Mysteries of Sound
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On this week's On The Media, we bring you three audio puzzles, beginning with the Havana Syndrome. So I liken it to like if you take a Q-tip and you're bounced off your ear, you know, like that, you get that jarring like, ah, jarring.

Well, imagine taking like a sharpened pencil and then poking that off the eardrum. Also, a hum that you live with can help law enforcement solve crimes. You hear it with my refrigerator, a TV, elevators and buildings. You hear it. Everything is interconnected, right? It's very common. Plus, how an invisible disturbance ruined a series of high stakes pigeon races.

The mysteries of sound and the limits of our senses, it's all coming up after this.

Thank you.

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I'm Maria Konnikova. And I'm Nate Silver. And our new podcast, Risky Business, is a show about making better decisions. We're both journalists whom we light as poker players, and that's the lens we're going to use to approach this entire show. We're going to be discussing everything from high-stakes poker to personal questions. Like whether I should call a plumber or fix my shower myself. And of course, we'll be talking about the election, too. Listen to Risky Business wherever you get your podcasts.

From WNYC in New York, this is On The Media. I'm Michael Loewinger filling in this week for Brooke Gladstone. We begin the show in Havana, Cuba in the fall of 2016. I'm just laying on my bed with my laptop, you know, like I'm, you know, next to me and I'm watching the show. Former CIA officer going by the pseudonym Tony. And then all of the dogs in the neighborhood started barking. And then this loud sound just blasted into my bedroom.

It started very, very loud, like ear-piercingly loud. The pressure started in the head and then the discomfort in the ear. Then the severe, severe ear pain started. So I liken it to like if you take a Q-tip and you bounce it off your ear, you know, like that, you get that jarring, like, ah. Well, imagine taking like a sharpened pencil and then poking that off the eardrum.

Tony says the sound seemed directional. He stopped hearing it when he moved out of his bedroom. But that was just the beginning. I was at the top physical, psychological, emotional place I could have ever been in my life. And I was gung-ho to do my job. And within six months, I was a zombie and non-functional as a human being.

He was one of the first patients for what we now call Havana syndrome, a mysterious affliction that seemed to spread among American diplomats in Cuba and then across the globe. I felt paralyzed. And I think it's just sort of one of those, you're in a dream and you can't move. That's kind of how it felt.

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? And 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. A new assessment by U.S. intelligence officials says the debilitating ailment known as Havana syndrome cannot be linked to any foreign adversary or weapon. There's nothing in this latest report

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 primetime segment. You feel confident that the government is covering this up? 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.

Which is to say, there are a range of theories about what happened. And which theory you go with comes down to who you put your faith in. The first victims of Vivanus Syndrome were afflicted 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. This is John Lee Anderson, a staff writer with The New Yorker, who traveled to Havana with Adam Entis, an investigative reporter for The New York Times, to try to solve the mystery once and for all. It was the first time John Lee and I had been on the island together. Havana's my favorite city in the world.

And I hadn't been back in a long time. They laid out their findings in that podcast series from Vice. Adam and John Lee say the story really began in December 2014 before anyone got sick.

Today, the United States of America is changing its relationship with the people of Cuba. And the most significant changes in our policy in more than 50 years. The president ordered the opening of an embassy, a U.S. embassy in Havana for the first time in more than 50 years. Then in the fall of 2016, almost two dozen U.S. spies and diplomats reported experiencing a similar array of symptoms.

The story went public at a State Department press briefing on August 9th, 2017. So some U.S. 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.

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. It reads like a Cold War spy novel. This was a terrorist attack against U.S. diplomats and their families in Cuba. They used a sonic weapon, which is... Who's responsible for the acoustic attacks? Is it Cuba? Is it Russia? Who's to blame for that?

We've not been able to determine who is to blame. That last voice was Donald Trump's Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who was leading the administration's dismantling of the State Department. Just some absolutely stunning news out of the State Department and what's being described as the White House cleaning house. Latest plans from the administration call for a 37% cut to the agency's budget.

