Tony: It started very, very loud, ear piercingly loud, then the severe, severe ear pain started.

Micah Loewinger: On this week's On the Media, we bring you three audio puzzles, beginning with the Havana Syndrome.

Tony: I liken it to if you take a Q-tip and you bounce it off your ear, you get that jarring, ah. Imagine taking a sharpened pencil and then poking that off the eardrum.

Micah Loewinger: Also, a hum that you live with can help law enforcement solve crimes.

Jen Munson: You hear it with--

Nasir Memon: My refrigerator, a TV--

Jen Munson: Elevators, in buildings, you hear it.

Nasir Memon: Everything is interconnected, right?

Jen Munson: It's very common.

Micah Loewinger: Plus, how an invisible disturbance ruined a series of high-stakes pigeon races.

Reporter 1: It was billed as the race of the century, but many of the homing pigeons carefully prepared by their owners never returned.

Micah Loewinger: The mysteries of sound and the limits of our senses. It's all coming up after this.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger filling in this week for Brooke Gladstone. We begin the show in Havana, Cuba in the fall of 2016.

Tony: I'm just laying on my bed with my laptop next to me, and I'm watching this show.

Micah Loewinger: Former CIA Officer going by the pseudonym, Tony.

Tony: Then all of the dogs in the neighborhood start barking, and then this loud sound just blasted into my bedroom. It started very, very loud. Ear-piercingly loud. The pressure started in the head, and then the discomfort in the ear. Then the severe, severe ear pain started. I liken it to if you take a Q-tip and you bounce it off your ear, you get that jarring, ah. Imagine taking a sharpened pencil and then poking that off the eardrum.

Micah Loewinger: Tony says the sound seemed directional. He stopped hearing it when he moved out of his bedroom, but that was just the beginning.

Tony: I was at the top physical, psychological, emotional place I could have ever been in my life, then I was gang-hooded in my job, and within six months, I was a zombie and non-functional as a human being.

Micah Loewinger: He was one of the first patients for what we now call Havana Syndrome. A mysterious affliction that seem to spread among American diplomats in Cuba, and then across the globe.

Jen Munson: I felt paralyzed. I think it's just one of those, you're in a dream and you can't move. That's how it felt.

Micah Loewinger: These are the voices of American diplomats interviewed for a podcast series from Vice called Havana Syndrome. What was done to them? Were they being attacked? If so, by whom, with what kind of weapon? In this hour which first aired earlier this year, you'll hear about three audio mysteries, and about the people trying to make sense of sonic clues. Some audible, some not. Sounds that hum and buzz all through our natural and built environments. We'll start with Havana Syndrome, a seven-year-old mystery still driving headlines.

Reporter 2: A new assessment by US intelligence officials says the debilitating ailment known as Havana Syndrome cannot be linked to any foreign adversary or weapon.

Reporter 3: There's nothing in this latest report that disproves the possibility that this is from a foreign adversary which is what we're [crosstalk]--

Micah Loewinger: The Intercept reported in April that the Pentagon had requested $36 million to treat patients of Havana Syndrome and to continue studying its origins. That story came days after Fox News ran this prime-time segment.

Reporter 4: Do you feel confident that the government is covering this up?

News Interviewee: It sure sounds like it to me, because an attack on American embassy personnel is an attack on the United States. It's essentially an act of war.

Micah Loewinger: Which is to say, there are a range of theories about what happened. Which theory you go with comes down to who you put your faith in.

Jon Lee Anderson: The first victims of Havana Syndrome were aflicted by a similar range of symptoms, jarring paralyzing pain, a sound in their heads that apparently wasn't audible to others as far as they knew but was to them.

Micah Loewinger: This is Jon Lee Anderson, a staff writer with the New Yorker who traveled to Havana with Adam Entous, an investigative reporter for The New York Times, to try to solve the mystery once and for all.

Adam Entous: It was the first time Jon Lee and I had been on the island together.

Jon Lee Anderson: Havana's my favorite city in the world and I hadn't been back in a long time.

Micah Loewinger: They laid out their findings in that podcast series from Vice. Adam and Jon Lee say the story really began in December 2014 before anyone got sick.

Barack Obama: Today, the United States of America is changing it's relationship with the people of Cuba. The most significant changes in our policy in more than 50 years.

Reporter 3: The president ordered the opening of an embassy, a US embassy in Havana for the first time in more than 50 years.

Micah Loewinger: Then in the Fall of 2016, almost two dozen US spies and diplomats reported experiencing a similar array of symptoms. The story went public at a State Department press briefing on August 9th, 2017.

Female Speaker 2: Some US government personnel who were working at our embassy in Havana, Cuba on official duties, they've reported some incidents. We don't have any definitive answers about the source or the cause of what we consider to be incidents.

Micah Loewinger: The words "attack and weapon" weren't used by the State Department, but within 48 hours, the media coverage had taken on a distinctly militarized tone.

Reporter 4: It reads like a Cold War spy novel.

Reporter 5: This was a terrorist attack against US Diplomats and their families in Cuba. They used a sonic weapon which is--

Reporter 6: Who's responsible for the acoustic attacks? Is it Cuba, is it Russia? Who's to blame for that?

Rex Tillerson: We've not been able to determine who is to blame. We do hold--

Micah Loewinger: That last voice was Donald Trump's Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who was leading the administration's dismantling of the State Department.

