Nothing to do with a bigfoot, but then you go looking for pictures of bigfoot infrasound..
The unusual suspects..
In October of 2004, I flew to Seattle, rented a car, and drove down the Olympic Peninsula to join the BFRO expedition there. This marked the beginning of my active search for the reality behind the bigfoot phenomenon. I had always been interested, from at least the mid-seventies, but had not ever done anything about it. I didn’t know whether bigfoot really existed or not, but I was wiling to entertain the idea. When I saw that the BFRO had begun letting neophytes join their expeditions (for a price), I thought, rather than sit around wondering forever, maybe I should actually look into it? The idea of going out into the woods looking for evidence of a large, hairy humanoid, which would have sounded ridiculous to so many, sounded very interesting to me.
I remember one night of the expedition, as I sat behind a log in a shallow depression, hunkering down into my coat from the cold, I listened over a small two-way radio as another attendee had what he thought was a bigfoot encounter. His voice made his fear palpable to me.
He thought that he could hear something large moving around him, but he couldn’t see it. He described a nauseating smell, like the smell of rotting flesh. I sat on the other side of a river from him, down a ridge. He was probably three quarters of a mile away at least, and my feelings were less intense because of my remoteness. It was interesting to hear, but a lot of things walk around in the woods at night. The rotting smell could have been from the dead salmon that the local black bears had been pulling out of the river to eat. I could smell that from where I sat, but it wasn’t strong, and I could tell that it was dead fish. What interested me most was his level of fear. He was a military guy, and used to stressful situations. This was a theme that would be repeated over and over again in my experience as a bigfoot investigator. What can account for this unexpected fearful behavior?
As it happens, a fearful reaction isn’t uncommon in bigfoot reports. It may only seem natural -- what else are you to feel when confronted with a giant hairy man? But there seems to be something more going on. The earliest modern case I have heard of that makes a point of noting an unnatural reaction is a story from the early 1970s, reported in Clark and Coleman’s 1978 book
Creatures from the Outer Edge. The account speaks of a couple who experienced feelings of intense dizziness, depression, and anxiety. These sensations came upon them so suddenly, and so oddly, that they remembered the event. For several years they continued to note odd happenings on their property until finally, in 1972, they had a clear sighting of a bigfoot-like creature. Not a direct correlation, but suggestive enough. Since that time, there have been numerous cases down the years that describe an unusual fearful reaction.
There are those who say that traffic with the unknown causes fear in any human being. We fear most that which we do not understand. I do believe this is an element, but I would call this “natural fear.” It seems to me from my research that bigfoot encounters can create in their experiencers a level of fear which is beyond that which we can account for by reference to natural fear. Encounters can sometimes create a fear which is so extreme it is debilitating. Is there any explanation for this?
As it turns out, there may be. During that expedition in 2004 I heard someone make reference to infrasound, which was colloquially called “getting zapped,” and this was thought to explain the unnatural amount of fear and other strange effects.
Infrasound refers to sounds that are too low for the human ear to hear. A healthy young human being can hear sounds down into the range of about 20Hz. Some people can hear tones even lower than that, to about 17Hz. Sounds below that threshold, however, are completely inaudible to humans, no matter how loud they are. According to sources I’ve found around the internet, some frequencies in this range have been shown to have various effects on human beings, including causing uneasiness, a sense of "presence" (as if someone is in the room with you when there really isn't), confusion, nausea, and allegedly even loss of control of certain bodily functions. Additional affects specifically noted in various articles on the subject include anxiety, lethargy, euphoria, loss of time judgment, uneasiness, extreme sorrow, revulsion, chills down the spine, reduction of wakefulness, loss of concentration, fatigue, apathy, depression, pressure in the ears, drowsiness, and a sense of vibration of the inner organs. In the articles I looked at, specific frequencies were noted with particular effects.
