The Taos Hum: More Subliminal Research?

"You get so interested in the image in the mirror that it becomes you, and you forget who you were, who you are, who you could become. You become the person in the mirror."

"I had everything I wanted. I envied no one, wanted no one else's life. Having survived the experiment, I felt I was unlike anyone else. I was reborn and, having realized that, I had just begun to live."

"I imagine every large college in America was conducting similar experiments, some in conjunction with mind-altering drugs, some not, during the late 1960s and into the late 1970's. A few, those that showed promise, probably carry on today."

K. C. Grams, who lives in Taos, New Mexico hears a constant, irritating hum that deprives her of sleep and depletes her energy.

Steven Walters hears it, too; a low, throbbing sound that robs him of the precious quiet he sought when he left the big city.

Robert Faurie hears it: an unnatural, generator-like noise just at the edge of what his ear can pick up.

It is the Taos hum, a phenomenon fit for a supermarket tabloid, a sound that not everyone hears and no one can identify.

"You know how it is when you're about to go to sleep and one of those big black flies or a mosquito is on your room? Imagine having that every single night and not being able to swat it. It makes you crazy," Grams said.

When she first heard the sound two years ago, she assumed it was something in her old, adobe house on the outskirts of town. But she could never find the source.

She was horrified to discover that when she went camping 30 miles away she could still hear the sound.

About a year and a half ago, at a potluck dinner at her son's school, a stranger asked Grams if she could hear a humming sound.

"I almost started crying," Grams recalled. "It's such a relief to know you're not crazy and not alone, and that it's real."

Experts don't doubt Grams and others are being bothered by something. A team of scientists and engineers spent a week in Taos recently at the request of two Congressmen, using sophisticated equipment to measure acoustic, electromagnetic and seismic signals. They found no ready answer.

"Right now we're not close to being able to say anything. It's disappointing to all of us," said Joe Mullins, chairman of the mechanical engineering department at the University of New Mexico and leader of the team from Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories and the U.S. Air Force's Phillips Laboratory.

Based on initial observations, the team believes it is probably an acoustic signal - that is, not a sound - the hearers are picking up.

"If it was a sound then one of the microphones would have sensed it," said team member Horace Poteet. The team used conventional laboratory microphones as well as a specially built microphone that detects low frequency sound.

Poteet, a physicist whose work involves nuclear test-ban treaty verification, heard the Taos hum while he was there.

In fact, he says, he's been hearing a noise for a while at his Albuquerque home 130 miles south of Taos. He hasn't found it particularly bothersome and describes it as sounding like a diesel truck idling in the distance. (Refer to UFO Report number 8 for a description of a spherical object landing and making the same kinds of sounds).

Seven persons who simulated the sound for the investigators using a signal generator and a loudspeaker selected low-range frequencies, from 33 to 80 hertz. The range of human hearing is between 20 and 20,000 hertz.

Taos residents are convinced the problem is not with their ears because the sound can be masked with other sounds or by getting far enough away from Taos that they no longer hear it.

At first, U. S. Representative Bill Richardson, D-NM, was inclined to write off the complaints as "some of my more colorful constituents." The town of 4,000 in a spectacular setting in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains has long been known as a haven for artists, writers, dancers and other sensitive people.

But he is now convinced the problem is real, and has asked a staff member from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence to investigate.

"It isn't a figment of anyone's imagination," Richardson said. "I think there is a hum, a noise of some kind."

So does Steven Walters, a musician who moved from Portland, Oregon in search of the quiet life.

"Every time I become quiet, the sound is right there, throbbing," he said. "The best word I've come up with for it is insidious."

So do more than 100 people who have contacted Bob and Catanya Saltzman since the Saltzman's first reported hearing the sound.

Dozens of people also responded to the Saltzmans' informal survey, complaining of headaches, anxiety, sleeplessness, shortness of breath, balance problems and other ailments, the couple said.

Catanya Saltzman first heard the sound in May 1991 and her photographer husband heard it two weeks later. They have heard it almost continually since - including on occasional visits to Santa Fe, 70 miles to the south.

They describe it as a low, grinding, pulsating noise, with a whine overlying it. It disrupts their sleep, and Catanya Saltzman, a dancer, said it affects her balance and concentration.

The Saltzmans spent two months in South Carolina recently to escape it.

They speculate the sound emanates from a secret defense elated project and that it may not be random noise at all but, rather, specific electromagnetic waves.

John Keel, well-known UFO author and researcher feels that there is now abundant evidence that "somebody" has developed a technique for broadcasting not only to HAM radio operators but to civilian band radios, walkie-talkies and even over telephones. Strange voices and code-like signals have been heard on TV sets. He says that interference is often in the form of rapid, guttural language that sounds like an odd combination of Spanish and German. It is most prevalent in the low frequencies, on bands used almost exclusively by governments for transmitting time signals.

He suggests that if you own a good short wave radio you may be able to hear these signals at the low end of the band after midnight during the UFO flap months of March, April, July and August.

We must never discount the possibility of subliminal contact - telepathy. Thought is not limited by distance; the mind transcends all that is physical and there is nothing in the physical universe that cannot be penetrated by human thought.

The most remote corners of the universe can be reached in an instant. The physical body can be transported by the power of the mind anywhere in the universe.

When I was in the Navy, particularly from about 1955 until 1968, I would project my thoughts at night to my younger brother and try to heal his broken and crippled legs. I did this every night for about 15 years as a normal routine. I had no idea if the thoughts or projections were working or not and I never told anyone that I had done it or continued to do it for 15 years.

It was only in 1992, 22 years after I returned from Southeast Asia, that his wife pulled me aside one afternoon during a visit to Indiana and told me that she had awakened one night to the sound of someone talking in their bedroom.

She said she could clearly see me standing at the foot of their bed looking at my brother and that she insisted I leave at once, but I told her that I had come to help heal him.

The mind (as opposed to the brain) is not a physical object. It is being rather than matter. It is an entity that has no substance and, yet, is aware of itself. And it can be affected and even altered by electromagnetic harmonics and sounds, often to the point of death.

If you have heard unusual sounds, particularly a sound like a diesel engine idling, alternately high and low, or what seem to be voices played in fast forward on a tape recorder, or clearly heard and understood questions or commands that seem to originate from a point about one foot behind your right ear, we urge you to write and tell us about it. You are probably being scanned as a potential target for mind-altering experiments, including suicide or murder.

You may be receiving instructions to go to a certain place at a certain time to accomplish a task that will never be consciously revealed to you.