Microwave Hearing Effect: What It Is, And Possible Explanations
Have you ever thought about the effect that microwave waves can have on our mind? Although it sounds like science fiction, its effect is real and has been studied for more than 50 years.
This phenomenon is called the microwave hearing effect. Here we will see what exactly it consists of and how it has been studied.
Microwave hearing effect: what does it consist of?
Have you ever heard of the microwave hearing effect? Also called the Frey effect after its discoverer, the American neuroscientist and biologist Allan H. Frey, it is a somewhat curious phenomenon, which has even been classified as a “mental control” phenomenon.
Allan H. Frey was the first to publish his findings on this phenomenon, which we will learn about a little later. This phenomenon, broadly speaking, consists of an effect produced by the “clicks” (sounds) induced by the different microwave frequencies. These clicks are generated inside our heads.
We find the origin of this effect in World War II, when a group of people realized that they felt these clicks when working in the vicinity of radar transponders. The clicks of the microwave hearing effect are only heard by the person themselves, and not by people around them.
Origin and history
As we have seen, it was the American neuroscientist and biologist Allan H. Frey who first talked about the microwave auditory effect, in 1960. At that time, Frey worked at the Advanced General Electronics Center at Cornell University. It was there where was in contact with a technician, who claimed that he could hear sounds emitted by a radar.
A year later, in 1961, Frey embarked on the study of this phenomenon. Frey discovered that people who heard these clicking or humming noises, and sometimes numbers or words, They heard them “directly from their heads” (not through their hearing organs).
Just one year later, in 1962, Frey published his study “Response of the human auditory system to modulated electromagnetic energy.”
Through his experiments, Frey observed that people could “hear” microwave radiation if it was just right; This occurred at a distance of up to 100 meters.
However, beyond the effect, Frey also detected a series of side effects in his participants, which consisted of: tingling sensations, headaches and dizziness.
Project Pandora: the US government
Thus, it was in the ’60s, when concern arose in the United States about microwaves and the “mental control” that they could have. For its part, the US government discovered that its embassy in Moscow had been bombed by low-level electromagnetic radiation.
As a result of this fact, the government itself, in 1965, launched Project Pandora, which consisted of top-secret research which had the mission of exploring the possible behavioral and physiological effects of these low-level microwaves.
This phenomenon was secretly investigated for four years. As? “Involuntary” sailors were exposed to microwave radiation, and other small experiments were also performed. The results, however, were disparate, and internal scientific disputes were generated within the research itself. There are those who believe that the investigation continued, and there was even talk of a weapon that would use sound waves to send words to people’s heads.
A little later, in the 1970s, NASA also investigated the possible microwave hearing effect. What they observed was that this effect It was produced by the thermal expansion of the parts of the human ear around the cochlea a structure of the inner ear.
Through this expansion, the microwaves that could generate words, and that came from inside the head, were modulated. Thus, they also found that the signals modulated in the ear could include words or sounds with a possible intracranial origin.
How is this effect explained?
Thus, basically the microwave auditory effect translates into a kind of “clicks” that we hear internally as a buzz or auditory sensations. But why do they occur?
It is believed that its cause lies, as we have already mentioned, in the thermal expansion of portions of the hearing system. What happens, specifically, is that The brain heats up with each pulse, and the pressure waves that originate travel to the cochlea, through the skull.
Related milestones
We are going to list, in chronological order, a series of relevant milestones related to the microwave hearing effect.
1. 1975
On March 30, 1975, it was published an article titled Microwaves and behaviorwhich addressed this phenomenon, led by Dr. Don R. Justesen (published in the magazine “The American Psychologist”).
2. 1983
Eight years later, on December 19, 1983, Philip Stocklin of Satellite Beach, FL, filed a patent for microwave auditory communication.
3. 1988
Five years after the patent, a private entity patents an application to generate signal bursts, thus promoting the creation of intelligible communication.
Finally, ten years after the previous event, Another device was patented, this time based on the microwave hearing effect, and with the purpose of keeping birds away from airplane turbines.
What role does technology have in all this?
On the other hand, technology has also played a role in the microwave hearing effect. To give a relevant example, in 2008, an American technology company announced that it was developing a device, called MEDUSA (Mob Excess Deterrent Using Silent Audio), which was based on the principle of the microwave auditory effect.
This device, specifically, would consist of a microwave ray gun, capable of transmitting sounds directly to people’s heads.
Thus, said device would exploit the microwave hearing effect, and would act by causing a “shock wave” inside the skull, a wave that our ears would be able to detect. In addition, through the gun, a series of pulses could be transmitted that would allow recognizable sounds to be produced.
However, this device would not be intended for the common population, but rather its objective or mission would have to do with military or crowd control applications. Once more reality exceeds fiction.
