Debunked: Strange Sounds in the Sky

Yeah, it's an interesting topic, as there actually ARE strange sounds. I suspect many of them have a mundane explanation, such as a pump operating late a night, when normally it's very quiet.

People have even reported strange sounds in Venice, CA, where I live. Which is odd, as presumably tens of thousands of people would have been able to hear the same sound, yet did not consider it strange. One thing that people report is just the pier fog horn, which only goes a few nights of the year. But then you get reports like:


http://www.yovenice.com/forum/east-of-lincoln/incredibly-strange-sound-115-am-72
Need to know if anyone else heard the incredibly strange sound last night at approximately 1:15am. I live near the corner of Walgrove and Palms, and the noise, whatever it was, woke both my wife and myself up. Definitely sounded like it was a "sky-based" sound rather than a "land-based" sound. For crying out loud this sounds stupid. I'd say it lasted a good 20-30 seconds. Was extremely loud. Sounded like a series of loud sound waves (that's the best way I can describe it — didn't sound like anything I had ever heard before outside perhaps a sci-fi movie). Was definitely NOT a helicopter because as a ten year Venice resident, I have heard plenty of those. Very well could have been someone parked outside playing extremely loud music, but I have never heard music that loud, and have never heard music that strange (and I have heard more than my fair share of strange music). Perhaps it was a firework somebody launched that was a misfire and it ended up stuck in a tree? I have no idea. Have yet to canvass my neighbors yet, but I will do so shortly. And no, I was not on any drugs.
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Since lots of other people would have heard it, I guess "strange" is relative.
 
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I think some people are hearing something but, overall, i'm suspicious of many of the more recent claims coming forward. With 12/21/2012 nearing, many people will either have fun hoaxing or trying to cash in on the coming doomsday.
 
After listening to some of them, it seems pretty clear they are fake. It's just animal noises slowed down and with some processing added, like reverb.

I made a comparison of an elephant roar with a couple of the more fake sounding "strange sounds".



So I'm calling hoax on many of them.
 
Sound waves can apparently bounce off cloud-cover......not greatly, but much more-so than if cloud-cover is absent.
I can report hearing Burbank Airport jet noise during thick cloudy days, when normally I am way too far away to hear such sounds.
http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1298&dat=19740627&id=BfZNAAAAIBAJ&sjid=DosDAAAAIBAJ&pg=2765,468165
....much like thunder sound ....can travel very far during a storm with a cloud layer overhead.
Keep in mind, radio waves and other transmission waves can also bounce off clouds.....so can sound waves.
 
At night here when it's very quiet you can hear things that are very far off - the crash of the waves on the beach being one (the beach is about a mile away). There the fog horns. Distant trucks accelerating, or super-loud car stereos (something of a sport round here - dB racing).

I'm sure there are many cases where people simply wake up when it's quiet, and hear something they are not familiar with in an unusual context.

There are also many mechanical things that don't happen very often in some areas, but make loud sounds of indeterminate origin. Sewer drilling and pumping. Cargo helicopters. Transformer failures. Pile driving. Angle grinding.

Then there are some real mysterious sounds. Most likely of some underground origin, ultimately natural.
 
I always noticed when I was a kid that on cold calm winter days with thick fairly low stratus deck that high altitude jets sounded strange. Actually it was about the only time that I recollect them really being audible. Sometimes it would even frighten me because it was a really eerie sound quite different from the lower altitude traffic into Langley AFB, Oceanna, ORF, etc.... I'd think a tornado was coming or something. Now that I'm older and fly a lot I know that traffic from Florida toward DC/BWI/PHL/BOS/nyc area etc... flies right over the house where I grew up. Many dozens of flights per day. They're all cruising well above 30,000 feet and you don't hear them on a clear day unless you really listen for them. But when you've got that stratus deck over a cold stable surface layer the sound hits the ground and goes back up, hits that stratus deck and maybe a temp gradient and comes back down. Eventually you get enough of that sound reverberating below the deck that it pretty much creates a non-stop drone (it is actually a higher frequency sound ). It's not loud but persistent and weird and it's been like that for as long as I can remember.