The National Institute of Health has a document, prepared in 2001, called “Infrasound: Brief Review of Toxicological Literature,” which had this to say in its preface:
Among the more consistent findings in humans were changes in blood pressure, respiratory rate, and balance. These effects occurred after exposures to infrasound at levels generally above 110 dB. Physical damage to the ear or some loss of hearing has been found in humans and/or animals at levels above 140 dB.
And then in the executive summary, there was this:
There is no agreement about the biological activity of infrasound. Reported effects include those on the inner ear, vertigo, imbalance, etc.; intolerable sensations, incapacitation, disorientation, nausea, vomiting, and bowel spasm; and resonances in inner organs, such as the heart.
Infrasound has been observed to affect the pattern of sleep minutely. Exposures to 6 and 16 Hz at levels 10 dB above the auditory threshold have been associated with a reduction in wakefulness (28). Workers exposed to simulated industrial infrasound of 5 and 10 Hz and levels of 100 and 135 dB for 15 minutes reported feelings of fatigue, apathy, and depression, pressure in the ears, loss of concentration, drowsiness, and vibration of internal organs. In addition, effects were found in the central nervous, cardiovascular, and respiratory systems (29). In contrast, a study of drivers of long distance transport trucks exposed to infrasound at about 115 dBA found no statistically significant incidence of such symptoms (e.g., fatigue, subdued sensation, abdominal symptoms, and hypertension) (30).
So, it seems that the effects of infrasound are well known, if not thoroughly studied.
The effects noted in association with infrasound make an interesting list. What makes the list doubly interesting is that these same affects have been noted in some bigfoot encounters. I am not the first to make this association in print. To my knowledge, that honor goes to Tony Healy and Paul Cropper in their book
The Yowie: In Search of Australia’s Bigfoot.
As I detailed in a blog post called “
Feeling around infrasound,” Healy and Cropper discuss in their book something that I remember hearing about some time ago but which I had forgotten: the discovery that a certain frequency of standing wave is associated with what people call haunting phenomena:
Since the mid-1980s, British engineer Vic Tandy has made interesting discoveries at two apparently haunted locations in Coventry. In both places people felt distinctly uneasy, hair rose on the backs of necks and some sensed “presences”. Some fled and refused to return. Tandy found that parts of both buildings produced standing waves of 18.9Hz infrasound. Anything below 20Hz is inaudible to humans. In one building an extractor fan was responsible; in the other, a 14th century pub, it was air funneling through a long, crooked corridor.
These “distinctly uneasy” feelings, which do appear to be related to infrasound, are identical to the feelings people report in some bigfoot encounters. Healy and Cropper make the identification plain:
When considering whether infrasound might have anything to do with the yowie phenomenon, it is worth noting that sounds in the range of 18.9Hz can cause, in addition to fear and anxiety, blurred vision, hyperventilation, headaches, imagined drops in air temperature, gagging sensations, nausea and post-exposure fatigue. As we have seen, extreme fear is a feature of many yowie reports. Gagging sensations, nausea, icy sensations in the spine, headaches and post-sighting fatigue have also been mentioned by a small number of witnesses.
I think it’s worth pointing out, as an aside, that the very fact both the yowie and bigfoot are suspected of using infrasound, or being at least somehow associated with infrasound phenomena, is another indication that the two creatures are related, which suggests that neither is the product of imagination or misidentification. But no amount of talking about infrasound will do a better job of illustrating its possible application to bigfoot reports than the reports themselves.
Let us take a brief diversion into history so that we can see stories such as the ones I’m about to relate are by no means unique either to our time or place. It’s true that these early tales speak of creatures other than bigfoot, but it is interesting that the effects reported appear to be in the same league as those associated with some bigfoot accounts.
The earliest reference I have found comes from a section of the Book of Daniel in the
Bible dated to before the 2nd century BC. In chapter 10, verses 4-10, we read that Daniel’s visitor affected him in an unusual way, causing him to tremble with fear, become paralyzed and fall into a sleep. Also, the visitor spoke with a voice “like multitudes”, perhaps an allusion to a multifrequency sound. Another historical account can be found in Cabeza de Vaca’s
La Relacion. In it, de Vaca tells of an encounter in the Ozarks region of North America that a tribe of Indians had experienced some years before, in about 1516.