37%. Trump and his anti-communist surrogates seemed pretty happy to exploit the ambiguities of the Havana mystery. 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. The Trump administration announced Friday that it is pulling more than half of its staff out of the American embassy in Havana. Donald Trump is busily tearing down any aspect of Obama's legacy he can find. John Lee Anderson. Including, of course, the rapprochement with Cuba, and then the reports of the Havana syndrome.

It's sort of used publicly as the reason for which the embassy is finally closed down. Meanwhile, the U.S. government reached out to a group of physicians at the University of Pennsylvania to study the Havana patients. Doctors treating the victims have found abnormalities in the white matter of their brains. This is the most specific finding so far about abnormalities.

physical damage caused by those sonic attacks. Dr. Smith at the University of Pennsylvania is an expert in studying and helping people who suffer from concussions. He sees similarities between this kind of damage and what he sees in the concussion cases.

involving professional sports players. Over the next couple of years, other diplomats and intelligence officers continued to report incidents, and not just in Havana. There are now more than 130 possible cases of Havana syndrome, including in China and Russia. In Vienna, even outside the White House. In their podcast, Adam Entis and John 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 Indy's short-tailed cricket. The Cubans brought me in to meet with their team of scientists that were trying to analyze it. And in that meeting, they said that they believed that it was crickets.

Many experts argued that sound can't cause brain damage, not without deafening everybody in the area. So if not a sonic weapon, then what? 19 top experts from the National Academies of Sciences conclude the most likely explanation directed pulse microwave energy. Microwave energy from some kind of external source. They don't really know what that source is.

John Lee Anderson sees some Cold War precedent for this theory. There was this long history of the Russians barraging the U.S. embassy in Moscow, going back to virtually the Stalin years. John Lee and Adam interviewed officials who had been stationed at the Moscow embassy in the 50s when microwave attacks occurred. The reason behind the KGB barraging the U.S. embassy with microwaves is

wasn't apparently to necessarily harm the Americans. It was directed at some kind of interference with the CIA's own electronics, maybe eavesdropping equipment located inside the U.S. Embassy buildings. If somebody douses 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. 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. They asked those early victims to record their attacks, and they did.

And microwaves cannot be recorded. 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. 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. When it comes to any of the foreign adversary theories, Bartholomew isn't convinced. For six years, the U.S. government went down a rabbit hole searching for secret weapons and foreign conspiracies. And when they reached the bottom of that hole, all they found was

were rabbits. And in fact, his analysis aligns with a report published last month from several intelligence agencies, which found it, quote, very unlikely a foreign adversary was responsible, very unlikely a weapon or any device purposely or accidentally caused the symptoms. And there's not even a consistent set of physical injuries that could be characterized as Havana syndrome. Now, there are

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. It is a collective stress response that's based on a belief.

We all have beliefs. Therefore, we are all potential victims. He points to the original Havana patients who lived incredibly stressful lives. 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. And 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. That's not to say he discounts their pain. 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. 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 quote 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 normal.

Well, 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 Entos recently described Havana Syndrome victims as serious people who had no incentive to make up a story.

Well, that shows me that he doesn't understand mass psychogenic illness. Mass psychogenic illness is

is not people who are crazy or mentally ill or weak-minded. It is a collective stress response based on a belief. In the Vice podcast, Dr. Douglas Smith, leader of the UPenn study, told Adam and John Lee why he didn't buy the psychogenic theory. In mass hysteria, it's just like you have to be essentially kind of 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

And then they had these symptoms, but independently described kind of the same type of story without ever seeing another patient. Bartholomew says that mass psychogenic illness is not a conscious collusion between patients, but it's a moot point in this case because... 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 pre-existing health conditions under a new label, Havana Syndrome.

To be a part of this in history is one of the most exciting things. 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. I'm tired of the gaslighting that keeps happening from the U.S. 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. The work of Dr. Bartholomew and others who have been pushing this psychogenic argument...

