Sky Trumpets
Sky Trumpets
Case #: - 31-06/17/2015
Status: Closed
Are Sky Trumpets Really Sounding the Oncoming Rapture? The Rapture is here! Flee before the smitey smite smiting of your beloved God/Ancient Alien/Flying Spaghetti Monster/Cthulhu! The trumpets call and foretell of fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes! The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!
At least…that’s what mainstream media and right ring religious types will have you think.
For the past five years mysterious trumpet videos like the ones below, have been running rampant on YouTube and in the news creating speculation and debate over what is causing strange trumpet like sounds in the sky.
For some, these various explanations raise the question among believers “If that is the reason, why haven’t we heard these noises before?” The truth is we do and all the time. The only reason this has recently become popular is due to mobile devices, the internet, and people who badly want to believe. Before all the hype we tuned it out as background white noise. Sadly if enough people start to notice, pull out their phones, point to the sky and hype it up to be much bigger than it really is, it will become whatever we want it to be. This is known as Popular Folly. Carl Sagan has discussed this in his novel The Demon Haunted World and the novel Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay focuses strictly on Popular Folly throughout history. I recommend both these books as they are very informative and come on…it’s Carl Fracken Sagan!
This mentality is the same as the mentality that led to the Demon hysteria of the 70’s and the Witch hysteria that led to the witch hunts. This publicly shared thinking also leads to another condition known as cognitive distortion.
Cognitive Distortion is where a person’s thoughts cause them to perceive reality inaccurately thus reinforcing negative thinking patterns or emotions. These distortions interfere with the way a person perceives an event or experience such as these strange sounds. It delves into our primitive brain and activates primordial survival instincts. When this happens we start to experience a heightened sense of alarm resulting in an anxious mental state. Then our minds begin to play tricks on us with its thumb over our fight or flight responses. This also leads us to jump to a more negative conclusion. i.e. That these sounds are that of danger, a monster or the rapture.
When presented with the evidence or possible reasons I mentioned, some try to argue with “I’m from (insert location, state or province) and lived there all my life and I have never heard any sounds like that!” You know my Dads in his thirties. He has lived in Calgary all his life and still is discovering new things about our hometown. So when you claim to speak for an entire state like Montana…I have to ponder. You must be pretty omnipotent to know all the sounds happening in Montana from the comfort of your own home. This is another example of cognitive distortion leads into cognitive dissidence. This is where one begins to make up excuses, memories or false reasoning to combat their uncomfortably with assimilating new contradictory data. In other words you’re suffering from hard core denial.
Individuals with alarmist personalities are more susceptible to such things making them prime targets of right wing religious groups, talk shows and cults. These groups prey on society’s ignorance and fear. I am surprised that no one has started suicide cults or caused mass panics because of this. Yet this may be evident that we as a species are now more skeptical of such things. Sure we hear the noises and get freaked out or scared, but we probably go home and do some research on the internet. Filling our minds with knowledge and effectively stamping out any seeds of ignorance.
In closing I will leave you with a quote from Carl Sagan that I believe sums this entire topic nicely.
“Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works.”
Bibliographical links
To the untrained ear it’s easy to see how these sounds can be misconstrued. Nevertheless these sounds have a more earthly human cause rather than the supposed Ancient Aliens End of Days Rapture theories going around. Here are a few of them.
Hoax. Many of the videos use NASA space recordings, slowed music or dialogue, underwater sounds or whale song, or even just rip the sounds from other videos. They don’t even try to mask out distinct background noises such as birds or vehicles.
Industrial sounds. Many of these eerie sounds are caused by acoustic amplification of grinding, scraping and crashing sounds. They are caused by local construction, garbage trucks, bulldozers, trains, cargo containers etc. In fact most of the areas where you hear these trumpets are near train yards, shipping yards or major construction sites. If you talk to anyone working such sites they can identify many of these noises.
Funky acoustics or weather. Much like the industrial sounds they can also be caused by rain, wind or lightning bouncing across objects, structure or walls. I once did an experiment in Drumheller using different pitched beeps played in a pattern. As the beeps bounced off the canyon walls they began changing in pitch and after a while the echoes produced sounds similar to what we have been hearing. I think when we go out to Drumheller this summer I’ll re-create the experiment and capture it on video.
Electromagnetic Vibrations. According to popular belief because space is a near vacuum there is no sound. This is partially true but space is actually quite noisy. Sound in space travel unheard to our ears by the vacuum through Electromagnetic vibrations. These vibrations can only be captured and heard using special equipment and receivers. However if some of these sounds are vibrating through an atmosphere they can be amplified while others are too low or high pitched for us to hear. This is one reason why we don’t hear them all the time. It has a lot to do with amplitude. These vibrations can originate from our own planet or from interstellar vibrations from our sun or nearby satellites hitting and bouncing off our atmosphere.