Of course it is more noticeable on calm days. Wind noise drowns it out but I think overrunning warmer air causing both a stratiform deck and a shallow thermal inversion is enhancing the sound. The type of winter weather that brings sleet, freezing rain, or just cold rain is fairly common east of the Appalachians with high pressure wedging down the east side and low pressure systems tracking up the Ohio valley. The conditions are right a few times a winter. But I bet most people don't notice because traffic and daily life will drown if out. It will only be when someone is looking to get freaked out by a weird sound that they'll notice the weird sound and then video it and fail to seek out the proper boring prosaic cause.

Down here in FL we frequently get night time thermal inversions. If the navy bombs over at altoona when there is a stout thermal inversion we get rocked. In winter when we have weather as right now with warm high pressure but with temps in the 60s we'll get shallow inversion over the ocean that will persist all day. Any off shore bombing will rock the beach front. If they fire a rocket at the cape you really hear it even a long way off. It's like someone shouting down a steel pipe the sound carries so well.
 
Interesting official explanation:


http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/04/17/atmospheric-audio-ducting
SPECIAL WEATHER STATEMENT
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE TALLAHASSEE FL
718 PM EST WED MAR 9 2011
FLZ011-013>018-026-027-114-115-118-127-GAZ155>158-100230-
JACKSON-CALHOUN-INLAND GULF-INLAND FRANKLIN-GADSDEN-LEON- INLAND JEFFERSON-LIBERTY-INLAND WAKULLA-COASTAL GULF-COASTAL FRANKLIN-COASTAL JEFFERSON-COASTAL WAKULLA-SEMINOLE-DECATUR-GRADY-THOMAS
718 PM EST WED MAR 9 2011 /618 PM CST WED MAR 9 2011/
…STRANGE SOUNDS BEING REPORTED ACROSS THE FLORIDA BIG BEND…
THERE HAVE BEEN SEVERAL REPORTS OF VERY STRANGE SOUNDS FROM THE WOODVILLE AREA SINCE ABOUT 645 PM EST. THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE BELIEVES THIS PHENOMENON IS BEING CAUSED BY THUNDER FROM DISTANT LIGHTNING STROKES… BOUNCING OFF A VERY STABLE LAYER ABOVE THE GROUND. THIS IS CALLED DUCTING…AND CAN ALLOW SOUND TO TRAVEL UNUSUALLY LONG DISTANCES. THIS SOUND HAS BEEN MISTAKENLY ATTRIBUTED TO POSSIBLE TORNADOES…BUT WE AT THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE WANT TO BE VERY CLEAR THAT THERE ARE NO TORNADOES … AND NONE ARE EXPECTED.“
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After a sound has traveled along a duct like this, I'd imagine it would get quite distorted, unrecognizable, but still loud.
 
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We had a fairly strong inversion Thursday morning with a shallow layer of cool stable air at the surface and NE winds advecting a layer of relatively warm moist air in off the ocean. It took until about 9AM for sun to heat the surface layer enough to mix out the inversion. I could here traffic from a distant highway, traffic that I only hear if their is thermal cap and general wind flow out of the east.

Now what is described above is what often happens here when we get big but slow moving diurnal storms. They'll tap cold air aloft which gets driven down to the surface in strong down drafts. But the storms are mostly stationary; generally forming and dieing in place as the CAPE (convective available potential energy) is used up with storm propagation occurring along outflow boundaries (downdrafts hit the ground and spread laterally). As a storm collapses the atmosphere becomes hyper stable. With the surface temp having dropped from say 92F to 70F. You'll often end up with stratiform rain from mid level clouds where the original storm occurred and new thunderstorms radiating out away from that origin but connected to one another by the stratiform deck. The most spectacular thunder I've heard was when storms over ten miles apart both dropped CG lightening and then CC lightening spanning the entire distance between them. The thunder created by such an arc is continuous for 30 or more seconds because the CC lightning stroke was over 10 miles long and the sound is trapped below the inversion so you end up hearing the distant thunder at a much greater volume that usual. Some kind of constructive interference occurs because this kind of thunder really lasts and isn't cracking but is very intense low frequency the rattles everything in the house.