Reporter 7: Just some absolutely stunning news out of the State Department in what's being described as the White House cleaning house.

Reporter 8: Latest plans from the administration call for a 37% cut to the agency's budget. 37%.

Micah Loewinger: Trump and his anti-communist surrogates seemed pretty happy to exploit the ambiguities of the Havana mystery.

Male Speaker 3: We can say that we don't know how it happened. We can even say we can't know for sure who did it, but two things we know for sure, people were hurt and the Cuban government knows who did it.

Reporter 9: The Trump administration announced Friday that is pulling more than half of its staff out of the American embassy in Havana.

Jon Lee Anderson: Donald Trump is busily tearing down any aspect of Obama's legacy he can find-

Micah Loewinger: Jon Lee Anderson.

Jon Lee Anderson: -including, of course, the [unintelligible 00:07:04] with Cuba. Then the reports of the Havana Syndrome, it's used publicly as the reason for which the embassy is finally closed down.

Micah Loewinger: Meanwhile, the US government reached out to a group of physicians at the University of Pennsylvania to study the Havana patients.

Reporter 10: Doctors treating the victims have found abnormalities in the white matter of their brains. This is the most specific finding so far about about physical damage caused by those sonic attacks.

Adam Entous: Dr. Smith at the University of Pennsylvania is an expert in studying and helping people who suffer from concussions.

Micah Loewinger: Adam Entous.

Adam Entous: He sees similarities between this kind of damage and what he sees in the concussion cases involving professional sports players.

Micah Loewinger: Over the next couple of years, other diplomats and intelligence officers continue to report incidences, and not just in Havana.

Reporter 11: There are now more than 130 possible cases of Havana Syndrome including in China and Russia.

Micah Loewinger: In Vienna, even outside the White House. In their podcast, Adam Entous and Jon Lee Anderson explore the popular explanations for these incidents, like the sonic weapon theory. A team of researchers in the UK and the US quickly identified this sound which was recorded by a patient in Havana as the mating call of the Indies short-tailed cricket.

Male Speaker 4: The Cubans brought me in to meet with their team of scientists that were trying to analyze it. In that meeting, they said that they believed that it was crickets.

Micah Loewinger: Many experts argued that sound can't cause brain damage, not without deafening everybody in the area. If not a sonic weapon, then what?

Reporter 12: 19 top experts from The National Academies of Scientists conclude, the most likely explanation, directed pulsed microwave energy.

Female Speaker 3: Microwave energy from some external source. They don't really know what that source is.

Micah Loewinger: Jon Lee Anderson sees some Cold War precedent for this theory.

Jon Lee Anderson: There was this long history of the Russians barraging the US embassy in Moscow, going back to virtually the Stalin years

Micah Loewinger: Jon Lee and Adam interviewed officials who had been stationed at the Moscow embassy in the '50s when microwave attacks occurred.

Jon Lee Anderson: The reason behind the KGB barraging the US embassy with microwaves wasn't apparently to necessarily harm the Americans, it was directed at some interference With CIA's own electronics, maybe eavesdropping equipment located inside the US embassy buildings.

Robert Bartholomew: If somebody dowses your room right now with microwaves, your Wi-Fi system would probably shut down. There's a good chance your computer would turn off. Microwaves would literally heat your brain.

Micah Loewinger: Robert Bartholomew is a journalist and a professor of medical sociology at the University of Auckland. He does not think it was a microwave weapon.

Robert Bartholomew: They asked those early victims to record their attacks, and they did. Microwaves cannot be recorded.

Micah Loewinger: Bartholomew told me he was really frustrated by all the coverage of that University of Pennsylvania study, the one that found white matter changes in the brains of the early patients.

Robert Bartholomew: That study should never have been published. White matter tract changes are common in everything from migraine, to depression, to normal aging. Brain anomalies do not equate to brain damage.

Micah Loewinger: When it comes to any of the foreign adversary theories, Bartholomew isn't convinced.

Robert Bartholomew: For six years, the US government went down a rabbit hole searching for secret weapons and foreign conspiracies. When they reached the bottom of that hole, all they found were rabbits.

Micah Loewinger: In fact, his analysis aligns with a report published last month from several intelligence agencies, which--

Reporter 13: Found it, "Very unlikely a foreign adversary was responsible, very unlikely a weapon or any device purposely or accidentally caused the symptoms, and there is not even a consistent set of physical injuries that could be characterized as Havana syndrome." Now, they're very--

Micah Loewinger: Robert Bartholomew says that in his opinion, the best explanation for the symptoms experienced by all those spies and diplomats is the one he wrote about in his 2020 book, Havana Syndrome: Mass Psychogenic Illness, and the Real Story Behind the Embassy Mystery and Hysteria.

Robert Bartholomew: It is a collective stress response that's based on a belief. We all have beliefs, therefore we are all potential victims.

Micah Loewinger: He points to the original Havana patients who lived incredibly stressful lives.

Robert Bartholomew: When American diplomats and spies have been in Cuba in the past, they had a long history of harassment. You'd wake up in the morning, come downstairs, and you'd find cigarette butts on your kitchen table, and you don't smoke. Or you'd see dog poo on your kitchen floor, and you don't have a pet. At the same time they were told, "You're being targeted with a sonic weapon, and don't stand or sleep near windows." That prolonged anxiety can trigger anomalies in the brain, and that's exactly what happened in the Cuban cohort.

