The Enduring, Dubious Belief That Wind Turbines Make People Sick

In his 1973 book Supernature, the scientist and adventurer Lyall Watson tells the story of a six-foot-long whistle. Part of an experiment in the 1960s, the enormous device was designed to explore the effects of low-frequency sound on humans. The technician who first tested it “fell down dead on the spot,” Watson writes. “His internal organs had been mashed into an amorphous jelly.”

How could such a gruesome death result from sound? While , the idea that low-frequency noises can do extreme damage to people has been popular for decades. Infrasound—sound that’s commonly (and incorrectly) thought to be below the threshold for human hearing—has often been claimed as a source of annoyance, nausea, sleep loss and anxiety, among many other symptoms. Popular media to sell