The skyline of Kyiv, Ukraine, where the first viral 'sky trumpet' video was recorded in 2011

The Sky Trumpet: The Viral Sound of 2011 That Nobody in Kyiv Heard

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About 6 min read

On a summer afternoon in 2011, in a residential neighbourhood of Kyiv — the city the videos of the time still called Kiev — a man stood on the fifth floor of an apartment building and pointed a camera at the sky. What he recorded was not a plane, not a storm, not anything visible at all. It was a sound: a vast, metallic groan, rising and falling like a trumpet the size of a city, with harmonics that seemed to come from everywhere at once. The windows of the buildings, the uploader wrote, shivered. The sound was, in his words, very strong, and very scary. He posted the video to YouTube in November 2011. Within weeks, it had been watched by millions of people, and the sky trumpet — the strange sound from the sky — had become one of the first great viral mysteries of the internet age.

It is important to be precise about what happened next, because the story of the sky trumpet is not, for the most part, the story of a sound. It is the story of a video. The Kyiv recording, made on 3 August and again on 11 August 2011, was the first of its kind, and it set the template for everything that followed: a static shot of a sky, a groaning metallic drone, and a caption insisting that no one could explain it. By January 2012, montage videos were gathering the clips together under titles like “Strange Sounds Out Of Heaven From All Over The World”, and the sound was being reported from Banff in Alberta, from Texas, from Berlin, from every corner of the map. The radio show Coast to Coast AM, broadcast on some six hundred stations across North America, dedicated three hours to the subject. The researcher Linda Moulton Howe told its listeners that there were already some fifty YouTube videos circulating, many of them from North America, and that the sounds had been recorded since at least March 2011 — though no one had paid attention until the montages began.

The video that started it all

The Kyiv video itself is a strange artefact, and the strangeness is in the details. The sound is enormous, a multi-tonal groan that seems to shake the air. But the people visible in the video do not react to it. No one looks up. No one covers their ears. No one hurries inside. The street goes about its business as if the sky were silent, and the only evidence that anything is happening is the soundtrack itself. When local news in Kyiv tried to validate the story, they found that no one in the neighbourhood had heard the sounds except the person who uploaded the video.

Digital analysts who examined the recording found that its audio track had not obviously been doctored — but that finding proved less than it seemed to. An undoctored track does not prove that the sound was recorded in that place, at that time, by that camera. It proves only that the file had not been cut. The sound could have been added at the moment of recording, played through a speaker off-camera, or captured from a source that had nothing to do with the sky above the street. The video, in the end, is evidence of a recording, not evidence of an event.

And yet the sound itself was real enough to be recognised. Within months of the Kyiv video, the same audio began turning up in other videos, in other cities, on other continents — and it was possible to tell, because the recordings carried the same incidental details. Listeners noticed that even the sounds of passing birds from the Kyiv video could be heard in the imitations, dubbed over staged footage of people staring into the sky. The sky trumpet, it turned out, had a fingerprint, and the fingerprint belonged to a single afternoon in Kyiv.

How a sound becomes a plague

The speed with which the sky trumpet spread says as much about the internet of 2011 as it does about the sound. YouTube was five years old. A video could travel the world in a day. And the sky trumpet arrived with a ready-made audience: enthusiasts of Bible prophecy, who noted how closely the groaning resembled the sound of the shofar, the ram’s-horn trumpet of Jewish tradition, and who read the videos as a sign of the end times. Atheists, in turn, took up the subject as sport, demonstrating that the sounds could be produced with audio software on an ordinary computer. The argument itself became part of the phenomenon, and the phenomenon grew with every round of it.

Some of the later videos were outright hoaxes, and the methods were not subtle. People took sound clips from films, ran them through amplifiers, and filmed themselves reacting to the noise as it was broadcast from a speaker just out of frame. Others simply re-uploaded the Kyiv audio over new footage. The film Red State, released in September 2011 — two months before the Kyiv video was posted — even contained a scene in which religious extremists are fooled by computer experts broadcasting shofar trumpet blasts over an old firehouse siren, a coincidence that did not go unnoticed by the debunkers.

There were also sincere attempts to explain the sound in natural terms. On Canadian television in January 2012, after a sky trumpet was reported in Banff, Alberta, the physicist Jean-Pierre St. Maurice of the University of Saskatchewan suggested that what people were hearing might be electromagnetic noise from the aurora and the radiation belts, picked up and made audible by some environmental antenna in the landscape — a real phenomenon, in which radio waves are converted into sound, but one that produces a faint crackle rather than a trumpet blast. Others blamed the dam on the Kyiv Reservoir, just north of the city, suggesting that its vibrations were carried through the water and the ground. No evidence was ever produced for either idea, and neither of them explains the silence of the people in the video.

The craze fades

By the middle of 2012, the sky trumpet had spent its viral energy. The montages stopped coming, the prophecy forums moved on, and the sound of the apocalypse became a footnote in the history of internet hoaxes. A last famous video, recorded at Terrace in British Columbia in August 2013, was attributed by the city to maintenance on a grader blade — a piece of road machinery whose metal edge, dragged across asphalt, can produce a groan very like the one in the videos. It was a fitting end to the story: a mundane machine, doing mundane work, making a sound that the internet had briefly mistaken for the voice of heaven.

What remains of the sky trumpet is a lesson in how a mystery is made. There was a real recording, of a real sound, made in a real place. There was also a street full of people who did not hear it, a soundtrack that turned up in a dozen other cities, and a global audience that was ready to believe. The sound was never explained, because the sound was never really the point. The point was the video, and the video was a mirror: it showed each viewer whatever they were already afraid of, or already hoping for, and it sounded, to all of them, exactly like a trumpet in the sky.

The sky trumpet belongs to a family of sounds that includes the Barisal guns and the brontidi — but it is a different kind of member. Those are sounds that people heard, in person, over generations, in the open air. The sky trumpet is a sound that people watched, on a screen, for a few months, in 2011 and 2012. It is the first skyquake of the internet age, and it is also the most instructive: a reminder that a mystery can be real, viral, and entirely manufactured, all at the same time.

What is documented, and what is not

Documented facts: The first viral “sky trumpet” video was recorded in Kyiv, Ukraine, on 3 and 11 August 2011 and posted to YouTube in November 2011; the uploader reported that windows shivered in the buildings. When local news investigated, no one in the neighbourhood had heard the sounds except the uploader, and people visible in the video do not react to the noise. By January 2012, montage videos collected clips from many locations, and the radio show Coast to Coast AM devoted three hours to the subject, with researcher Linda Moulton Howe reporting some fifty circulating YouTube videos. The same audio — including the sounds of passing birds from the Kyiv recording — was identified in later videos from other cities. Some videos were shown to be hoaxes, using film sound clips played through speakers or audio generated with software. The film Red State, released in September 2011, contains a scene of shofar trumpet blasts broadcast over a firehouse siren. A 2013 recording from Terrace, British Columbia, was attributed by the city to maintenance on a grader blade.

Unverified or disputed claims: That any sky trumpet sound was heard in the open air by a crowd — no crowd has ever been documented hearing one, and the Kyiv video’s own footage shows no reaction. That the sound came from the sky, from the earth, from a dam, or from the aurora — none of these has been supported by evidence, and the aurora explanation describes a faint radio phenomenon, not a trumpet blast. Claims that the sounds were a sign of the apocalypse, or the shofar of prophecy, are matters of belief, not evidence. No sky trumpet recording has ever been verified as an unaltered recording of an unexplained sound in the place where it was claimed to occur.

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