Micah Loewinger: That's not to say he discounts their pain.

Robert Bartholomew: Their symptoms are as real as any medical condition out there and they are genuinely suffering, but if you've been told you have brain damage from some secret weapon, you're not going to get well as fast as you would if you believed that it was psychogenic in origin.

Micah Loewinger: You've described mass psychogenic illness as one of the most misunderstood and stigmatized conditions in medicine. In earlier decades, it was commonly called mass psychogenic hysteria, and that term "hysteria" is very loaded because historically, doctors had said it came from a sickness caused by a "wandering uterus" that affected primarily women. I'd love to hear you respond specifically to the idea that there is this fraught history of telling people, and especially female patients, that they are not experiencing what they say they're experiencing and that it's just stress.

Robert Bartholomew: Sure. Look, I have never claimed that the victims are crazy or are suffering from some type of mental disorder. Mass psychogenic illness is much more common than people realize. It affects normal healthy people. Adam Entous recently described Havana syndrome victims as serious people who had no incentive to make up a story. That shows me that he doesn't understand mass psychogenic illness. Mass psychogenic illness is not people who are crazy, or mentally ill, or weak minded. It is a collective stress response based on a belief.

Micah Loewinger: In the Vice podcast, Dr. Douglas Smith, leader of the UPenn study, told Adam and Jon Lee why he didn't buy the psychogenic theory.

Dr. Douglas Smith: Mass hysteria, you have to be essentially, contaminated or influenced by somebody else with the same symptoms. That doesn't work here because many of these patients had never met the other patients. They just independently had the same kind of history of some kind of exposure, and then they had these symptoms, but independently described the same type of story without ever seeing another patient.

Micah Loewinger: Bartholomew says that mass psychogenic illness is not a conscious collusion between patients, but it's a moot point in this case because--

Robert Bartholomew: The majority of cases in Havana Syndrome, whether in Cuba or around the world, was not mass psychogenic illness. It was simply people being told they might be the targets, and then redefining an array of preexisting health conditions under a new label, Havana Syndrome. To be a part of this in history is one of the most exciting things.

Micah Loewinger: Some of the patients bristled at this theory on 60 Minutes last year, saying their suffering was sidelined by officials who didn't see evidence of a weapon.

Male Speaker 4: I'm tired of the gaslighting that keeps happening from the US government because I'm watching new colleagues and friends that I've trained with being sent to these countries and coming back a shell of their former selves. We need to help them and we need to stop this.

Adam Entous: The work of Dr. Bartholomew and others who have been pushing this psychogenic argument,-

Micah Loewinger: Adam Entous.

Adam Entous: -they're providing an armchair analysis without actually having done any hands-on research with these individuals.

Robert Bartholomew: It's actually even better to look at it from afar-

Micah Loewinger: Robert Bartholomew.

Robert Bartholomew: -because you've got people who got so close to these victims saying things like, "Oh, I've talked to these victims. They're really suffering." You want a degree of emotional separation. Wherever we have strong emotions, we're liable to fool ourselves.

Adam Entous: Seriously? The criticism here from Bartholomew is that we interviewed the patients? Would you want us to cover the earthquake in Turkey without interviewing the victims? You do really want to talk to the affected. That's the job of a journalist.

Micah Loewinger: I don't think it's simply interviewing the patients. Some of the patients seemed primed to believe that it was an attack.

Adam Entous: You're right that some of the patients, more than others, have strong opinions and beliefs about what they believe happened to them without evidence. They can describe the experience that they had, but they have no unique information about what caused it. That said, it could be psychogenic in some cases. I was agnostic when I started on this process, and frankly, I still remain agnostic today.

Micah Loewinger: Adam's reporting partner, Jon Lee, says on the podcast that he believes a contingent within the Cuban government could have conspired with the Russians in Havana to target American diplomats with a microwave weapon.

Jon Lee: If Russia had the technology and it had worked in Havana, why not take it on the road? Especially if your goal in life is to fuck with the US. It's about messing with our heads anywhere they can.

Adam Entous: I hear what you're saying, Jon Lee, but I really think we need to stick with the facts, and there's just not that many of them. What do we know? We know we have a bunch of people who say they've been hurt, but the CIA hasn't been able to find any communications intercepts in which officials in Russia or Cuba talk about what they did. I think it's very strange that they haven't been able to collect anything like that.

Micah Loewinger: Toward the end of our conversation, I asked Jon Lee how he felt about ending up on the same side of the debate as Trump's former national security advisor, John Bolton, who he interviewed for their podcast.

John Bolton: Certainly, from all outward appearances, it was an attack on American personnel, first in Cuba, then in China. We can't tolerate that.

Micah Loewinger: This is a guy who has a reputation as a war mongerer. He seems like the exact kind of person who would be very invested in there being a secret Russian weapon behind all of this.

Jon Lee: I totally agree with you. He's almost a cartoonish anti-communist cold warrior. He didn't really make me feel more convinced of my hypothesis at all, although he echoed some of the same conclusions. The Russians are the most neurotically belligerent to the Americans and they're the only ones, again, who had something relatively similar in terms of experimenting with microwaves against Americans in the past. Two plus two equals four, basically, for me.

Micah Loewinger: For me, it just doesn't add up. After listening to their podcast and reporting this piece this past spring, I'm leaning towards the conclusion that reporter Jack Hitt came to when he investigated this story for Vanity Fair in 2019.