In brief, if I'm not cracked on this. Thunderstorm ends up stabilizing the atmosphere by convecting warm air up and cooling the surface. CAPE runs out. Storm collapses and spreads out into a mid-level stratus deck producing light to moderate steady rain (most weather radars paint the signal yellow at this intensity). However, thunderstorms may be actively forming along the outflow boundary radiating away from the original storm. Inter-cloud lightening then travels a great distance through the stratus deck between discrete cells.

There's got to be a real scientific write up about this as opposed to my hypothesizing.
 
I'm not alone in having witnessed this. Googling turned up these comments on another forum:

The thunder you describe was common during the dying phases of a cell. As the cell decays to mostly a midlevel stratiform type of cloud, the lightning strokes would run inter cloud tru this stratiform. The resulting thunder would roll on seemingly for ever, an extremely deep resonous type that shook the very foundations of our house. The thunder didn't seem to stop, instead only decreasing as it sounded to get so far away. Awesome stuff, best experienced from the ground, they were fearsome to aviate around!!!!

I was very close to one of those strikes a couple of days ago and experienced the same effect. I had flash-BANG!, with that noise like tearing cloth, then slowly decaying rumbles with one rumble about 10s after the initial strike that rattled the windows and front door! Very spectacular (pre-frontal trough I think).

This second comment is something else I've found fascinating about the "long duration" thunder that seems to occur in association with decaying thunderstorms, cloud to cloud lightening, and ducting in the subsidence inversion that can occur in association with a decaying storm(s). The low rumble of near continuous thunder is punctuated by these THUMPS that shake the house and that you can feel in your chest if you're outside. The thumps are not ear piercing loud like thunder generated close by.
 


This guy did a really good job debunking some of the videos.

PCWilliams said:
I think some people are hearing something but, overall, i'm suspicious of many of the more recent claims coming forward. With 12/21/2012 nearing, many people will either have fun hoaxing or trying to cash in on the coming doomsday.
My sentiments as well. When the strange noise videos began getting popular, the Fundies were claiming that it's trumpets from Revelations.
 
Interesting official explanation:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/04/17/atmospheric-audio-ducting/



After a sound has traveled along a duct like this, I'd imagine it would get quite distorted, unrecognizable, but still loud. [/FONT][/COLOR]

That sounds very reasonable. I was a Sonar Tech in the Navy and the sonar set I worked with was a Surface Duct Sonar. Basically the surface duct is the part of the ocean that is a fairly constant temperature from the surface to a certain depth. At that depth, the temp falls off quickly. The depth of that duct determined the range of our active sonar. Simply put, the sound waves are transmitted and reflect off of the barrier created by the sharp temperature decrease back to the surface. Then reflect off the surface. The deeper this duct was, the greater our range. Here is a link that shows how this works:

http://www.commanders-academy.com/w...orne_Operations_Manual_-_Sensors#Surface_Duct

Wow. I haven't thought about this in years. :D
 
I just heard in the south of spain 4 am what can only be descibed as a jet which at first at thought it was but i looked and couldnt see any aircraft above and the noise came from the sky as if it would be flying evrywhere at once it was more like thunder but jet sounding if that makes sense it was very strange and freaked me out it seemed to dissapear as if it was mvoin away but like i say am pretty sure it was no jet unless the sound of a jet from far away that travelled but i doubt it it was like it was litterarlly over my head at one point , i have seen the you tube videos of the booms ect it didnt sound like them but i am aware peple are reporting strange things and now have heard my self am just looking for answers like eveyone else i suppose
 
I heard it too earlier this year in Singapore. It lasted a few hours at night.
I am pretty sure that copy cats and maybe a network of people blow fog horns at a Pre-determined date and time around the world.
 
That sounds very reasonable. I was a Sonar Tech in the Navy and the sonar set I worked with was a Surface Duct Sonar. Basically the surface duct is the part of the ocean that is a fairly constant temperature from the surface to a certain depth. At that depth, the temp falls off quickly. The depth of that duct determined the range of our active sonar. Simply put, the sound waves are transmitted and reflect off of the barrier created by the sharp temperature decrease back to the surface. Then reflect off the surface. The deeper this duct was, the greater our range. Here is a link that shows how this works:

http://www.commanders-academy.com/w...orne_Operations_Manual_-_Sensors#Surface_Duct

Wow. I haven't thought about this in years. :D

Just wondered if you think this may have something to do with it?