Adam Entis. They're providing like an armchair analysis without actually having done any hands-on research with these individuals. It's actually even better to look at it from afar. 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. 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? I mean, you do really want to talk to the affected. That's the job of a journalist. I don't think it's simply interviewing the patients.

Some of the patients seemed primed to believe that it was an attack. You're right that some of the patients, more than others, you know, 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.

But Adams reporting partner John 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. 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 f*** with the U.S. It's about messing with our heads anywhere they can.

I hear what you're saying, John 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.

Toward the end of our conversation, I asked John Lee how he felt about ending up on the same side of the debate as Trump's former national security adviser, John Bolton, who he interviewed for their podcast. It certainly from all outward appearances, it was an attack on American personnel, first in Cuba, then in China. And.

And, you know, we can't tolerate that. This is a guy who has a reputation as a warmonger. He seems like the exact kind of person who would be very invested in there being a secret Russian weapon behind all of this. I totally agree with you. I mean, he's almost a cartoonish anti-communist cold warrior. I mean, he didn't really make me feel more convinced of my hypotheses at all, although he echoed some of

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. So two plus two equals four, basically, for me.

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. I think the most likely explanation... Jack Hitt is speaking here on the New Republic podcast. 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. 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 kind of a minor mental breakdown and I had to take time off from work. I think it's burnout and I'm working on it. And I know, and where was me? You know, 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. It's called conversion disorder because intense stress under pressure is converted into real physical illness. And 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.

Coming up, how the police can use that buzzing sound from your fridge to help solve crimes. This is On The Media. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.

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I'm Maria Konnikova. And I'm Nate Silver. And our new podcast, Risky Business, is a show about making better decisions. We're both journalists whom we light as poker players, and that's the lens we're going to use to approach this entire show. We're going to be discussing everything from high-stakes poker to personal questions. Like whether I should call a plumber or fix my shower myself. And of course, we'll be talking about the election, too. Listen to Risky Business wherever you get your podcasts.

This is On The Media. I'm Michael 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. Hi. 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.

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

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. And using ENF analysis, this researcher was able to tell me the day and time almost to the exact second that I recorded each interview. Really? Yeah. But that's in the metadata because you sent him a digital file. But I re-bounced it. Okay.

So that if you checked the metadata of the file, it would be when I made that file, not when I recorded it. 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, you know, like...

environmental sounds around you. Okay, that's a good guess. That's not right, though. That's not right. No. Tell me. Now I want to know. Hi, I'm Nasser Memon. I'm a professor here at NYU's Stand-in School of Engineering in the Computer Science and Engineering Department.

Nasser 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, a.k.a. 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 use by law enforcement is what caught his eye. To my understanding, the first folks that had done it was the London Metropolitan Police.

In 2010, a specialist at the Metropolitan Police Department described ENF as, quote, the most significant development in the field since techniques were developed to analyze the Watergate tapes. Nasser 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. You'll see on the graph here

You know, you're getting just like the low rumble. I had Jen use a fancy audio equalizer tool to look at the different frequencies in a recording I sent to Nasser's team. There's a little bit of this hum, 60 hertz. Can you hear that?

I think it's kind of imperceptible in this recording. But my ears are tuned to hear it. Audio engineers will tell you that this 60 hertz hum contaminates all kinds of recordings. That's the first thing I'm approaching is getting rid of that sound. And you hear it a lot on guitar amps. You hear it with... My refrigerator, a TV. Elevators and buildings, you hear it. Everything is interconnected, right? It's very common.

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. And 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. But it's unable to keep it exactly at 60 hertz.

Because the consumption is varying. Lights turn on and off and people turn on their devices. And so it's trying to maintain and cater to the load. It doesn't want to produce too much electricity. The demand for electricity is constantly changing based on what's plugged in. And the production mechanism is trying to keep pace with it.

And it doesn't succeed, right, in maintaining it to exactly 60. So it becomes 59.8, 60.1. 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. Yes, ever so slightly wiggle. And the utility companies, they have to measure this and report it to the government.