These Indians, and the ones we encountered before, told us a very strange thing which they reckoned had happened about fifteen or sixteen years earlier. They said that a man whom they called "Evil Thing" wandered that land. He had a small body and a beard, but they never were able to see his face. When he came to the house where they were, their hair stood on end and they trembled. Then there appeared at the entrance to the house a burning firebrand. Then he entered and took whomever he wanted and stabbed him three times in the side with a very sharp flint, as wide as a hand and two palms long. He would stick his hands in through the wounds and pull out their guts, and cut a piece of gut about a palm in length, which he would throw onto the embers. Then he would cut his victim three times in the arm, the second cut at the spot where people are bled. He would pull the arm out of its socket and shortly thereafter reset it. Finally he would place his hands on the wounds which they said suddenly heated. They told us that he often appeared among them when they were dancing, sometimes dressed as a woman and other times as a man. Whenever he wanted, he would take a buhio or a dwelling and lift it high. After a while he would let it drop with a great blow. They also told us that they offered him food many times but he never ate. They asked him where he came from and where he lived; he showed them an opening in the ground and said that his house was there below. We laughed a lot and made fun of these things that they told us. When they saw that we did not believe them, they brought many of the people who claimed he had taken them and showed us the marks of the stabbings in those places, just as they had said.
Though certainly neither tale refers to bigfoot, let these two accounts serve as our indication that such stories have been told throughout human history, and we ought not to see them as necessarily an oddity of bigfoot reports only.
I have interviewed many witnesses and experiencers about the possibility of something like an infrasound reaction. One witness, who prefers to go by the name of Dave in Kentucky,
had an up close and terrifying encounter. Dave emphasizes the impact it had on him, “And that’s the kind of sound people talk about, it just kind of hits you. It literally just hit me, with almost a physical force. You feel it in your chest. And it just sort of backed me up. And I’m looking at this thing, and it’s just standing there, and it let out this bellow.”
Dave related what he felt to previous experiences with big cats that has had an opportunity to see at his local zoo, where he has a friend who works with the tigers. He thinks the effect of the bigfoot yell is similar to when a tiger roars. “When they turn loose with a sound like this it’s exactly the same kind of feeling. You really do feel it physically, and almost on a deeper level, something almost immediately telling you, this is a bad idea! I really shouldn’t be where I’m at.”
As it happens, some research has been done on infrasound in large cats. In a ScienceDaily.com article from December of 2000 highlighting the research of bioacoustician Elizabeth von Muggenthaler, tigers were noted to use infrasound with the possible effect of paralyzing people:
In the first study of its kind, von Muggenthaler and her colleagues recorded every growl, hiss, chuff, and roar of twenty-four tigers at the Carnivore Preservation Trust in Pittsboro, North Carolina, and the Riverbanks Zoological Park in Columbia, South Carolina. Bioacousticians found that tigers can create sounds at about 18 hertz and when tigers roar they can create frequencies significantly below this. "When a tiger roars-the sound will rattle and paralyze you," says von Muggenthaler. "Although untested, we suspect that this is caused by the low frequencies and loudness of the sound."
That the creature Dave saw was trying to use infrasound seemed a credible theory to him. He described for me what it looked like as the creature was vocalizing. “When it made these sounds, I could see it sort of shake. It wasn’t like it was trying to shake, it was putting so much energy into what it was doing.. It was like when someone yells at you. They kick forward and their arms twitch and their shoulders twitch. And when I saw it the couple of times when it was making these low, guttural grumblings, it really did seem to be just forcing that out, like it was yelling at me. And I understood. I’d been there for probably three weekends straight, and it was probably quite aware of my presence there.” Dave took the hint and retreated to his car. "When I got around to the other side of the car, it made this other sound. And the sound it made was more like a speech, more like a guttural speech-like noise, low, really low and garbled. There was this weird inflection. It definitely had this sort of inflected tone where there these word-like sounds coming out, but it was coming out in a very forceful, kind of angry delivery. It was like a scolding kind of experience."