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/11/201211912435170883.html

Sophistication of the technology

Establishing the viability of this new technology, NASA's solar-powered aircraft Pathfinder, with a 100-foot wingspan, reached an altitude of 71,500 feet altitude in 1997, and its fourth-generation successor the "Helios" flew at 97,000 feet with a 247-foot wingspan in 2001, two miles higher than any previous aircraft.


For the next tier above the Earth, in the upper stratosphere, DARPA and the Air Force are collaborating in the development of the Falcon Hypersonic Cruise Vehicle. Flying at an altitude of 20 miles, it is expected to "deliver 12,000 pounds of payload at a distance of 9,000 nautical miles from the continental United States in less than two hours".

Although the first test launches in April 2010 and August 2011 crashed midflight, they did reach an amazing 13,000 miles per hour, 22 times the speed of sound and sent back "unique data" that should help resolve remaining aerodynamic problems.

Content from External Source
 
Any noise from Falcon would be heard over a much wider area. I doubt it would make any though, it's basically just a rocket.

Unless you mean something to do with audio ducting? But I can't see any connection there. What were you thinking?
 
Any noise from Falcon would be heard over a much wider area. I doubt it would make any though, it's basically just a rocket.

Unless you mean something to do with audio ducting? But I can't see any connection there. What were you thinking?

I was just wondering if it or something like it, could have anything to do with it... pure conjecture
 
These people must have no ability to discern where a sound is coming from. One New Year's Eve I heard what sounded like a bass frequency when I went out with my dogs, around midnight. I thought it was music coming from far away, although I thought it was a little late for that. I live in a flat area, there are a lot of farms, and I am also about a 1/2 mile from the bay and 2 miles from LI Sound, so sound travels. When I went to bed, I could hear this low frequency sound, in fact it was so annoying I put my pillow over my head. Next day, nothing. Later on though, heard the sound again. I started getting very curious and began driving around. Couldn't hear it from the farm up the street. Heard it again that night. Started really driving me crazy! The next day I was determined. I figured out it was coming from the north, so I headed north. Heard no sound a mile north. Kept heading north, to the beach. Lo and behold, I found it! About a mile offshore there is a platform where tankers offload oil. It was the engine from the ship anchored at the platform. I go to that beach every day practically, and never heard that sound come from any other ship. I don't know if it was a different type of engine or what, but case closed, mysterious sound discovered. Some friends who live up there told me they can hear the engines depending occasionally, and that one did sound different. I guess with a boom it would be harder to tell, the noise I tracked was consistent, but still, you'd think someone would be able to figure out what it is.
 
hello

These sounds do occur and are very real, not to mention annoying. i am in the south of Spain, near Valencia. I am hearing them right now. It lasts for about 3 hours and i hear them approximately at monthly intervals more recently, and never heard them before, although i have only lived in this location for two years.

The noise is simple to describe but my phone does not record it well, The level of the "loudness" is drowned out somewhat when society wakes.

The sound occurs at what would appear to be a regular time ( which in itself is odd) or it is that with all the normal noises of a town it is drowned out. But seems tobe very audible between 05:00 -09:00.

Dogs seems to react to it also.

So the sound sounds like a solar wind might , a wind, constant it does not really vary. It seems to come from the sky.

The best way to describe it, is like a jet has flown over and you are hearing the "after jet noise" but for hours. Another similar sound is when you live next to a motorway/freeway and you can hear the road traffic noise .

it is loud enough to penetrate double glazing.

I live very close to the sea and there are mountains nearby. the sound is not being generated by any machine or human, it is way too vast, constant and consistent.

