I had a supernatural experience

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On 31 May 2003, a group of UK researchers held a mass experiment where they exposed some 700 people to music laced with soft 17 Hz sine waves played at a level described as "near the edge of hearing", produced by an extra-long-stroke subwoofer mounted two-thirds of the way from the end of a seven-meter-long plastic sewer pipe.  The experimental concert (entitled Infrasonic) took place in the Purcell Room over the course of two performances, each consisting of four musical pieces.  Two of the pieces in each concert had 17 Hz tones played underneath.  In the second concert, the pieces that were to carry a 17 Hz undertone were swapped so that test results would not focus on any specific musical piece.  The participants were not told which pieces included the low-level 17 Hz near-infrasonic tone.

The presence of the tone resulted in a significant number (22%) of respondents reporting anxiety, uneasiness, extreme sorrow, nervous feelings of revulsion or fear, chills down the spine, and feelings of pressure on the chest.  In presenting the evidence to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Professor Richard Wiseman said, "These results suggest that low frequency sound can cause people to have unusual experiences even though they cannot consciously detect infrasound.  Some scientists have suggested that this level of sound may be present at some allegedly haunted sites and so cause people to have odd sensations that they attribute to a ghost -- our findings support these ideas."

 Article 1 

 Article 2 

 Article 3 

A wind or draft passing through the building could produce infrasound vibrations.  I found this extract from the third article to be particularly enlightening:

The Ghost in the Machine

Research by Vic Tandy, a lecturer at Coventry University, suggested that the frequency 19 Hz was responsible for many ghost sightings.  He was working late one night alone in a supposedly haunted laboratory at Warwick, when he felt very anxious and could detect a grey blob out of the corner of his eye.  When he turned to face it, there was nothing.

The following day, he was working on his fencing foil, with the handle held in a vice.  Although there was nothing touching it, the blade started to vibrate wildly.  Further investigation led him to discover that the extraction fan was emitting a frequency of 18.98 Hz, very close to the resonant frequency of the eye (given as 18 Hz in NASA Technical Report 19770013810).  This was why he saw a ghostly figure -- it was an optical illusion caused by his eyeballs resonating. The room was exactly half a wavelength in length, and the desk was in the centre, thus causing a standing wave which was detected by the foil.

Perfectly logical scientific explanations that need no "supernatural" involvement.

Correlation is not causation. Just because there is an association between this frequency and induction of visual hallucinations in some research participants does not mean this explanation is causal in all claims.

A similar argument was made by psychologists in the 1950s that newspaper reports of "flying saucers" from 1947 induced confabulations by subsequent witnesses to see flying discs. There is even major publications in journals and books that this explains something called the false memory effect where people think they have seen a UFO but are incorporating newspaper articles or science fiction into the reality. The problem with this explanation is that people see all types of shapes of UFOs (not just discs) and secondly sightings are made by highly reliable witnesses and third radar/scan/photos/witness reports are now available that concurrently verify objects do exist and are not false memories.

With time alien abductions will also be taken more seriously than simply throwing around "false memories" to explain everything like the way scientists in the 1950s used swamp gas or the planet venus to explain every UFO

Right, the problem is finding the most reasonable middle ground between the extremes of credulity and absolutist denial of the existence of anything that has not been proven.


Although I agree that we shouldn't totally dismiss the possibility that some UFO's are alien spacecraft, I also think we should be very slow to draw such a conclusion. I think we should be more concerned about the possibility that some UFO's are advanced weaponry or spy craft from hostile powers here on Earth. And of course more mundane explanations (e.g. weather balloons) should be considered too (but not dogmatically assumed to explain every case).

Last edited by Mona Pereth on 24 May 2023, 9:02 pm, edited 3 times in total.

Very interesting. Thanks for posting this.

Infrasound is certainly something that should be looked into as a possible explanation for alleged hauntings, but should not be assumed to explain every alleged haunting.

I do agree that naturalistic explanations should be sought where possible.

Anyhow, I would be interested in your answer to the question I asked you here, earlier in this thread (near the bottom of the first page, so you might have missed it).

I asked Fnord this question several years ago. I think his response was something to do with "faith" Vs belief