I have spoken to Dave about the infrasound theories, and thinks there may be something to them. “It really is like something is short circuiting. And I know, anytime I talk about it, when I get to the other side of the car, that’s the point that I just kind of have to stop for a minute. Because it’s the most vivid point. It’s not like when I saw it was the most vivid, this is the most vivid because, here I am, I’m just this cowering thing with this creature on the other side of a car, and I’m thinking.. I really just want to lie down here. I really just want to stop. And my rational mind is thinking, ‘Good God, if you do this now, this thing is going to come around this corner any moment now!’”
He reiterated his feeling of being scolded. “It’s funny how I felt. I felt almost ashamed to have been where I was when I was. It was almost this feeling of, you’re not supposed to be here, what are you doing here? Why are you bothering me? And whenever it would reach the low end of these sounds, it’s like I could feel it.” The impact of the sounds was having a physical effect on him. “I was almost doubling over..”
So did Dave experience something like infrasound? He thinks that was at least partly responsible for his experience. But he also suspects that a pungent smell he encountered played a role too. “There definitely was an undercurrent that makes you feel hot, makes you feel ill, makes you feel nervous. I assumed it was a pheromone. Being that my friend is a zookeeper, I have been in enclosures with gorillas, and there was a male gorilla that was kind of aggressive at the time, and yeah, you could smell it, and yeah, it did something to you. But it wasn’t the same kind of smell. With gorillas, it’s a very strong, distilled B.O. Very sour. But this was more like decay. A concentrated putrescence that smacks you in the face, and almost clings to you.”
Dave’s conjecture seems astute. As it happens, pheromones and sound go together. Research shows that pheromones can be used with sounds to make them more effective. In an article called “Pentagon Explores ‘Human Fear’ Chemicals; Scare-Sensors, ‘Contagious’ Stress in the Works?”, posted on Wired.com’s Danger Room blog, reference is made to a pentagon report that states:
On its own, the alarm pheromone probably would not do much. But given an external trigger, such as a loud noise, it could influence people to start stampeding like spooked cattle.
The kinds of sounds needed to create the desired effects would certainly include roars and other loud vocal sounds often associated with bigfoot, but perhaps could also include such ambiguous noises as branch snaps and other unidentifiable woodland noises. It seems to me that the use of sound to fix a certain reaction to stimuli could also be effective with infrasound, which has otherwise been noted in laboratory tests to create either positive or negative results, depending on the perceiving individual, when presented neutrally (ie, hidden within loud music). Branch snapping, wood knocking, and rock clacking are so often noted in possible bigfoot encounters that one could theorize the intention might partly be to fix a negative association, through which the pheromones or infrasounds could then do their work in frightening the experiencer.
Dave’s experience of feeling as if he were being forced down has its echoes in many other tales I’ve heard and collected. Researcher Billy Willard of Sasquatch Watch of Virginia told me about an experience he had while investigating a sighting, shortly before two of his sons had their own sighting of a bigfoot. He was in the woods alone, though there was another researcher within about a half mile of him. He had been following a creek and knew where he was. He noticed at one point that he was beginning to feel strange. He became confused and could no longer remember where he had come from. He became so disoriented, he said, “that I just had to lie down. I couldn’t take it anymore. I guess it was like a panic attack, but I’ve never had one before, or since. It was very odd. After a few minutes, I got myself together and stood up, and that’s when the boys radioed that they could see a bigfoot.” Billy said that he never saw a bigfoot himself, but that he did catch something in his peripheral vision before his attack. One could speculate that Billy had been subjected to infrasound, or a pheromone, or both, until he was incapacitated, at which point the creature moved forward to get a good look at his teenaged sons.
