Kimberly Wookey of Terrace, British Columbia, woke up early Thursday morning to a loud, strange trumpet-like sound. She’d heard the sounds before, back in June, so she grabbed her camera and recorded it. This time, she said, the noises were more intense. Her 7-year-old son was already in the living room — he had heard the sounds and was scared, she said.
Wookey recorded the bizarre moaning noises from her living room and then posted them online, where she saw other reports of people who’d heard similar noises. One resident thought someone was dragging a dumpster and the lack of wind that day allowed the sound to carry through the valley. However, Wookey’s video appears to show a quite a bit of wind.
Some claim her video is fake, and that the sounds were taken from this scene in the 2011 horror movie “Red State.”
The local police aren’t sure where the sounds came from.
Similar sounds have been heard elsewhere in Canada and around the world.
One day in January 2012, in the small town of North Battleford, Saskatchewan, which is 1,000 miles east of Terrace, a local radio station got around 40 calls from residents asking about strange sounds in the sky. In the far-flung community of Conklin, Alberta, which is over 300 miles from North Battleford and over 1,000 miles from Terrace, a creepy video filmed in the forest purports to show a similar phenomenon. (“It sounds like the planet is screaming in pain,” one commenter wrote.) A few days after the video in Conklin appeared, a video filmed in the town of The Pas, Manitoba — a 13-hour drive southeast — shows more or less the same thing.
In Chicago, Ill., sounds were heard that were also very similar to those recorded by Wookey. “The weird noise started a couple days ago,” the uploader wrote in January 2012. “It’s loud and even violent at times.”
A video from last year in Texas, this one titled “Strange sounds coming from the sky,” shows a group of puzzled people listening to the eerie noises.
Other videos claim to have captured the unexplained noises in Michigan, New York and as far away as Spain and Norway. Sometimes the noise sounds like an animal moaning, other times it’s a low rumble, a whine or a thumping.
The comments sections of these videos are full of people quoting the Bible or claiming the noises are a portent of the apocalypse. Others say the noises are a sign of extra-terrestrial life in the Earth’s vicinity.
Of course, a good deal of skepticism is required here — you can’t believe everything you see on YouTube, no matter how real it looks. One video that purportedly captured the strange sounds in Edmonton, Alberta, has garnered almost 800,000 views, despite being an admitted hoax. Many others have been pulled from YouTube for various violations, a possible sign that copycats have seized on the trend and produced bogus videos.