British researcher says infrasonic wave sounds create ghosts

[Orion]

The funny thing is,  I just realized this driving in to work this morning, as I was mulling it around in my mind.

I have no idea who has a stock of human eye balls.  Someone might though.  I have to say if someone has eyeballs and is putting them in a machine to hit them with sound and make em vibrate, Im not sure I want to meet them.

lol... me either!
Hey, I found this site http://www.lancs.ac.uk/depts/spc/vibrations/vib12.htm  and they claim the resonant freq of a human eyeball is between 60Hz and 90Hz, which personally I found more logical but still maybe off?
That'd be a wavelength of ...  150 inches.. (1,125 ft/sec x 12 = 13,500 inches /sec::  13.5k / 90 = 150")   hmm.. still kinda big.

Interesting though, someone else has looked into it. 

This site http://notmysecondopinion.blogspot.com/2006/10/medical-investigations-into-occult.html claims the 18Hz frequency comes from NASA.

So now I know who to write to and ask how they derived that value!  (unless they're full of bull about the NASA thing, o'course but either way, I'll find something out)

Hey, I found out more from wikipedia, on the "infrasound" page.  It's reportedly NASA Technical Report "19770013810" that cites the eyeball 18Hz thing.  No link or citation provided however.  Hmmm..
Now I'm getting somewhere?

So interestingly, I went to http://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp, which allows you to search all their technical reports:  I plugged in "19770013810" and nothing came up - zero hits;  I plugged in "eyeball resonance" and still nothing..

I'm beginning to suspect this is BS with the NASA thing.

[mrgaldor]

Technical reports sometimes cant be accessed by the public because they arent published in the usual sense. 

You could try tapping your eye with your finger 18 times per second and see if it bounces away.   

[Orion]

Technical reports sometimes cant be accessed by the public because they arent published in the usual sense. 

You could try tapping your eye with your finger 18 times per second and see if it bounces away.   

Ouch!     Ouch!    Ouch!    Ouch!   

Hey, you're right!  I'm beginning to see things! 

[Orion]

The closest thing I found on NASA technical report site is this:
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=623482&id=3&as=true&or=false&qs=Ntt%3D18Hz%26Ntk%3Dall%26Ntx%3Dmode%2Bmatchall%26Ns%3DHarvestDate%257c1%26N%3D0

It deals with blood pressure, that kind of thing.  No mention of eyeballs.
That's it.  I'm writing to them.   I'm confident this eyeball thing is a myth or misunderstanding.
I still have no reason to doubt that infrasound can create hallucinations,  just the eyeball/18Hz thing.
Tandy's story would seem to back this up.  If the fencing foil he had clamped down started resonating, then that tends to indicate (to me) that the wavelength would affect much longer objects.

[Orion]

Aha, the plot thickens.  I have something to go on.

I got an answer from NASA.

To wit:

Dear Mr. **************,

Thank you for contacting the NASA STI Help Desk.

We are not able to search the entire full text of NASA technical
reports. Searching the titles, subject index terms, and abstracts of
such reports, however, I did not find any reference to the finding you
describe either.

When I looked for references to such a document on the Internet at large
using Google, I did find a reference in the Wikipedia article
"Infrasound" to two so-called NASA reports. Those documents, however, are
not NASA reports. They are listed in the NASA database of scientific and
technical information, so they have been assigned Document ID Numbers.
But since they are not NASA reports, they do not appear in the publicly
available database of NASA technical reports, the NTRS (NASA Technical
Reports Server), and copies are not available from here at the NASA
Center for AeroSpace Information. The two documents are

Dupuis, Heinrich, and Georg Zerlett. "The effects of whole-body
vibration." Research supported by the Hauptverband der gewerblichen
Berufsgenossenschaften. Berlin and New York, Springer-Verlag, 1986, 171
p. Translation. (NASA Document ID Number 19870046176)

Ohlbaum, M.K. "Mechanical resonant frequency of the human eye in vivo."
Ph.D. Thesis, Aerospace Medical Research Laboratory, Wright-Patterson
Air Force Base, Ohio, 1976. Report Number AMRL-TR-75-113. Available from
the U.S. National Technical Information Service as AD-A030476. (For
ordering information see http://www.ntis.gov) (NASA Document ID Number
19770013810)

I have not reviewed the content of these reports, but referring to them
as "NASA reports" is an error.