Jack Hitt: I think the most likely explanation,-

Micah Loewinger: Jack Hitt is speaking here on the New Republic podcast.

Jack Hitt: -the Occam's razor explanation, one that accounts for all of the facts as we know them in the simplest possible way, but for journalists the least satisfying, is what's known as mass psychogenic illness. Conversion disorder is the other phrase that is often used.

Micah Loewinger: Look, I don't know what it feels like to be a spy or diplomat living abroad, facing regular harassment, or what the symptoms of the Havana patients felt like. We can study the arguments for this and that theory, but we can't say with certainty what happened to them, but oddly enough, while I was working on this episode, I had a minor mental breakdown and I had to take time off from work. I think it's burnout, and I'm working on it. I know, [mimics whining child] woe me is me, another millennial journalist who feels bad for himself, but that's really how I felt.

The more I watched and heard interviews with the Havana syndrome patients, the more I came to see this as a story about the physical and mental toll of work. A toll we're taught to minimize, explain away and hide from one another.

Jack Hitt: It's called conversion disorder because intense stress under pressure is converted into real physical illness. Really, the key thing that all of these conversion disorder scientists and doctors that I talked to said, is that these are real symptoms. Conversion disorder makes you sick.

Micah Loewinger: Coming up, how the police can use that buzzing sound from your fridge to help solve crimes. This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger filling in for Brooke Gladstone. Okay, so this next mystery is a little different. It has to do with an obscure form of audio forensics, a technology called Electrical Network Frequency analysis, or ENF.

Jen Munson: Hi.

Micah Loewinger: That's Jen Munson. She's On the Media's technical director. Her job is to make the hosts, producers, reporters, and the people we speak to sound as clean and clear as possible.

Jen Munson: My approach is mostly to find the thing that I like in someone's voice and bring that out.

Micah Loewinger: I called her up to tell her about ENF analysis, though she didn't know that at the time. I just said I was working on an episode about audio mysteries.

Jen Munson: Audio mysteries.

Micah Loewinger: [laughs] I told her that I sent a scientist some recordings of me interviewing people on our show. Just my side of the conversation, just my voice. Using ENF analysis, this researcher was able to tell me the day and time, almost to the exact second that I recorded each interview.

Jen Munson: Really?

Micah Loewinger: Yes.

Jen Munson: That's in the metadata, because you sent him a digital file.

Micah Loewinger: I rebounced it so that if you checked the metadata of the file, it would be when I made that file, not when I recorded it.

Jen Munson: Interesting. Forensic audio is really fascinating to me. I would think there would be a way to compare it to known other recordings, traffic sounds, like environmental sounds around you.

Micah Loewinger: That's a good guess, but that's not right though.

Jen Munson: That's not right?

Micah Loewinger: No.

Jen Munson: Tell me, now I want to know.

Nasir Memon: Hi, I'm Nasir Memon. I'm a professor here at NYU's Tandon School of Engineering in the Computer Science and engineering department.

Micah Loewinger: Nasir oversees the group at New York University that published papers on ENF analysis as recently as this year. They get funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, AKA DARPA, the research arm of the Department of Defense. This type of audio forensics has been studied in academia for a couple decades now, but its used by law enforcement is what caught his eye.

Nasir Memon: To my understanding, the first folks that had done it was the London Metropolitan Police.

Micah Loewinger: In 2010, a specialist at the Metropolitan Police Department described ENF as, "The most significant development in the field since techniques were developed to analyze the Watergate tapes." Nasir explained to me that for ENF analysis to work, he needs to find something specific in the recordings I sent him, a bit of interference, that Jen is very familiar with.

Jen Munson: You'll see on the graph, you're getting just the low rumble.

Micah Loewinger: I had Jen use a fancy audio equalizer tool to look at the different frequencies in a recording I sent to Nasir's team.

Jen Munson: There's a little bit of this hum 60 hertz. Can you hear that?

Micah Loewinger: I think it's imperceptible in this recording.

Jen Munson: My ears are tuned to hear it.

Micah Loewinger: Audio engineers will tell you that this 60 hertz hum contaminates all kinds of recordings.

Jen Munson: That's the first thing I'm approaching, is getting rid of that sound. You hear it a lot on guitar amps. You hear it with--

Nasir Memon: My refrigerator, a TV--

Jen Munson: Elevators, in buildings, you hear it.

Nasir Memon: Everything is interconnected, right?

Jen Munson: It's very common.

Micah Loewinger: Many of our electrical things all around us are constantly buzzing at a 60 hertz or a harmonic, like 120 hertz, 180 and so on. What we're hearing or not hearing is the electrical grid. The companies that manage our power, in my case, Con Edison in New York, are required by law to maintain that 60 hertz output.

Nasir Memon: It's unable to keep it exactly at 60, because the consumption is varying. Lights turn on and off and people turn on their devices. It's trying to maintain and cater to the load. It doesn't want to produce too much electricity.

Micah Loewinger: The demand for electricity is constantly changing based on what's plugged in.

Masir Memon: The production mechanism is trying to keep pace with it, and it doesn't succeed in maintaining it to exactly 60. It becomes 59.8, 60.1.

Micah Loewinger: If you were to map the frequency over time, it would not be the straight 60 hertz. It would be this ever so slightly wiggle.

