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Straining to Hear the Voice of the Aurora

Late-night glimpses of the aurora borealis took on a new meaning for me last fall after Genezaret Barron was killed. Barron, a gentle soul, was a Fairbanks freelance photographer who captured the aurora on many a frozen night. Before he was murdered, I'd often think of him during auroral displays. I knew that while I was heading back indoors to hug the wood stove, Barron would be out on some dark hilltop, pointing a camera skyward.

Now I think of him in a different way when a particularly active display of the northern lights forces me to stare upward. Thumbing through a few books on aurora legends, I found some cultures associated the northern lights with spirits of those who passed on.

Before scientists discovered that the northern lights were caused by charged particles from the sun colliding with gases in the earth's atmosphere, people were left to their imaginations to explain the dancing lights in the sky.

The Eskimos of Labrador, Canada, believed the aurora to be the light of torches of spirits illuminating a pathway to heaven for souls of people "who have died a voluntary or violent death," according to Canadian Anthropologist Ernest Hawkes, who published an account in 1916. The Labrador Eskimos believed spirits who lit the torches could be seen in the aurora kicking around a walrus skull in a game like soccer.

Hawkes added: "The whistling crackling noise which sometimes accompanies the aurora is the voices of these spirits trying to communicate with the people of the earth. They should always be answered in a whispering voice."

An account of Greenland Eskimos collected by Danish explorer Knud Rasmussen in 1932 is similar in that the northern lights were seen as a pathway to the heavens where spirits played: "Here, they are constantly playing ball, the Eskimo's favorite game, laughing and singing, and the ball they play with is the skull of a walrus . . . It is this ball game of the departed souls that appears as the aurora borealis, and is heard as a whistling, rustling, crackling sound. The noise is made by the souls as they run across the frost-hardened snow of the heavens. If one happens to be out alone at night when the aurora borealis is visible, and hears this whistling sound, one has only to whistle in return and the light will come nearer, out of curiosity."

The voice of the aurora is still a great mystery. Many people have reported hearing the aurora--in legend and modern times--but scientists haven't yet nailed down the reason.

Tom Hallinan, a professor of geophysics at the Geophysical Institute, has studied the aurora for decades. He said he's heard the aurora and has talked to many others who have.

"There's something going on," Hallinan said of the aurora's whisper. "It's scientifically unreasonable, yet people do hear it."

Hallinan says the thin air of the ionosphere--where the aurora dances from 60 to about 200 miles above the earth's surface--can't carry sound waves. Even if it could, Hallinan says, we're so far away that it would take several minutes for the sound to reach us.

Hallinan suggests a few possible explanations for auroral noise. He said the brain may sense electromagnetic waves from the aurora and somehow convert them to sound. Another theory is that electrical currents induced on the ground by the aurora (which also corrode the trans-Alaska oil pipeline) may create an audible electrical discharge from nearby objects such as spruce trees or buildings.

It's somehow comforting that this part of the aurora borealis remains a mystery. The voice of the aurora will undoubtedly someday be captured on tape and explained, but if I ever hear it, I'll whisper back. Maybe Barron has something to tell us.