THOSE ARE THE FACTS
 
I just heard in the south of spain 4 am what can only be descibed as a jet which at first at thought it was but i looked and couldnt see any aircraft above and the noise came from the sky as if it would be flying evrywhere at once it was more like thunder but jet sounding if that makes sense it was very strange and freaked me out it seemed to dissapear as if it was mvoin away but like i say am pretty sure it was no jet unless the sound of a jet from far away that travelled but i doubt it it was like it was litterarlly over my head at one point , i have seen the you tube videos of the booms ect it didnt sound like them but i am aware peple are reporting strange things and now have heard my self am just looking for answers like eveyone else i suppose

i agree, see my post below today 17.11.13. I live near Valencia . The only thing I don't agree with in your analysis, is that it sounds like thunder. i just hear a constant sound , relentlessly consistent, but does vary somewhat in strength, which makes me think it could be wind or atmospheric pressure related....
 
We had a fairly strong inversion Thursday morning with a shallow layer of cool stable air at the surface and NE winds advecting a layer of relatively warm moist air in off the ocean. It took until about 9AM for sun to heat the surface layer enough to mix out the inversion. I could here traffic from a distant highway, traffic that I only hear if their is thermal cap and general wind flow out of the east.

Now what is described above is what often happens here when we get big but slow moving diurnal storms. They'll tap cold air aloft which gets driven down to the surface in strong down drafts. But the storms are mostly stationary; generally forming and dieing in place as the CAPE (convective available potential energy) is used up with storm propagation occurring along outflow boundaries (downdrafts hit the ground and spread laterally). As a storm collapses the atmosphere becomes hyper stable. With the surface temp having dropped from say 92F to 70F. You'll often end up with stratiform rain from mid level clouds where the original storm occurred and new thunderstorms radiating out away from that origin but connected to one another by the stratiform deck. The most spectacular thunder I've heard was when storms over ten miles apart both dropped CG lightening and then CC lightening spanning the entire distance between them. The thunder created by such an arc is continuous for 30 or more seconds because the CC lightning stroke was over 10 miles long and the sound is trapped below the inversion so you end up hearing the distant thunder at a much greater volume that usual. Some kind of constructive interference occurs because this kind of thunder really lasts and isn't cracking but is very intense low frequency the rattles everything in the house.

In brief, if I'm not cracked on this. Thunderstorm ends up stabilizing the atmosphere by convecting warm air up and cooling the surface. CAPE runs out. Storm collapses and spreads out into a mid-level stratus deck producing light to moderate steady rain (most weather radars paint the signal yellow at this intensity). However, thunderstorms may be actively forming along the outflow boundary radiating away from the original storm. Inter-cloud lightening then travels a great distance through the stratus deck between discrete cells.

There's got to be a real scientific write up about this as opposed to my hypothesizing.

Actually this could in part explain why I say that the sounds occur at the same times and at fairly regular intervals. i.e. monthly... it could be that the temp drops enough for this sound to occur and as the temp increases it ceases.

In this part of spain we get very few clouds, hardly ever any cloud base, 300+ days of pure sunshine and temp of between 20-30c for nine months a year. today as the sound is occurring early as usual, it is 15c (which is very cold for here)
 
i agree, see my post below today 17.11.13. I live near Valencia . The only thing I don't agree with in your analysis, is that it sounds like thunder. i just hear a constant sound , relentlessly consistent, but does vary somewhat in strength, which makes me think it could be wind or atmospheric pressure related....

Or the sea? I live a mile from the ocean, and in the quiet of the night you can hear the sea. If you are further inland, then the individual waves would be even less distinct.
 
I live relatively high up, on a peninsula in Helsinki. I can watch the ferries arrive on one side of the building, and from the other I can see the ice breakers when they're parked up for their summer sleep. We hear loud booms every now and again, some of which can be attributed to the RORO traffic of the ferries, others which can't. The latter booms are louder, and rather than appear to be sky-borne, they seem to be emanating from deep within the ground. With my hand on the steel rail of the balcony I can feel the vibration. It was very puzzling for over a year.

Then I discovered that Helsinki has been developing sub-Baltic spaces designed for keeping massive amounts of servers, with the Baltic itself serving as the main cooling system. It was probably the construction outfit blasting new caverns in the granite. We're sitting close to one of those caverns, so much so that I can see one of the entrances to the subterranean system if I look over my right shoulder and out the window.
 
hello

These sounds do occur and are very real, not to mention annoying. i am in the south of Spain, near Valencia. I am hearing them right now. It lasts for about 3 hours and i hear them approximately at monthly intervals more recently, and never heard them before, although i have only lived in this location for two years.