But we can measure it too. Nasser's former grad student Safit Vatansever built a very simple computer that records the wiggle from the grid every second or so. And when I sent Safit 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.

So he would pull out the data for the last three months that we've been capturing. I told Safat that I often recorded my interviews like 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. And then he would run an algorithm on the sound using a sliding window.

So every 20 seconds, he sort of slides it over. And at some point, matches, matches, matches. Which is how he guessed the time of three of my recordings within around 10 seconds each. Wow!

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. I'm blown away. Even though ENF has been around for nearly two decades, it doesn't seem to have caught on in any significant way in the U.S.,

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.

Katalin Gregoris, 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.

So if I was...

running this in an intelligence agency, I would make sure I'm capturing everywhere in the world. Do you think the American intelligence agencies are interested in ENF? Intelligence won't tell me, right? And even if I knew, I may not be able to tell you as well, which I don't. Do I believe you? No, I don't have any secret clearance, anything of that. 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. Right. So we are scientists. We like to further science, and science can be used for good and bad, so we just...

We just leave that question aside quite often. I mean, because it just gets very, very, very complicated. The answers are not clear. He told me at one point in his team's research he had considered collecting way more data. 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. And then I thought that's going too far.

that's going too far because the ethical issues started coming up then to me. What if a stalker wants to try to track somebody down using videos you posted on Instagram? Yeah, that's why I didn't do it, right? I'm not trying to say I'm a very ethical person. If there was money there in it, maybe I would have done it. I don't know, right? There was no reason to do it. For what purpose? So I did not. I've gotten you to admit that you're corruptible. Yeah.

Well, we all can be, let's put it that way. 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. I mean, 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. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.

What if comparing car insurance rates was as easy as putting on your favorite podcast? With Progressive, it is. Just visit the Progressive website to quote with all the coverages you want. You'll see Progressive's direct rate. Then their tool will provide options from other companies so you can compare. All you need to do is choose the rate and coverage you like. Quote today at Progressive.com to join the over 28 million drivers who trust Progressive.

Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Comparison rates not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy. ♪

I'm Maria Konnikova. And I'm Nate Silver. And our new podcast, Risky Business, is a show about making better decisions. We're both journalists whom we light as poker players, and that's the lens we're going to use to approach this entire show. We're going to be discussing everything from high-stakes poker to personal questions. Like whether I should call a plumber or fix my shower myself. And of course, we'll be talking about the election, too. Listen to Risky Business wherever you get your podcasts.

This is On The Media. I'm Michael 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. Well, 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. Robert Krolwich is the co-creator and former co-host of Radiolab.

I spoke to him earlier this year when this story first aired. 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. And weirdly, pigeons played an integral role in early journalism. In media history, it's some guy named Israel Josaphat, and he lived in Aachen in Germany. In 1850, Josaphat started a company that brought news to Aachen from Brussels faster than anyone else. There was a stock market in Brussels.

And if you were in Over-I-Nachen, 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. 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. You'd have to take them on the train to Brussels and then put messages on them in Brussels and they'd go up at the end and 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, you know, today the diamond price went up or yesterday.

that these cantaloupes are selling down. And then he was the first one to know what was going on in Belgium, maybe five hours before anyone else. And that, in the press, as we both know, is a competitive edge. Oh, gosh, yes. There's actually a 1940 film about Josaphat's brilliant business. Who is this man who trades in secrets? This man who controls the most amazing dispatch system ever known?

A lone pigeon soars into the skies carrying a crumpled scrap of paper. And who was this man? Why are we even talking about him? Well, he changed his name to Mr. Reuters of the famous Reuters news service. 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. You know, 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. What?

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. This is in 2002. And he looks and he sees a pigeon sitting right there in front of his house. And he goes, oh, I know this pigeon. It had a name.

It was called Champion Whitetail. This was the first time Tom had seen Champion Whitetail, his bird, in five years. 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.

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. And 60,000 birds were entered into that contest. But many of the homing pigeons, carefully prepared by their owners, never returned.