Nasir Memon: Yes, ever so slightly wiggle. The utility companies, they have to measure this and report it to the government, but we can measure it too.

Micah Loewinger: Nasir's former grad student, [unintelligible 00:26:08] built a very simple computer that records the wiggle from the grid every second or so. When I sent [unintelligible 00:26:15] my recordings, he isolated the 60-ish hertz hum, which might have come from my laptop charger, plugged in a few feet from my microphone.

Nasir Memon: He would pull out the data for the last three months that we've been capturing.

Micah Loewinger: I told [unintelligible 00:26:30] that I often recorded my interviews around a couple weeks before they aired, which a forensic specialist would determine pretty quickly anyway, but I told him that mostly so he wouldn't have to spend unnecessary time cycling through years of data.

Nasir Memon: Then he would run an algorithm on the sound using a sliding window. Every 20 seconds, he slides it over, and at some point, matches, matches, matches.

Micah Loewinger: Which is how he guessed the time of three of my recordings within around 10 seconds each.

Jen Munson: Wow.

Micah Loewinger: It's such a one man's trash is another man's treasure thing, that for you and audio engineers, the thing that makes your job slightly harder is actually this forensic fossil that can be dug up to glean information about when something happened, when the recording was made.

Jen Munson: I'm blown away.

Micah Loewinger: Even though ENF has been around for nearly two decades, it doesn't seem to have caught on in any significant way in the US. I reached out to an editor at Bellingcat, the cutting edge investigative outlet known for its use of data and tech. They knew about ENF analysis, but weren't familiar with journalists using it. I also couldn't find any court records mentioning its use by American law enforcement. Catalent Gregor, one of the early developers of ENF told me it's often used for checking to see if media has been edited or tampered with. You can compare the hum in a piece of media to the data from the grid to see if the audio has been spliced or rearranged.

Other scholars have referenced the Osama bin Laden cave videos as a hypothetical application. Investigations in which the ability to learn which electrical grid a person is near might offer up new leads, but the issue here is that the technology only works if, A, the hum is captured in the recording, which is a bit of a crapshoot, and B, you have access to the right grid data. Nasir Memon.

Nasir Memon: If I was running this in an intelligence agency, I would make sure I'm capturing everywhere in the world.

Micah Loewinger: Do you think the American intelligence agencies are interested in ENF?

Nasir Memon: Intelligence won't tell me. Even if I knew, I may not be able to tell you as well, which I don't.

Micah Loewinger: Do I believe you?

Nasir Memon: [laughs] No, I don't have any secret clearance, anything of that.

Micah Loewinger: You mentioned that the study was funded by DARPA, and I understand that similar research has been done completely independent of DARPA, but it does seem like you are helping develop a technology that could be used for surveillance.

Nasir Memon: Right. We are scientists. We like to further science. Science can be used for good and bad. We just leave that question aside quite often, because it just gets very, very, very complicated. The answers are not clear.

Micah Loewinger: He told me, at one point in his team's research, he had considered collecting way more data.

Nasir Memon: Even different countries, make it public, put a tool whereby you submit a video and then I'll tell you what time it was taken. Then I thought, that's going too far. That's going too far because the ethical issue started coming up then to me.

Micah Loewinger: What if a stalker wants to try to track somebody down using videos you posted on Instagram?

Nasir Memon: That's why I didn't do it. I'm not trying to say I'm a very ethical person. If there was money there in it, maybe I would've done it. I don't know. There was no reason to do it. For what purpose? I did not.

Micah Loewinger: I have gotten you to admit that you're corruptible.

Nasir Memon: [laughs] Well, we all can be. Let's put it that way.

Micah Loewinger: I don't really know how useful ENF analysis is for mass surveillance. There are just far better ways to track people, like GPS or the type of stuff you can legally buy from a data broker. Even little visual clues in the back of a selfie can lead a dedicated sleuth to figure out where you live. What drew me to learn more about ENF is the poetry of it. Think about it, every time you turn on a light, or plug in your phone, or vacuum your rug, or blow dry your hair, you're contributing to that ever so slightly wiggle as the grid adjusts itself to our needs. It's a barely audible symphony that we're all playing a part in.

The American electrical grid, which has been called the largest machine in the world, is a pulsating map that should remind us of just how interconnected we all are. Coming up, our final mystery is about another map made of sound. That no human, not even Jen Munson, can hear. This is On the Media.

[MUSIC - Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark: Electricity]

This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger, filling in this week for Brooke Gladstone. This next audio mystery might teach us something remarkable about a seemingly unremarkable bird, the pigeon. I first learned about this story from a fellow radio journalist, a man who happens to be a lifelong fan of pigeons.

Robert Krulwich: I'm a New York kid, so there were pigeons at the very beginning of my life. When I would go to the playground, there was my mommy, the baby carriage, and the pigeon.

Micah Loewinger: Robert Krulwich is the co-creator and former co-host of Radiolab. I spoke to him earlier this year when this story first aired.

Robert Krulwich: When I would look at the pigeons, apparently, according to my mother, I would try to touch a pigeon. That many people think that they're vermin and shouldn't be touched never occurred to me.

Micah Loewinger: Weirdly, pigeons played an integral role in early journalism.

Robert Krulwich: In media history, it's some guy named Israel Josaphat. He lived in Aachen in Germany.

