A team from the University of North Carolina sent some recording equipment hung from a high-altitude helium balloon to listen to atmospheric infrasound - sound waves below the human hearing range.
Recordings were then sped up to make them audible to human ears.
"It sounds kind of like The X-Files," graduate student Daniel Bowman told Live Science.
The experiment took place over the USA last year through NASA’s High Altitude Student Platform, an annual programme designed to get people interested in space research.
The balloons fly to a near-space altitude of 38km and picked up mysterious signals in the stratosphere - many of which had never been heard before.
So what caused the sounds? Researchers have a number of ideas: they could be from a wind farm, turbulence, the ocean, gravity waves or even simply vibrations in the balloon equipment.
There's no suggestion that the sounds are generated by aliens.
The plan is to send another high altitude balloon in 2015 to find out more.
"There haven't been acoustic recordings in the stratosphere for 50 years. Surely, if we place instruments up there, we will find things we haven't seen before," Bowman added
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