I find that an interesting similarity -- both Billy and Dave felt like they should lie down. On a recent episode of the History Channel show MonsterQuest, a man named David Griffin stated that after seeing a bigfoot, he began to follow it, with the intention of shooting it if he could, but that he suddenly found himself sitting down. Witness John Cartwright told me that he found himself suddenly curling up into a ball shortly after smelling something like “a dog that had been rolling in crap,” though he did not see a bigfoot until after this experience.
“It was really bad. It was so bad it made my eyes water and it made me gag. Then I started having dry heaves, like I was going to vomit.” Maybe because he hadn’t yet eaten that day, JC was able to hold off the nausea. But the trouble didn’t stop there. “Then I felt like a static electricity shock, it felt like, and kind of.. have you been shocked before, it’s like your just frozen? All the hairs on your body are standing up, and you’re just stuck there, I guess. Then I started feeling like, I could feel my internal organs.. my heart, my lungs. I don’t know how to describe it, I’ve never been able to feel it before, but I could feel them. I can’t explain it, but maybe they were getting some kind of trauma. It was just the weirdest thing I had ever felt. And then I started having some kind of muscle spasms or nervous spasms, really bad, and I kind of slumped down on the floor of the deer stand, and curled up in the fetal position.” About five minutes after this experience, John watched a bigfoot walk to a nearby tree and eat some leaves there, apparently unaware of John’s position in the deer stand about fifty feet away.
These experiences are remarkable for their similarity. Let’s not skip over the fact that Dave spoke of feeling a sense of heat as he doubled over. Dave told me that this interesting detail is repeated in a BFRO case, #12959. There, the witness says:
I thought for an instant that I would yell at it, jerk or jump and maybe frighten it away but I could not bring myself to move. I could not even bat an eye. I could feel my legs starting to shake and I became very hot all over. For an instant I though I was going to pass out or become physically ill.
As weird as these tales are, we are not half done yet. According to the website ImpossibleVisits.com, a woman going by the name Rachel in Texas experienced something very strange while directly observing a bigfoot making a noise:
I shined the light back on the cornfield, and I could see [the bigfoot] running through the corn, and I was like, I’m going to go get a closer look, so I ran up to the fence, and I get within about six or eight feet of the fence, and Mama walks out, puts her hands on the fence and just looks at me. I’d seen her a couple times before. She starts making this humming noise? And I couldn’t move, I was just like stuck there. I was so scared, couldn’t make a noise, couldn’t do anything. I was getting really scared, and then she started making like this cooing noise, and then I wasn’t so scared anymore.
This episode sounds an awful lot as if the noise the bigfoot was making somehow rendered Rachel in Texas unable to move. (Another interesting thought: had it been noise and a pheromone, it would seem that it would not have been so easy to “turn it off,” as appeared to happen in this event.) These cases do leave the impression that something like infrasound could be the main cause of the experiences.
But things can’t be that simple either. Infrasound effects have been noted by scientists when studied at high volumes, of 100dB or higher. It would be difficult for an animal to sustain this volume, and even more difficult to broadcast it very far. But as we have seen, the creature does not have to be that close for the effects to occur.
And what of cases where these effects were noted, but no bigfoot was observed at the time of the experience? I have several of these in my files.
One remarkable case involved a retired police officer in New Jersey named Dennis, who believes he has experienced infrasound on two different occasions, one of which is detailed briefly below. The incident occurred more than twenty years ago, before he became a police officer.
After stopping on the side of a rural road one night, deep in the woods, so that he and his companions could relieve themselves, Dennis began to hear a strange “thumping” noise.
“[It was] very deep. And I didn’t really feel a strong impact the first couple of beats. My mind started hunting around for an explanation for it. It became faster and stronger, and in a matter of a couple of seconds I went from thinking, “what the hell is this” to thinking maybe there’s a helicopter, because it was that powerful, it built into that kind of a strength in approximately six or seven beats. It was that strong.” Dennis described the sound he heard this way: “This was like pure bass. It had no high [end] to it, it was just like pure bass. I had a kicker box years ago in a car, and you can feel the “thump thump thump” of the bass.”