I hope this information will be of some help.

Thank you for your interest in NASA scientific and technical
information. We hope that we may serve you in the future.
     
Sincerely,
     
Edna Paulson
NASA STI Help Desk
Tel: (443) 757-5802
Fax: (443) 757-5803
help@sti.nasa.gov
     

-----Original Message-----
From: Orion [mailto:orion@phrets.com]
Sent: Friday, November 13, 2009 12:15 PM
To: help@sti.nasa.gov
Subject: NTRS Comments

Hi,

I'm looking for validation of a supposed NASA technical document that
claims NASA discovered, via testing of astronauts, that the resonant
frequency of the human eyeball is approximately 18Hz.
I have found no such document having searched the site for both "18Hz"
and "eyeball".  The math seems wrong to me, given the wavelength of an
18Hz acoustic wave, and the diameter of the typical human eye.
Is anyone aware of such a document? 

Thank you,
****************

So the proper document ID is AMRL-TR-75-113, but then shows up as AD-A030 476/6.
Apparently, it was the Aerospace Medical Research Lab at Wright-Patterson AFB in Ohio that actually did the paper, not NASA, technically.
What stinks is that the report is not free. It's $40 for microfiche, $60 for printout on demand.

Forget that.  Crap. There has to be another way.  lol

I also found others discussing this very thing on a physics forum:
http://www.physicsforums.com/archive/index.php/t-13559.html
A user there by the name of "zoobyshoe" shares my skepticism of an eye's mechanical (acoustic) resonant freq to be as low as 18Hz, a little over a quarter way down the page.
At first, they had the same trouble I had locating that infamous "NASA" document.
Further down, they finally locate the document, as I did.. I don't think anyone ponied up the $$ either though.

By the end of their discussion, ( I skimmed some but I did read a lot of it) from what they've gleaned from other sources regarding infrasound, they seem to pretty much negate Tandy's findings, for the most part.  It is quite possible that the original report by Ohlbaum doesn't even mention infrasound, specifically. The title is "Mechanical Resonant Frequency of the Human Eye in Vivo".
Remember, these aren't ghost hunters who want hauntings to be real, these are physics students and professionals.

I dunno.  I like a good scientific challenge.  I'm not sure why I got so drawn into this, but hey, somebody had to.   
If I ever get my hands on that report, I'll share my findings.

[Kegger]

http://www.vibeforhealth.com/Data/Default/the_effect_of_wbv_negative.pdf

[Orion]

The vibeforhealth article doesn't discuss the eye, nor infrasound, nor resonant frequency.  Just whole body vibrations.
That's a different animal, really.
Another factor is amplitude, or strength, of the vibration or infrasonic wave.  That's why resonance is important:  resonance is a positive feedback loop that dramatically increases the strength of the phenomena through reinforcement, so to speak. 
Without resonance in the context, infrasound and/or mechanical vibration may have no effect at all - in this case, it all depends on how "loud" it is.

[rodentraiser]

 OK, I know this is an older thread, but I found something sort of interesting. What you do is look directly at the ball and then shift your gaze and look at it out of the corner of your eye. When you do that, the path of the ball changes. However, it's only really for that frequency. If you move the frequency either up or down, you don't get the same effect.

http://illusioncontest.neuralcorrelate.com/2009/the-break-of-the-curveball/

[Orion]

I've seen some cool optical illusions before, but that one is wild!

Doesn't have anything to do with infrasound or mechanical res freq of the physical eyeball, but neat nonetheless.

Just goes to show how fragile and unreliable our perception can really be.

[rodentraiser]

 I was just reading something hat said that children have a much better perception of size. They showed children those pictures where you have a ball surrounded by larger balls and that was next to the same size ball surrounded by smaller balls. The balls in the center are the same size, but one looks larger than the other. But children are not as affected by the surrounding balls and can tell that the balls are the same size, unlike adults who always think one ball is larger than the other.