Tens of thousands of birds just didn't come back. The newspapers at the time had dubbed it the great pigeon race disaster. Right. You know, 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. It sounds like there are two mysteries. One is what caused the great pigeon racing disaster of 1997. Yes. And where the hell has this pigeon been for five years? That's right. They were trying to figure out what the heck happened, and they ended up trying to blame it on the weather. This is John Hagstrom. I'm...

Like Robert, he's been thinking about pigeons for decades, and he might have cracked the case of the royal race. The birds just would not face it.

I think they spent hours and hours flying around the race point and just did not leave. 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. But 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 changes

The pigeons just go to roost and don't come back.

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 U.S. on the East Coast, there were two other smashed races on the same day. On Monday, 2,000 homing pigeons were released in Virginia to begin their flight back to Allentown, Pennsylvania. Only 200 made it. The rest seemed to have disappeared.

In a separate pigeon race from western Pennsylvania to Philadelphia, 600 of the 800 birds are missing. And they were both going back toward lofts in the Philadelphia area, and they actually intersected. Maybe the birds were disrupted by something that happened around the moment the flight paths crossed. Actually, it was right over Harrisburg, where Three Mile Island, the nuclear plant, was. So I got sort of sidetracked by nuclear plants.

I called them up and I was very suspicious. You know, did you have any high pressure gas releases or were you doing anything funny at this time on this day? And they denied it. You were a full on pigeon detective is kind of what I'm hearing. This is what you got to do. You know, I was calling the Department of Transportation that they've been doing any blasting. I was even thinking of calling, you know, to see if Gettysburg they were having any Civil War reenactments and, you know, shooting off a lot of cannons.

But what really finally gave it away was I had been thinking about infrasound and I was reading infrasound papers. Let me pull this back a little bit. What is infrasound? Well, 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 frequency, so very short wavelengths. But infrasound is below our hearing, and so it has very long wavelengths. If you're a pigeon, you can sense tones that are 12 octaves below middle C. That would be beyond human hearing.

Pigeons were the first birds that were shown to be able to hear it. That was done at Cornell in the 1970s. The question of whether birds can hear infrasound is still contested among biologists. Anyway, John Hagstrom 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 them when he thought of the Concord?

British Airways Concorde, the first supersonic passenger airliner to fly you at more than twice the speed of sound. Those gorgeous planes that look kind of like giant triangles with sort of curvy noses. 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. Concorde has crossed the Atlantic in three and a half hours.

And so 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 I went, oh, my God, that could be it. A plane landing 200 miles away from the pigeon races seems like a wild explanation until you consider what defined the Concorde.

We should be supersonic about 10 minutes after takeoff. Escalating to Concorde's regular speed, Mach 2, twice the speed of sound. Faster than a rifle bullet, 23 miles every minute. Now, when a plane breaks the sound barrier, it is constantly sending little sonic booms in its path.

Boom, boom, boom. They are quite loud. I actually heard one once as a geologist. You know, I was way out in the field in Montana and I heard one. I thought it was an atomic bomb. This is why supersonic flight over land in the U.S. was outlawed in 1973, because the sonic booms could break windows and freak people out. Hence why the Concorde mostly flew over the Atlantic.

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.

And the thing is, 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. So he crunches the numbers with the two U.S. races. The first thing I did was, you know, back of the envelope calculations. I know sort of how fast pigeons fly. I know how fast sound moves through the atmosphere. So I could calculate...

when this sonic boom came and hit. And, you know, was there an intersection between the pigeons' racing course when the pigeons were there and the sonic boom wave coming through? And it matched. It matched for one of the races. But the timing didn't match for the other race because... They had actually delayed releasing the pigeons...

so that they actually released them after the Concorde should have landed at JFK. So I called up this guy, I'll never forget, his name was Rob Hasbini, and 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. And he said...

said, this is the Concorde. Two hours? Are you kidding? It's only three hours from Paris. So I said, please, it's a scientific question. Will you please look it up? And he said, quote, are you a magician? It was two and a half hours late that day. Wow. Those are the moments you live for as a scientist when you make a prediction and somebody tells you you're right. So let's return to the 1997 Royal Centenary race across the English Channel. The Concorde leaving Paris was

goes subsonic until it gets over water because they don't want to lay down a boom carpet right along the English Channel. And so 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.