Dennis began looking around for the source of this noise. “I actually looked up in the air. Even though there was no wind, no lights, or anything from the noise, I actually looked up in the air because by that time I felt like it was moving. It started in front of me, [then] it became to where I wasn’t exactly sure where it was coming from and thought that it was above me. So I looked up and there’s no wind, no lights, and as I’m doing that I thought, nah, it’s not a helicopter anyway. I got this feeling that it wasn’t a machine, and there was an animal like quality to it.”
Whatever was making the noise, it had to be large. “It was extremely precise, but for some reason, I thought, you know, large.. formidable. It had to be extremely large to make this type of powerful sound, because I could feel it. It felt like it was hitting me, inside even. Like my whole body was feeling it. What I remember most is my chest cavity feeling it.”
We can recall at this point that John Cartwright spoke of being able to feel his internal organs, and that Dave in Kentucky mentioned being able to feel it in his chest too.
Another common feeling that experiencers relate is the feeling of being "unwelcome." Dennis felt this very clearly during his encounter. And Dave in Kentucky said, “It’s funny how I felt. I felt almost ashamed to have been where I was when I was. It was almost this feeling of, you’re not supposed to be here, what are you doing here? Why are you bothering me? And whenever it would reach the low end of these sounds, it’s like I could feel it.”
Dennis thought that he was getting a similar message. “I was just like hit with this very unwelcome.. like I shouldn’t have been there. Like we picked the wrong place to stop and it was telling me to get lost. It was like a warning that I had walked up to the wrong spot and it was telling me to leave.”
I want to emphasize that neither Dennis nor Dave thought that they were getting any kind of
telepathic messages here. They both thought the message was being sent in a non-verbal way that they somehow understood. I think this seems credible, given that we know large animals can make use of infrasound. We co-evolved with many large, dangerous animals. There need be no kind of telepathy involved once you begin to experience infrasound. Your subconscious mind will surely give you the message that you should be leaving soon, a legacy of the many thousands of years that mankind was as often hunted as hunter.
I asked Dennis what effect the sound was having on him. He admitted to feeling confused. “The only other feeling that went with it was fear. The confusion seemed a little more than just normal because I remember pausing after it ended. Instead of walking right away like ‘what the hell was that, let’s get out of here,’ I remember pausing right away and looking into the woods. I think it was more than just wondering what it was because I could have been wondering and leaving at the same time. Because it was obvious to me that whatever was making that noise didn’t want me there.”
The sound stopped, leaving Dennis and his friends mystified. Dennis never saw a bigfoot, but his experiences, and some associated footprint finds, led him to believe that the source of the noises and the unexplained fear was the elusive creature.
Now we get into some difficulties. Following are several accounts that share some of the features of the previous accounts, but where there is even less certainty that a bigfoot was involved.
A poster on a popular internet chat board, bigfootforums.com, going by the name CrimsonGoblin, told this interesting story about a camping trip with his girlfriend.
We had barely got comfortable in our sleeping bags when all hell broke loose right behind the tent. Something was making all sorts of very aggressive, very loud noises and screaming like you couldn’t imagine. We both were in a state of fear to say the least. The noises lasted around 10 seconds give or take a few. Then dead silence. Whatever made the noises was directing them at us and was very close to the tent. We did not hear it leave. My girlfriend was in tears and crying. I was trying to keep her quiet and stop her from getting out of the tent to run for the car. Suddenly and without warning I was in a deep sleep and could not be awoken by her...and she tried. She was awake all night listening to sounds of it walking about, sticks breaking and pebbles and or sticks landing on the tent. According to her it may have been only two or three minutes from the vocals stopping and me being unconscious. I do not recollect falling asleep. I do remember being woken by the sound of a stick breaking but struggling to break out of the sleep. It was similar to feeling like I was drugged.