The noise is simple to describe but my phone does not record it well, The level of the "loudness" is drowned out somewhat when society wakes.

The sound occurs at what would appear to be a regular time ( which in itself is odd) or it is that with all the normal noises of a town it is drowned out. But seems tobe very audible between 05:00 -09:00.

Dogs seems to react to it also.

So the sound sounds like a solar wind might , a wind, constant it does not really vary. It seems to come from the sky.

The best way to describe it, is like a jet has flown over and you are hearing the "after jet noise" but for hours. Another similar sound is when you live next to a motorway/freeway and you can hear the road traffic noise .

it is loud enough to penetrate double glazing.

I live very close to the sea and there are mountains nearby. the sound is not being generated by any machine or human, it is way too vast, constant and consistent.

THOSE ARE THE FACTS

Did you read my post? #24?
 
People sometimes have problems describing what they are hearing, especially in a non native language. My old neighbor in Santa Monica (who was from South America) was complaining about the "strange beeping" noise she hear the night before. She thought it must have been someone in the building left on their alarm clock.

It turned out it was the Santa Monica Pier fog horn, which is two miles away. Plus she'd lived there for ten years, and must have heard it every year (on foggy nights). It was just the coincidence of a foggy night and open windows, and being up late when it is quiet.

It also sounded nothing like a "strange beeping". It sounded like a distant fog horn (one second blasts of a low deep note).
 
i appreciate your replies but i am not looking for a protracted to and from by email on this subject.. I can ASSURE you i have absolute and total clarity on this matter and my description is as accurate as it can be when you are describing something you have never encounter before and never heard ever elsewhere. I am an ex submariner and in my fifties. So for the avoidance of doubt, i say again, this sound is not and cannot be mistaken for or be emanating from anything man made or mechanical (in my opinion). Why; the sound is everywhere and has no particular direction, there are no bangs, thumps or anything remotely similar. It is omnipresent, and "appears" to be atmospheric. I have looked on the internet and you put aside all the conspiracy theories and reports of bangs , bumps droning, bass noises, these are not the same. However there are a large number of reports and accompanying videos that DO ACCURATELY described the sound i am referring to, and these seem the be spread across the world, with a recent emphasis here in Spain. I am less than half a mile from the sea and am very familiar with all the noises that could emanate from the ocean. This sound is so VAST that you automatically discount all these possibilities. imagine a noise that is so loud, does not vary in strength, does not osculate, does not sound as if its even directional. Before I pull the curtains on my double glazed patio doors, I expect to see a very windy outdoors, but instead it is totally still, the trees or leaves are not moving at all, and yet a strange wind noise... now in conclusion and not wishing to enter into the bizarre, i have read the possibility that the sound could be coming from below the ground.....WOW, well it does not feel like that but i suppose its a possibility. After all the earth i believe is due to change slightly on its axis and the strong magnetic field etc could be causing this i suppose. But if this is the case why would the sound stop? thank you for your indulgence and i am signing off and will not return to this forum, unless i can provide more information on the sound itself.. .
 
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...the sound is not being generated by any machine or human, it is way too vast, constant and consistent.

THOSE ARE THE FACTS

Sorry those are not facts they are conclusions you've taken. If they were facts you could show us how you've eliminated all other options.
And the time of day you're talking about is the time you would hear more from further away than usual. Sound coming from far away will be of a more all-surrounding nature, especially as it's likely it's being reflected of mountains, clouds, or temperature layers.


In general to no-one in particular, is it still being regularly reported on world-wide, or has the trend fallen off?
The last report from this year appears to be the grader sound in august.
Of course if it's still ongoing people won't upload to youtube every time it happens, as it's no longer a novelty.
Still, weird.
 
Hard to really say for sure - except it's a similar sound. You'd have to be very patient to find the exact match.
The last video was great, it shows the sound is objectively there - but it could still be hoaxed through speakers.

One could say if jupiter makes that sound then it's the same process making the sound on earth, but as I understood it sounds from space were converted from radio waves so as to be audible.


Whatever it is, it's very resonant, it must be impressive to hear in person.
 
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