You know, it would be quite loud to them, but it's below our hearing. Which would explain why the fanciers in Nantes had blamed it on the weather. The majority wouldn't try to go through that belt of rain. They would attempt to go around it.

But of course, depending on the distance, this could tie them out. It's thought the pigeons are now just resting up somewhere in France before completing their flight across the Channel. So let's go back to Tom Roden in Manchester and his prize pigeon champion Whitetail, who returned home five years after the race. 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. I don't know if that's true, but I'd love it if it were. So these people could read that story wherever they lived. And it turned out that there was a guy in Nantes who read the story. And he wrote a letter to Tom Rodin saying, essentially... Wait a second, wait a second. On the very day of that race, I walked into my backyard and...

And there was a shaggy, sad-ass looking bird sitting in my backyard looking terribly exhausted.

And it had a little ringlet on its foot. And I wrote down the number of the bird. Then walked the bird to the Museum of Natural History in Nantes and said, here, I've found this bird. And then the museum took it. And presumably, they eventually released it. So that was two weeks after the race. We now have four and a half years to account for. A lot of unaccounted time.

The fact is, we really don't know how Champion Whitetail made its way home after five years. For John Hagstrom, the geophysicist behind the Concord theory, there's a more fundamental question about how Champion Whitetail, or any pigeon, makes these long journeys. And 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. And a compass, I think everybody knows what that is. It'll tell you directions. Are you going north, south, east, or west? And birds have compasses, and they're pretty well 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 the map? Yeah.

He has a theory, which gets pretty heady. It's an idea he outlined in the Journal of Experimental Biology, though none of this has been tested with pigeons in like a controlled setting.

This is where I'm getting more into speculation. What I'm basically saying is that the pigeons can hear the landscape. Their map is made up of the infrasound emanating from the world below. The ground surface is moving ever so slightly because of what are called microsisms. And the microsisms 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 sort of speculation. But if you're a bird flying over a place you've never been before, there will be some kind of rumbling sound that will come from the air off the hills and off the valleys and off the rooftops and off the...

the tumbling waves on the surface of water off the calm water, which will tell you what's underneath you. And birds can, in effect, see with their ears. They can feel the topography of the earth and the sea. An infrasound has such huge wavelengths and pigeons have such a small distance between their ears

that they can't really tell its direction if they're just sitting still. And so what pigeons do when they're released is they circle. They fly in these big circles. And people have always wondered, what are they doing? I think what they're doing is Doppler shifting the low frequency signal. So when they're headed toward the signal, the frequency goes up. When they're headed away from the signal, the frequency goes down. I see. So they can...

directional information by hearing the change in pitch from the infrasound source. Correct. How

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. Good question. That's been studied. And they have actually put little goggles, frosted goggles on pigeons so 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 kilometers of their loft, but they have to see it to be able to fly in and land at their loft. So you're proposing that for like the majority of the navigation they're doing, even across places they've maybe never been before, they're using this infrasound detection. That's correct. I don't know how plausible that is or how much to believe in it. I don't know. It's like one of those things that brings me to the question of the Umwelt, which is a German word for

which says, look, all the creatures that live on this planet, all of them have their own abilities and their own way of sort 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.

But then what goes on in the bird's mind and what goes on in the people's mind, there's different things. It's very hard to cross that sort of barrier of no understanding, like of nothing shared. Umwelt is the word that says that each creature lives really in its own sensual 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 kind of beautiful thing. Robert, thank you very much. You're welcome. You're welcome.

The Umfeldt 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.

So 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.

And that's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Eloise Blondio, Molly Schwartz, Rebecca Clark-Calendar, Candice Wong, and Suzanne Gabber, with help from Sean 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 Michael Lowenger.