I contacted CrimsonGoblin about the story, and he very meticulously pointed out that he did not know it was a bigfoot making the noises, or what was responsible for his sudden sleepiness. While it is true we can’t know what caused these effects, this is another case that fits in with the infrasound hypothesis, even if it wasn't a bigfoot.
Henry Franzoni, a well known bigfoot researcher, had his own very strange experience while driving in his car with his wife in the mountains near his home that included his wife suddenly falling asleep at an odd time.
It’s true that some of the effects Henry experienced would be difficult to ascribe to infrasound, and he does not accept that explanation himself. But his wife’s sudden sleepiness, which matches CrimsonGoblin’s own sudden onset of sleep, is particularly interesting. Infrasound was noted to promote sleep in individuals who were already asleep, and to cause drowsiness in some subjects at certain frequencies, but it was not noted to actually put people to sleep. And the selectivity of the effect would be hard to explain. Infrasound would be difficult or impossible to focus. So why would one person go to sleep while the other felt no drowsiness at all?
There is possibly a solution. Infrasound can’t be focused, but ultrasound can. Interestingly enough, there are some clues that ultrasound may have many of the same effects that infrasound has been shown to have at certain frequencies. In an article on Physorg.com, with a title straight out of science fiction, “Ultrasound shown to promote remote control of brain circuits,” the authors discuss experiments which show ultrasounds at certain frequencies are able to affect the brain at the level of neurons.
"We were able to unravel how ultrasound can stimulate the electrical activity of neurons by optically monitoring the activity of neuronal circuits, while we simultaneously propagated low-intensity, low-frequency ultrasound through brain tissues," says Tyler, assistant professor of neurobiology and bioimaging in the School of Life Sciences in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
The Arizona State University researchers have been able to get past previous difficulties with their methods.
One prior stumbling block to using ultrasound noninvasively in the brain has been the skull. However, the acoustic frequencies utilized by Tyler and his colleagues to construct their pulsed ultrasound waveforms, overlap with a frequency range where optimal energy gains are achieved between transcranial transmission and brain absorption of ultrasound – which allows the ultrasound to penetrate bone and yet prevent damage to the soft tissues. Their findings are supported by other studies examining the potential of high-intensity focused ultrasound for ablating brain tissues, where it was shown that low-frequency ultrasound could be focused through human skulls.
When asked about the potential of using his groups' methods to remotely control brain activity, Tyler says: "One might be able to envision potential applications ranging from medical interventions to use in video gaming or the creation of artificial memories along the lines of Arnold Schwarzenegger's character in 'Total Recall.' Imagine taking a vacation without actually going anywhere?
Among those speculated uses, perhaps one can envision using ultrasound to put people to sleep?
Ultrasound has already been successfully used to create a beam of sound that can be focused on a particular person, causing that person to hear sounds that no one else can hear. Devices are being developed to take advantage of this discovery. One such application is known as the Audio Spotlight. According to a Wired.com article from 2002, this device “converts ordinary audio into high-frequency ultrasonic signals that are outside the range of normal hearing. As these sound waves push out from the source, they interact with air pressure to create audible sounds.” A Wikipedia article discusses how this is done more fully:
A transducer can be made to project a narrow beam of modulated ultrasound that is powerful enough (100 to 110 dBSPL) to substantially change the speed of sound in the air that it passes through. The air within the beam behaves nonlinearly and extracts the modulation signal from the ultrasound, resulting in sound that can be heard only along the path of the beam, or that appears to radiate from any surface that the beam strikes. The practical effect of this technology is that a beam of sound can be projected over a long distance to be heard only in a small well-defined area. A listener outside the beam hears nothing.
While it’s interesting to speculate, I’m not aware of any studies that show ultrasound can produce all the effects we have noted here. And I want to emphasize also that, even though I’ve illustrated that many of the odd features of bigfoot encounters match what has been discovered about infrasound, I do not take that to mean that one has caused the other. One way to test this further in the field would be to develop microphones and recorders to detect and record infra and ultrasound. But this is a technological problem that is beyond my skills to tackle.
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