​Eerie 'Alien' Sounds Captured 22 Miles Above Earth's Surface

After 50 years, mysterious 'X-Files' sounds have been heard and taped from the edge of space. The amazingly eerie "hisses and whistles" were taped from the rim of space. One helium balloon that was created and put up by a student to support his NASA project got all the sounds when he was 22 miles above the Earth's surface, according to rt.

The equipment was created and uploaded by Daniel Bowman, a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, according to LiveScience. Most of the instruments captured the "atmospheric infrasound" or the sound waves that were tuned at frequencies below 20 hertz. As infrasound drops much below human hearing range, the noises are audible only when the sound levels rise.

"It sounds kind of like 'The X-Files,'" Bowman said. He felt that the intensity of the shock made them "surprised by the sheer complexity of the signal."

Listen to the sound here.

Bowman voices the hope that the recordings can increase interest in infrasound recordings, which have not been recorded in the stratosphere for 50 years, according to independent.co.

To capture the eerie noises, infrasound microphones were dangling from the helium balloon above the US states of New Mexico and Arizona.

The flight was launched on August 9, 2014, and was part of an annual project conducted by NASA and the Louisiana Space Consortium. Bowman's experiment was part of the 10 payloads that were also part of the High Altitude Student Platform (HASP) in 2014.

The balloon was floating at a height of above 123,000 feet at 62 miles (100 km) above the earth, where airplanes fly, yet below the line marking the top of the stratosphere. For the first time, an infrasound study touched such heights.

It is not known what the source of the noises were. Scientific speculations include "ocean waves, gravity waves, clear air turbulence, noise from the balloon cable itself, and even a wind farm under the balloon's path," or even earthquakes and storms.

It was the first time that acoustic recordings took place in the stratosphere in 50 years, according to Bowman.

"I think this work has opened new ground for more research," said Omar Marcillo, a geophysicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, who was not involved in the study. "It's very important for the entire [infrasound] community."