Micah Loewinger: In 1850, Josaphatat started a company that brought news to Aachen from Brussels faster than anyone else.

Robert Krulwich: There was a stock market in Brussels, and if you were over in Aachen, you'd want to know what was hot, and what was cold, and what was more, and what was less, but you couldn't find that out unless you took the eight-hour train.

Micah Loewinger: There was a gap in the telegraph lines between these two cities, so the train was the bottleneck, until he realized that pigeons could fly from Brussels to Aachen in just two hours.

Robert Krulwich: You'd have to take them on the train to Brussels and then put messages on them in Brussels, and they'd go up and then go right back to Germany. He would put a little satchel onto the pigeon, and into that satchel, he'd place a little bit of information like, today the diamond price went up, or these cantaloupes are selling down. Then he was the first one to know what was going on in Belgium maybe five hours before anyone else.

Micah Loewinger: That in the press, as we both know, is a competitive edge.

Robert Krulwich: Oh, gosh, yes.

Micah Loewinger: There's actually a 1940 film about Josaphatat's brilliant business.

Man from Movie: Who is this man who trades in secrets? This man who controls the most amazing dispatch system ever known? A lone pigeon sores into the skies carrying a crumpled scrap of paper.

Micah Loewinger: Who was this man? Why are we even talking about him?

Robert Krulwich: He changed his name to Mr. Reuters, of the famous Reuters news service.

Micah Loewinger: It's true. Reuters, the global news agency, was started with pigeons. Which is to say that while we take these birds for granted, I know some of you are grossed out by them, they're not called rats with wings for nothing, pigeons are embedded in the DNA of modern communication. From the Middle Ages onwards, pigeons have been dutifully delivering the word. During the siege of Paris in 1870, pigeons flew thousands of messages to and from the city. Pigeons were awarded medals of honor for saving human soldiers in World War I and World War II.

Which brings us to our final audio mystery of the show, a story that Robert wrote about for his blog on nationalgeographic.com. A story that demonstrates how little we know about how pigeons do what they do.

Robert Krulwich: One day, a guy named Tom Roden in Manchester, England walks out the door of his house and he's going to walk the dog,-

Micah Loewinger: This is in 2002.

Robert Krulwich: -and he looks and he sees a pigeon sitting right there in front of his house. He goes, "Oh, I know this pigeon." It had a name. It was called Champion Whitetail.

Micah Loewinger: This was the first time Tom had seen Champion Whitetail, his bird, in five years.

Robert Krulwich: He was a pigeon fancier, and this was one of his greatest birds. It had won 13 races in its day, it had crossed the English Channel 15 times, so it was a real professional racing bird, and he hadn't seen it for five years because the last time he'd seen it, he'd sent it on a race and it hadn't come back.

Reporter 1: It was billed as the race of the century. Prize-winning birds from all over Britain were driven to France to mark the centenary of the Royal Pigeon Racing Society with a cross-channel flight.

Robert Krulwich: 60,000 birds were entered into that contest.

Report 1: Many of the homing pigeons, carefully prepared by their owners, never returned.

Robert Krulwich: Tens of thousands of birds just didn't come back.

Micah Loewinger: The newspapers at the time had dubbed it the Great Pigeon Race Disaster [laughs].

Robert Krulwich: Right. These birds are trained, and they're expensive, and then when five years later, one of those 10,000 birds suddenly shows up in Manchester and says, "Hello," to its boss, that's a thing.

Micah Loewinger: It sounds like there are two mysteries. One is, what caused the great pigeon racing disaster of 1997, and where the hell has this pigeon been for five years? [laughs]

Robert Krulwich: That's right.

John Hagstrum: They were trying to figure out what the heck happened. They ended up trying to blame it on the weather.

Micah Loewinger: This is John Hagstrum.

John Hagstrum: I'm a geophysicist. I worked for the US Geological Survey for 41 years and I'm now an emeritus there.

Micah Loewinger: Like Robert, he's been thinking about pigeons for decades and he might have cracked the case of the royal race.

John Hagstrum: Queen Elizabeth's birds were in this race, so it was a very big deal, and there was a big inquiry and I got a hold of the report on this inquiry.

Male Speaker 5: Heavy rain. The birds just would not face it. I think they spent hours and hours flying around the race point and just did not leave.

John Hagstrum: There was some rain offshore, but I don't really remember there being rain right along the route of the race, so it didn't quite make sense to me. Anyhow, it was part of the collection of races that I was able to find at that point that had been smashed for mysterious reasons. That's the term that the pigeon racers use when they let the birds go, and for some reason, usually weather, the pigeons just go to roost and don't come back.

Micah Loewinger: A trend began to form. There were a handful of other races like this across Europe. A year later in 1998, this time in the US, on the East Coast, there were two other smashed races on the same day.

Reporter 14: On Monday, 2,000 homing pigeons were released in Virginia to begin their flight back to Allentown, Pennsylvania. Only 200 made it. The rest seem to have disappeared. In a separate pigeon race from western Pennsylvania to Philadelphia, 600 of the 800 birds are missing.

John Hagstrum: They were both going back toward lofts in the Philadelphia area. They actually intersected.

Micah Loewinger: Maybe the birds were disrupted by something that happened around the moment the flight paths crossed.

