Open Bar: Subpoenaed by Congress, but still refusing to testify

[altered]

Update on weird sounds/lights:

They're back. Kind of.

Instead of one big orange light kinda far away, there's ten or so white lights randomly strewn around in a copse of apple trees real close by. Like, 30 yards or so. Again: steady lighting, no movement. Reminds me that I didn't mention: the orange light didn't illuminate anything around it, and neither do these.

The sounds are pausing this time, intermittently going in and out of audibility. They aren't moving this time either, and seem to be coming from the other side of the lights.

If I was making wild ass guesses, I'd say it sounds like if two birds that learned to mimic ambient music for horror games and have no other way of talking were chatting back and forth, but that overlooks the bizarre ... "verisimilitude?" of it all. Like, it sounds less like something playing back a horror soundtrack and more like the actual ambience in a nightmarish otherworld. Loud enough to be echoing from nearby houses, too quiet to fucking record.

I still have not dared to investigate.

I'm also not particularly creeped out or threatened by these things, they're just high strangeness of a particularly odd sort. General vibe is something along the lines of UFO meets haunted moor now.

I have formed a theory: low budget horror film recording. Bunch of dumb teenagers trying to be spooky in the woods at night to shoot a movie.

Alternatively, an alien ship crashed out in the woods the other day and this is their ghosts haunting the place.

[The Johnny]

Update on weird sounds/lights:

They're back. Kind of.

Instead of one big orange light kinda far away, there's ten or so white lights randomly strewn around in a copse of apple trees real close by. Like, 30 yards or so. Again: steady lighting, no movement. Reminds me that I didn't mention: the orange light didn't illuminate anything around it, and neither do these.

The sounds are pausing this time, intermittently going in and out of audibility. They aren't moving this time either, and seem to be coming from the other side of the lights.

If I was making wild ass guesses, I'd say it sounds like if two birds that learned to mimic ambient music for horror games and have no other way of talking were chatting back and forth, but that overlooks the bizarre ... "verisimilitude?" of it all. Like, it sounds less like something playing back a horror soundtrack and more like the actual ambience in a nightmarish otherworld. Loud enough to be echoing from nearby houses, too quiet to fucking record.

I still have not dared to investigate.

I'm also not particularly creeped out or threatened by these things, they're just high strangeness of a particularly odd sort. General vibe is something along the lines of UFO meets haunted moor now.

I have formed a theory: low budget horror film recording. Bunch of dumb teenagers trying to be spooky in the woods at night to shoot a movie.

Alternatively, an alien ship crashed out in the woods the other day and this is their ghosts haunting the place.

Demonic parrots and giant fireflies.

[The Johnny]

And btw, it could very well be the making of a creepypasta, it actually gave me some chills down my spine.

[altered]

I'm more amused. I tend to be paranoid of weird ass shit, but this doesn't give me any bad vibes or anything, it's just like... what's going on here? I posted about it in OB because it's a real thing happening and I figured maybe someone has heard of similar shit (singing bioluminescent algae or something?) and can inform me.

I really, really wish it was loud enough to record clearly. It gets buried in the crickets and frogs when I try to record it, despite being obviously neither of those things.

[altered]

So I managed to catch it on a recording! It's really hard to hear, use your headphones and forgive my voice, but it's audible. It sounds half as loud as it actually is, just about, but still... audible.

I had two failed recordings due to Bluetooth headphones, so I didn't catch myself explaining:

The white lights are gone. And the orange one is back, closer, much dimmer, in a different area.

Also the sound is coming from a different direction altogether now. Before, it was coming from the same direction as the lights: southeast. Now it's roughly northeast.

Anyway, that sound, and some voiceover and random ass goddamn geese (after midnight???): https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/669694031839887364/705659514220838922/New_Recording.m4a

You'll hear the pitch changes and changes in volume, but it's stuck doing the vibrato thing during recording. Normally it's a smooth whistling sound. Tonight it's mostly been all vibrato sounding, with some smoother parts fading in and out. Sadly, I did not catch it pausing, though you can mistake a fade out as it moves further away (and stops being picked up) for a brief pause.

[Juana]

I hear geese at night once in a while but that other faint noise is unsettling.

[Cain]

I can't make out anything except your voice and the goose, but let me play around with it a bit in some other programs and I'll get back to you on that.

[The Johnny]

Some sort of underground drill or gear? There's this set of phenomena that people call "the Hum" and in one occassion it was coming from some industrial production facility, but that could be heard from very far away.

Is there a construction site nearby or industrial complex?

[Cramulus]

I'm listening to this right now, and I want to submit the following remarks:

1. Even though I'm not hearing it, this is all very creepy
2. I'm really enjoying this deep dive into 'a weird sound'. I'm exicted that I might hear a strange sound we can't explain.
3. somebody remix this, LET THE BEAT DROP

[chaotic neutral observer]

I can (barely) make out a high-pitched whistle, and am wondering if maybe something is being vented under pressure.  The volume/pitch could be connected to the rate at which the venting is happening.

If there's a petrochemical facility nearby, maybe they're flaring natural gas, which could account for both light and sound.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VT1VyICXpW8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jm4BGvqjOqc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cV4CiLzzx3s

[altered]

The flare would be too yellow, it would flicker and move, and it would be further off of the ground. Good thought, nonetheless!

There isn't anything out here though. It's an hour to Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo from here, it exists as a place to live outside of the city that is further than the suburbs. It's an hour walk to anywhere.

It's either natural or amateur. This isn't the work of a company: the largest place in the area is a "logging" company that actually is just a hardware store that resells pre-cut lumber. That's only barely larger than the "industrial paint warehouse" (a garage that specializes in shitty camo paint jobs for cars), and the "party store" (a bodega, down to the cat, transplanted to the Michigan wilderness).

[Doktor Howl]

3. somebody remix this, LET THE BEAT DROP

And then LMNO filed a grievance, and Cramulus accidentally and nobody ever heard from him again. 

[Cain]

OK, having tried it on a number of different programs and things and listen to you say "that fucking goose" far too many times (you have a very soothing voice, btw) I think I'm hearing what you're talking about. I can't do anything fancy, like isolate it and bump it up, I'm not that technically adept when it comes to sound files or anything.

I also have no idea what it could be. I wouldn't mind a video of these lights, if you could get one.

[altered]

A video would be pointless, because at these distances the strange part is that there simply isn't anything where the lights are, and thus should not be any lights at all.

They look like they're electric lights, nothing special. The orange one at its brightest wasn't even particularly bright, you could convince me a street lamp fell over if I didn't know what was off in that direction. None of them move visibly, none of them flicker, they're just lights.

The lack of illumination of the surroundings is more likely to be the illumination being comparatively dim, like when you stick a flashlight in a sock: it's still quite bright to look directly at but that light doesn't reflect nicely off of anything around it. Combined with distance, where glare from looking at a distant light washes out everything around that light, I can't see a point in taking video. But I'll try to get some.

Given this is turning into a short project before I have to leave the area (I have 6 days left and no leads) it might be worth splitting these posts out of OB. Up to the mods of course.

[chaotic neutral observer]

Here's a spectrogram.  The intermittent horizontal lines are altered speaking.  The vertical line at around 0.07 is likely the unknown sound.

Matlab isn't the best tool for this, and I'm running out of lunch break, but I can take a whack at isolating the sound after work, if no-one beats me to it.