The people who claim to hear the Northern Lights - BBC Future

The people who claim to hear the Northern Lights - BBC Future: Chant's theory correlates well with many accounts of auroral sound, and is also supported by occasional reports of the smell of ozone – which reportedly carries a metallic odour similar to an electrical spark – during Northern Lights displays. Yet Chant's paper went largely unnoticed in the 1920s, only receiving recognition in the 1970s when two auroral physicists revisited the historical evidence. Chant's theory is largely accepted by scientists today, although there's still debate as to how exactly the mechanism for producing the sound operates. What is clear is that the aurora does, on rare occasions, make sounds audible to the human ear. The eerie reports of crackling, whizzing and buzzing noises accompanying the lights describe an objective audible experience – not something illusory or imagined.