400 hertz; an E Flat note on a piano clocks at 32 hertz.

As a result of these tests, Kelly concluded that not everyone was hearing the same thing, a determination that seriously complicated the search.

But further testing revealed something even more puzzling.

A sound, which the experts call a "beat," is perceived when a person becomes aware of two signals that play off against each other. "It takes two to tango," says Kelly. Strangely, in the case of the hum, the Taos hearers report a beat from only one signal. "This is truly the sound of one hand clapping," says a perplexed Kelly, who so far has been unable to account for this anomaly. "It is very hard to explain because there has to be another signal," he explains. Determining what that other signal is and where is it coming from is the one of the goals of the study.

The more Kelly examines the phenomenon the more he leans toward the possibility that the hum is something generated within the ears of the hearers themselves, a curiosity called an oto-acoustical sound.

The ear is a unique sense organ, says Kelly, one that exhibits two-way communication with the brain. "The ear does not just collect information and feed it to the brain; the brain also sends signals to the ear."

Kelly suspects what may be happening in Taos is that hearers perceive some type of self-generated sound. Then they begin to listen for it. The more they listen for it, the more they hear it. A rough analogy is like having a toothache. The victim begins to think about the sore tooth and the more he thinks about it, the more it aches. Pretty soon a loop develops and the only thing that person can think about is the toothache. The analogy breaks down, though, when one remembers that a toothache can be anesthetized but the hum cannot; there is no way to dull the nerves between the brain and the ear.

To back up his theory, Kelly points out that research using higher frequencies has shown that 50 percent of the population produce these oto-acoustic sounds. But no studies have been conducted using the frequency ranges reported by the Taos hearers. That is one reason the university is willing to spend time and money on the project: The object is not just to solve the Taos riddle but to conduct seminal research into low-frequency sounds.

The investigation has been slowed because the equipment necessary to conduct this type of research is not commercially available and has had to be custom-made by UNM technicians. That hurdle has now been crossed and the person-to-person studies are ready to begin.

When might some results be expected?

"It probably will take eight months to a year," Kelly says guardedly.
 

In the meantime, the hum continues to wreak its own type of havoc among Taoseños.

The Loumenas are an exception in that they are no longer troubled by the cryptic noise; for some reason, they no longer hear it. Unfortunately, there has been no deliverance for many of the others. As a result, some have taken extreme measures. One woman that she left New Mexico in an attempt to escape. For awhile, the change of location worked. Then, she said, the hum found her at her new home in Fort Worth, Texas. The Saltzmans, too, have fled, seeking sanctuary in Old Mexico. So far, apparently, they have not been re-exposed to the hum. However, those among the hearers who decided to depart are in the minority. For the most part, they have elected to continue their routines despite the constant distraction. One who decided to remain, at least so far, is Kristen Hayworth.

A late-comer as far as being aware of the noise goes, Hayworth did not hear it for the first time until March 1993, a year after Catanya Saltzman's letter was published. Although she was aware at the time that some of her neighbors had complained about a bothersome and mysterious sound she had never heard it. Then she developed a sinus infection that settled in her ears and left her temporarily deaf. It was while she was recovering from the infection that she first experienced the hum.

"I was asleep one night when I was awakened by a low vibrational noise," she says. Baffled by the sound's unwelcome appearance, she shook her husband and asked him if he could hear it as well. When he said no, she wrote off the experience as a symptom of the infection. In a few days, however, the illness went away but the noise did not.

It is with her still, she says, sometimes increasing in volume, sometimes abating. Occasionally it seems very distant while at other times it is so loud that she turns her bedside radio to static in an attempt to drown it out. And, as with Paul Loumena, it is more than a mere sound; it is something that palpates inside her, a sensation best expressed as a tingling in her ears. "It feels like there's something stuck in my head that won't go away," she says with resignation.

Although her husband does not hear it and her two children, aged 7 and 9, experience it only intermittently, she has refused to let it run her life. "It's with me morning, noon, and night," she says, "but I feel it's a conscious choice to be driven crazy by it or learn to live with it. I choose to live with it."