John Hagstrum: Actually, it was right over Harrisburg where Three Mile Island, the nuclear plant, was, so I got sidetracked by nuclear plants. I called them up and I was very suspicious, "Did you have any high pressure gas releases or were you doing anything funny at this time on this day?" and they denied it.

Micah Loewinger: You are a full on pigeon detective, is what I'm hearing.

John Hagstrum: [laughs] Well, yes. This is what you got to do. I was calling the Department of Transportation, had they'd been doing any blasting? I was even thinking of calling to see if Gettysburg, they were having any civil war reenactments and shooting off a lot of cannons. What really finally gave it away was I had been thinking about infrasound and I was reading infrasound papers.

Micah Loewinger: Let me pull this back a little bit. What is infrasound?

John Hagstrum: Infrasound is basically sound at frequencies below our hearing range. Just as ultrasound is the hearing above our hearing range. Dog whistles and bats are all working in the ultrasound range, which is very high frequencies, so very short wavelengths. Infrasound is below our hearing, and so it has very long wavelengths.

Robert Krulwich: If you're a pigeon, you can sense tones that are 12 octaves below Middle C. That would be beyond human hearing.

John Hagstrum: Pigeons were the first birds that were shown to be able to hear it. That was done at Cornell in the 1970s.

Micah Loewinger: The question of whether birds can hear infrasound is still contested among biologists. Anyway, John Hagstrum was looking at this collection of races on either side of the Atlantic Ocean, the two Pennsylvania races and the royal race across the English Channel, and he was thinking, "What might connect to them?" when he thought of the Concorde.

Male Announcer: British Airways, Concorde, the first supersonic passenger airliner to fly you with more than twice the speed of sound.

Robert Krulwich: Those gorgeous planes that look like giant triangles with curvy noses.

Micah Loewinger: The now-retired plane that once transported movie stars from London, Heathrow to New York's John F Kennedy airport in less than half the time of a normal plane.

Male Announcer: The Concorde has crossed the Atlantic in three and a half hours.

Jon Hagstrum: When I finally saw a map of the Concorde route coming in towards JFK, I saw that it was pointed right at the intersection of these races, and went, "Oh my God, that could it."

Micah Loewinger: A plane landing 200 miles away from the pigeon races seems like a wild explanation until you consider what defined the Concorde.

Pilot: We should be supersonic about 10 minutes after takeoff.

Male Speaker 6: Escalating to Concorde's regular speed, Mach 2, twice the speed of sound.

Male Speaker 7: Faster than a rifle bullet. 23 miles every minute.

Robert Krulwich: Now, when a plane breaks the sound barrier, it is constantly sending a little sonic booms its path. Boom, boom, boom.

Jon Hagstrum: They are quite loud. I actually heard one once. As a geologist, I was way out in the field in Montana and I heard one.

[bang]

Jon Hagstrum: I thought it was an atomic bomb.

Micah Loewinger: This is why supersonic flight over land in the US was outlawed in 1973, because the sonic booms could break windows and freak people out. Hence, why the Concorde mostly flew over the Atlantic.

Jon Hagstrum: The Concorde is pushing the sonic boom like a bow wave of a boat, and when it slows down and goes subsonic, that wave keeps going. The thing is the audible sound in that wave gets absorbed by the atmosphere relatively quickly, but the very low frequency infrasound wave just keeps going and going and going.

Micah Loewinger: He crunches the numbers with the two US races.

Jon Hagstrum: The first thing I did was, back to the envelope, calculations. I know how fast pegions fly, I know how fast sound moves through the atmosphere, so I could calculate when this sonic boom came and hit. Was there an intersection between the pigeon's racing course when the pigeons were there and the sonic boom wave coming through, and it matched? It matched for one of the races.

Micah Loewinger: The timing didn't match for the other race because--

Jon Hagstrum: They'd actually delayed releasing the pigeons so that they actually released them after the Concorde should have landed at JFK. I called up this guy, I'll never forget, his name was Rob Hasbini. He was with Air France at JFK and I said, "In order for my calculations to work, your plane had to be late over two hours that day." He said, "This is the Concorde, two hours, are you kidding? It's only three hours from Paris." I said, "Please, it's a scientific question. Will you please look it up?" Then he said, "Are you a magician? It was two and a half hours late that day."

Micah Loewinger: [laughs] Wow.

Jon Hagstrum: Those are the moments you live for as a scientist. When you make a prediction and somebody tells you were right.

Micah Loewinger: Let's return to the 1997 Royal centenary race across the English Channel.

Jon Hagstrum: The Concorde, leaving Paris, goes subsonic until it gets over water because they don't want to lay down a boom carpet right along the English Channel. I basically calculated that the birds that had been released in Paris in the centenary race in 1997 would have been passing over, crossing the channel just as the Concorde would have been going supersonic down the channel on its way to New York. You standing there wouldn't hear a thing, but the birds would be rocked by this boom. It would be quite loud to them, but it's below out hearing.

Micah Loewinger: Which would explain why the fanciers in [unintelligible 00:43:38] had blamed it on the weather.

Male Speaker 8: The majority wouldn't try to go through that belt of rain, they would attempt to go round it, but of course, depending on the distance, this could tire them out.

Reporter 1: It's thought the pigeons are now just resting up somewhere in France before completing their flight across the channel.

Micah Loewinger: Let's go back to Tom Roden in Manchester and his prized pigeon champion Whitetail who returned home five years after the race.

