Unexplainable things witnessed by hundreds of peop (part 1)

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

        We humans love to think we know everything, but the truth is that some things just can't be explained, and maybe it should stay that way — we're looking at you, skeptics, and your party-pooping logical explanations. Now why don't you all go find some mathematical theories to ponder while the rest of us enjoy these stories of unexplainable things that, by the way, have hundreds of witnesses.

      The Hum

                              Pretty much everyone has some sound-related pet-peeve, whether it's the way your brother chews his food, the sound of a squeaky chair, or the noise a balloon makes when you rub it. Now imagine if you heard that annoying sound every day, for hours at a time, and you could neither make it stop nor find the source.

For people all over the world, that's what "the Hum" is. According to New Republic, it's an unrelenting, low-frequency sound that is usually heard in rural places, at night and indoors. People who hear it have been known to go kind of nuts — according to Mic, one guy even deliberately deafened himself in one ear just so he could get a good night's sleep. And the trick is that not everyone experiences the Hum, even when they're in the same room with other people who can hear it.

Like every unexplained phenomena in the history of ever, some people think it's a conspiracy — innocent dental hygienists and building contractors targeted by insidious government technology. Because dental hygienists know Things. Deep, dark, government-upending Things.

The prevailing theory about the Hum is that it's not a sound at all but a low-frequency vibration that comes from factories or military communication systems. Some people experience the vibration as sound, while others don't notice it. But the real takeaway here is that you should be grateful you aren't a dental hygienist or a building contractor. Unless you are, you poor thing.

      Ball lightning

Right to the point: In 1963, a group of scientists on an airplane were stunned to see a fiery orb float down the aisle and exit the rear of the plane. People have been seeing ball lightning for centuries, but experts dismissed most of those (thousands of) accounts as misinterpretation of some more easily explainable phenomena (though no one could say exactly what) or just outright fabrications. But now actual scientists were witnesses, so you know, it must be true.

Ball lightning does sound a bit X-Filey. It floats just above the ground, occasionally bounces, sometimes burns through objects, and kills people. Witnesses say it almost seems intelligent, floating deliberately through doorways and down hallways. The only thing ball lightning doesn't have is a melancholy FBI agent trailing it with an EMF detector.

Ball lightning is generally believed to be a bona-fide natural phenomena, but scientists really have no idea how it works. It happens infrequently and unpredictably, so doing any meaningful scientific analysis is difficult. There are plenty of theories — some scientists think it's a plasma cloud, and some think that a charge of regular lightning might produce ball-shaped vapor that then burns away. In fact every few years some scientist or another claims to have solved ball lightning, and then another, totally different theory comes along. We may never know for sure: Seeker claims you'd need 100 million volts of electricity to actually replicate ball lightning in a lab.

The Battle of Los Angeles

Pearl Harbor wasn't the only World War II battle on American shores — there was also the much lesser-known Battle of Los Angeles, which was not a Japanese air raid, but (depending on who you ask) either a really expensive case of "jittery nerves" or a battle with extraterrestrial forces.

According to History, here's how it went down. In the early hours of the morning, military officials thought they saw enemy aircraft on radar. They responded by ordering a city-wide blackout and turning on the air raid sirens. Search lights came on and at 3 a.m. the military fired the first of 1,400 anti-aircraft rounds.

People all over the city said they saw Japanese aircraft, and there were even reports of falling bombs and a Japanese plane crashing in downtown Hollywood. But as the dust settled, it became clear that the only real damage was from falling shrapnel. There were no downed aircraft, no evidence of bombing, nothing to indicate that there had ever been an enemy presence in the sky.

So what happened? In 1983, the Office of Air Force History said meteorological balloons had been released just before the battle, which could explain the objects picked up on radar. As for the battle itself — it's not hard to imagine that the guys manning the guns might have thought they were seeing enemy aircraft through the searchlights and mid-air explosions. So jittery nerves does seem to be the most logical explanation, but let's keep "UFO battle" a close second.

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