This particular fact came as a great disappointment to the military-industrial complex. For years, infrasound was served up as the next big thing in nonlethal weapons. Obviously, powerful amplifiers would be needed to boost the decibel level—unless your intent was simply to make your enemy feel peculiar. In strong doses, infrasound has been alleged to cause all manner of bodily unpleasantness: nausea, salivation, “extreme annoyance,” rapid pulse, vibrating visual field, “intolerable sensations in the chest,” gagging, vomiting, bowel spasms, and “uncontrollable defecation.” Jürgen Altmann, the best authority on the subject that I could find, says that the more dire second half of the list is hearsay. In the vast stack of literature that Altmann reviewed, he found only one allegation of vomiting and none for bowel spasms and their pal uncontrollable D.
Contrary to persistent Internet rumors, actual infrasound weapons are rare. Altmann found one Russian institution—the very specifically named Center for the Testing of Devices with Non-Lethal Effects on Humans—that was said to have developed a device propelling a baseball-sized pulse of about ten hertz over hundreds of meters. He could find no information on the efficacy of the device, but his tone suggests you’d be better off propelling real baseballs.
Nonetheless, people worry. “I still get people ringing me up, thinking their neighbor is trying to get them out of the house by shooting infrasound at them,” says Tandy. I used to have a neighbor who shoots high-decibel Eagles songs out his windows, causing nausea and extreme annoyance at a fraction of the cost. I’d have loved to get my hands on a retaliatory infrasound blaster.
“Try a church organ,” suggests Tandy. “The big ones put out a lot of infrasound. Or you could rent an elephant.”
Elephants, as well as whales and rhinos, have recently been found to communicate by infrasound; they can both produce it and hear it. In the wake of recent research at the Fauna Communications Research Institute in North Carolina, tigers were added to the list. Tigers have large territories to defend, and it’s thought they use infrasound—which has the advantage of carrying over long distances and penetrating dense foliage—to warn trespassers.
The tiger finding spoke to Tandy. The fact that humans—albeit a minority of them—are able to sense infrasound had puzzled him. Why would the ability have evolved if we don’t communicate in infrasound? Perhaps to sense predators. Being able to detect a tiger in the vicinity was—for primitive man, anyway—a valuable knack. “So maybe there are people in the cellar whose tiger detector, as it were, is going off.”
The research is a nice fit with Tandy’s work. Though tigers’ vocalizations were found to span a range of audible and inaudible (to us) sound, their roars were measured at and below eighteen hertz—very close to the infrasound frequency that set Vic Tandy’s saber rattling. To test the notion that tigers use infrasound to ward off potential rivals, Elizabeth von Muggenthaler, the researcher who had recorded vocalizing tigers, set up powerful speakers to play the big cats’ roars and growls back to them. If ever there were a moment when acoustical science broke through the drear confines of audiograms and spectral analyses, this was it. Von Muggenthaler reports that the recordings caused several of the tigers to “roar and leap towards the speakers.”
You can try this experiment on yourself by turning your computer speaker to top volume, going to www.acoustics.org/ press/145th/Walsh2.htm, scrolling down to the paragraph about roars, and clicking on the speaker icon. Even though I know what’s coming, it scares the rubber dog doo out of me every time I play it. I recall once going to the big cat house of our local zoo at feeding time. For a solid minute, the tigers and lions stood in their cages and roared. I started to cry, though I wasn’t upset. I had the same embarrassing response to what I’m guessing were the effects of infrasound twice before: once while standing on a rooftop that was buzzed by a Blue Angels fighter plane, and another time standing two streets away from an imploded building as it collapsed. Also, I used to feel an ineffable queerness in my chest during Sunday mass, which I put down to God looking inside me and knowing I wasn’t listening. Now I’m thinking it was the organ music. I’m thinking I must be an infrasound sensitive.
I’ll soon know, because Tandy has promised to expose me to some nineteen-hertz waves. In fact, that’s where we’re heading now. Tandy gets up from the couch. It’s 6:30 p.m., and the Coventry tourism office has closed. Perhaps we’re going to the haunted tower at Warwick Castle? Tandy stops halfway down the first-floor hallway and makes a left. We are not going to Warwick Castle. We’re going to Vic and Lynne Tandy’s dining room. “You can really get a nice standing nineteen-hertz wave going in here. I’ve got my kit all set up for you.”
Tandy’s laptop is set up to channel computer-generated infrasound through the subwoofers of a car stereo amplifier and into a speaker. He pulls out a dining room chair for me. The speaker is seated at the head of the table. “Ready?” says Tandy.
He hits a series of keys on the laptop. We sit in the quiet, heads bowed, as if waiting for the speaker to say grace.
I think I feel something, but then again, I’m looking for it. Tandy says he can’t usually feel it while it’s on, but that he notices the room feels different when he shuts it off. So we turn the infrasound off, then back on, and then off again. It’s hard to say. It’s certainly subtle.
Lynne comes in to set the table for dinner. After she leaves, I ask Tandy to put the infrasound on one last time. He leans over, presses some keys. Is there a mild buzziness in my brain? A faint, indescribable weirdness? It’s there, I think it’s there. “I can feel something already,” I whisper.
Tandy looks up from his keyboard. “I haven’t got anything on yet.”
IF YOU ASK me which is the more likely explanation—infrasonics or spirits—I will tell you to apply the wisdom of Occam’s razor,[40] a principle which holds that the simplest, the least farfetched, of two competing theories is the place to put your money. But depending on who’s shaving, Occam’s razor yields manifestly different views. To those who believe in an afterlife, the most straightforward explanation for hearing your dead dad is that you’re hearing your dead dad’s spirit. Infrasonics and vibrating eyeballs and fight-or-flight responses would, given this particular worldview, seem to be needless and unlikely complexities. But to those of a less spiritual bent, the concept of a consciousness leaving a body and persisting in some ordered form that is able to interact with living beings is a notion that demands an even more elaborate and unnecessarily complex explanation.
Perhaps it’s time for a break from the tail-chasing complexities of scientific method. Perhaps some other learned pursuit has something to offer us. Has anyone, for instance, tried to prove the existence of ghosts in a court of law? In fact they have. In the farm belt of central North Carolina, some eighty years ago.
11. CHAFFIN v. THE DEAD GUY IN THE OVERCOAT
In Which the Law Finds for a Ghost, and the Author Calls In an Expert Witness
40
The principle known as Occam’s razor was not, curiously enough, William of Occam’s idea. Occam simply used it—frequently and “sharply,” to quote the