Tom Roden: Because the bird was a news story in England, in Manchester, it got into the newspapers, and maybe from Reuters, for all I know, among others. That story got passed around.

Micah Loewinger: I don't know if that's true but I'd love it if it were [laughs].

Tom Roden: These people could read that story wherever they lived, and it turned out that there was a guy in [unintelligible 00:44:26] who read the story--

Micah Loewinger: He wrote a letter to Tom Roden saying essentially--

Tom Roden: Wait a second. On the very day of that race, I walked into my backyard, and there was a shaggy sad ass looking bird sitting in my backyard, looking terribly exhausted. It had a little ringlet on it's foot. I wrote down the number of the bird, then walked the bird to the Museum of Natural History in [unintelligible 00:44:55] and said, "Here, I found this bird," and then the Museum took it. Presumably, they eventually released it. That was two weeks after the race. We now have four and a half years to account for.

[laughter]

Micah Loewinger: That is a lot of unaccounted time [laughs]. The fact is, we really don't know how champion Whitetail made its way home after five years. For Jon Hagstrum, the geophysicist behind the Concorde theory, there's a more fundamental question about how champion Whitetail or any pigeon makes these long journeys.

Jon Hagstrum: The big mystery that's still afoot is, how do they know where they are? Relative to home, for humans or basically anyone to navigate, you need a map and a compass. A compass, I think everybody knows what that is. It'll tell you directions. Are you going North, South, East, or West. Birds have compasses, and they're pretty well wanted understood. Pigeons in particular have a sun compass, they have a magnetic compass just the way we do. Night migrating birds can use the stars as a compass, but the big question is, what is that?

Micah Loewinger: He has a theory which gets pretty heady. It's an idea that he outlined in the journal of experimental biology, though, none of this has been tested with pigeons in a controlled setting.

Jon Hagstrum: This is where I'm getting more into speculation. What I'm basically saying is that the the pigeons can hear the landscape.

Micah Loewinger: Their map is made up of infrasound emanating from the world below.

Jon Hagstrum: The ground surface is moving ever so slightly because of what a called microseisms. The microseisms are generated by waves in the deep ocean. What I'm talking about exists but whether or not the pigeons are using it is more speculation.

Robert Krulwich: If you were a bird flying over a place you've never been before, there will be rumbling sound that will come from the air off the hills and off the valleys and off the rooftops and off the tumbling waves on the surface of water or off the calm water, which will tell you what's underneath you. Birds can in effect see with their ears.

Micah Loewinger: They can feel the topography of the Earth and the sea.

Jon Hagstrum: An infrasound has such huge wavelengths, and pigeons have such a small distance between there ears, that they can't really tell direction if they're just sitting still. What pigeons do when they're released is they circle, they fly and these big circles. People have always wondered, "What are they doing?" I think what they're doing is dopler shifting the low frequency signals. when they're heading towards the signal, the freuency goes up. when they're headed away from the signal, the freuency goes down.

Micah Loewinger: I see. They can drive directional information by hearing the change in pitch from the infrasound sound source?

Jon Hagstrum: Correct.

Micah Loewinger: How do we know it's not something much simpler like they just form a familiarity just through eyesight? They understand the landscape and they remember it the same way we do?

Jon Hagstrum: Good question. That's been studied. They have actually put little goggles, frosted goggles on pigeons so that they can use their sun compass. That's their dominant compass. They can see the compass through these frosted lenses, but they can't see anything else. If you let them go, they can get within a couple of kilometers of their loft but they have to see it to be able to fly in and land at their loft.

Micah Loewinger: You're proposing that for the majority of the navigation they're doing, even across places they've maybe never been before, they're using this infrasound detection?

Jon Hagstrum: That's correct.

Robert Krulwich: I don't know how plausible that is or how much to believe in it, I don't know. It's one of those things that brings me to the question of the umwelt which is a German word, which says, look, all the creatures that live on this planet, all of them have their own abilities and their own way of experiencing being on earth. This story points up the deep mystery when two species decide to do something together In this case, humans say, "Let's race," and the bird says, "I'm for it," and then off they go.

Then, what goes on in the birds mind, and what goes on in the people's minds are just different things. It's very hard to cross that barrier of no understanding, of nothing shared. Umwelt is the word that says that each creature lives, really, in its own central universe. We can do things with each other, but can we understand what's going on in each other? No, we can't. That's to me, a beautiful thing.

Micah Loewinger: Robert, thank you very much.

Robert Krulwich: You're welcome.

[MUSIC - Wallpaper: Woo]

Micah Loewinger: The umwelt seems like a fitting place to end this episode. After all, the concept describes how even though we all share the same world, how our fellow creatures and our fellow humans experience it will always be something of a mystery. For me as a radio producer, I wanted to make this episode because I'm fascinated by sound. That's our medium, it's our bread and butter. Here's to the fluctuating hum of the grid and the vibrations that emanate from the very land we walk on, and to compassion for those whose experiences we can only guess at.

That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Eloise Blondiau, Molly Schwartz, Rebecca Clark-Callender, Candice Wang, and Suzanne Gaber with help from Shaan Merchant. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson, of course. Our engineer this week was Andrew Nerviano, and a big thanks to Jared Paul for his scoring and sound design. Katya Rogers is our executive producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC studios. I'm Micah Loewinger.

[00:50:57] [END OF AUDIO]

 

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