MYSTERIOUS BOOMS

MYSTERIOUS BOOMS OVER CITIES are a manifestation of Scalar Weapon application at target areas.

December 27, 2008 -- Mild earthquake shakes Lancaster County, PA -- A minor earthquake rattled Lancaster County early Saturday morning, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The 3.3 magnitude quake hit at 12:04 a.m., according to Dale Grant, a geophysicist at the USGS's 24-hour earthquake monitoring office in Golden, Colo. "We consider this a very minor event, something local," Grant said. Tell that to people of Lancaster County. More than 1,000 residents called the county 911 center after feeling the tremors, according to the emergency dispatch center. No injuries were reported as of 12:30 a.m. The USGS Web site shows the quake was centered in the Salunga-Landisville area. It was felt in Philadelphia and Baltimore, too. Grant said his office received calls from Lancaster County emergency dispatch and Three Mile Island Nuclear Facility. "Three Mile Island always calls us when something is happening," Grant said. "They see what is happening on their seismographs." George Warner, a resident of Lititz in north Lancaster County, said he felt and heard two loud booms, about a second apart. "It was a loud boom and I heard our China cabinet shake," he said in a phone interview. "Then there was a second boom and I looked around the house to see if there was something that was the source. My guess was it was an earthquake. There was no damage." The earthquake was the seventh minor one to hit the state since early October, according to USGS data. The tremors were centered around a 23-mile radius of Saturday morning's quake. They occurred: Oct. 5, 19, 20 and 23. http://www.mcall.com/news/local/all-quake1227,0,3959584.story

AUGUST 20, 2008: Unexplained Mpls. explosions a 'Homeland Security' issue -- People living in the Longfellow neighborhood in Minneapolis were jolted awake in the middle of the night Thursday by a big boom. However, police said they aren’t sure what caused the explosion. "I heard an explosion. It sounded kind of loud and it reverberated," said James Pennington, who was jolted awake by the sound. Pennington thought it was coming from Longfellow Park and investigated. "It was rather scary. I walked outside, meandered down half asleep and didn't see anything," he said. Blocks away Mary Goodew heard it too. Police took calls stretching a 14-block radius from the 3000 block of Lake Street to 44th Street. "I knew it wasn't a gunshot, so it had to be a transformer," Goodew said. But Xcel Energy said a transformer didn’t blow and said, "nothing in our reports indicates an explosion from our equipment." This is the second time in a week an unexplained explosion has been heard. Police told 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS they don’t believe the explosions are terroristic or connected to the upcoming Republican National Convention. While authorities aren't saying much about the two explosions, reports are calling them issues of Homeland Security. http://kaaltv.com/article/stories/S545297.shtml?cat=10151

AUGUST 9, 2008: In the latest sign of the rising international political stakes in the Arctic, the top U.S. Coast Guard official has revealed a planned shift in American foreign policy from scientific research to "sovereignty" and "security presence" in Alaskan waters bordering Canadian and Russian territory. And to underscore growing U.S. concerns over its aging polar icebreaking fleet and suspect capacity for Arctic surveillance, Homeland Security director Michael Chertoff slipped quietly into Alaska on Friday to assess the coast guard's northern operations. A Homeland Security officia; told Canwest News Service that Chertoff's unannounced two-day visit does not include any public events. http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/story.html?id=1d6374e1-0a0c-483e-915a-e7151f7774a9

AUGUST 7, 2008: Military probes mystery blast in Arctic -- The Canadian military is sending a long-range Aurora aircraft to investigate reports of a mysterious explosion along Canada's Northwest Passage that may have killed several whales. The drama apparently began in the early-morning hours of July 31, when an Inuit hunting party at an outpost camp at Borden Peninsula on northeastern Baffin Island was alerted to the sound of an explosion, followed by a cloud of black smoke. An Inuit member of the Canadian Rangers, a military reservist unit stationed in the far North, reported the incident, and said a hunter at the camp saw several dead whales on shore when he went over to investigate. In a preliminary investigation, DND's Joint Task Force Northern headquarters determined there were no known vessels operating in the area, and it did not know of any activity that could have caused an explosion. "At this point, we really have very little else to report," says Summer Halliday, a spokeswoman for the Joint Task Force in Yellowknife. "But we will be sending an Aurora aircraft to do a flyover. The plane is currently up north in the Mackenzie Valley on a routine exercise supporting the RCMP's Operation Nunakput." Parks Canada will also be on the scene with a boat that's being dispatched from Sirmilik National Park on Bylot Island. Originally designed for anti-submarine warfare, the Aurora is able to detect and destroy the latest generation of stealth submarines. But its long-range capabilities are what make it so useful to the military. It can fly for 17 hours and cover 9,266 kilometres without refuelling. The Aurora is frequently used to search out illegal fishing, illegal immigration, drug trafficking and pollution along Canada's three coastlines. Unusual activity has been reported in the Borden Peninsula region before, according to a DND briefing report. Last summer, for example, several unusual and unidentified objects were seen in the water in the same area. This past winter, a spectacular meteorite that swept across the sky lit up the radio waves with talk of UFOs. Foreign submarines have also been sighted in Canadian Arctic waters over the past decade. No one will speculate on whether a submarine might be involved in this mystery blast. "Until we hear from Parks Canada and the military, there's nothing we can confirm or deny," says Keith Pelley, a Fisheries and Oceans Canada official based in Nunavut. "All we have is a report that an explosion occurred. It may be something or it could be nothing at all. Right now, we just don't know." In the briefing report sent to other government departments, the Joint Task Force noted that it takes this, as well as other reports like it, seriously. With climate change opening up the Northwest Passage to easier navigation, and with evidence of rich oil deposits below the Arctic Ocean, the international war of words over Canada's coldest frontier has been heating up. Five countries - Canada, Russia, Norway, Denmark and the United States - have been compiling data to claim possible extensions to their Arctic continental shelves under international law. Russia has been the most aggressive in pressing its claim to the Pole: About a year ago, it sent a submarine to plant a Russian flag on the North Pole sea floor, and Lt.-Gen. Vladimir Shamanov has been talking about extending Russia's naval presence in the Arctic. http://www.canada.com/topics/news/national/story.html?id=46bcc3e3-d4d1-4cb4-a024-902ef385a602

August 7, 2008: The mystery has deepened surrounding explosions that shook the Kincardine area last Thursday with University of Western Ontario scientists ruling out a meteor shower. “Something pretty significant exploded south and west of Goderich and Kincardine. It could have exploded out in Lake Huron,” said Dr. Peter Brown, associate professor in the department of physics and astronomy at Western and the Canada Research Chair of meteor science. Highly sensitive devices installed near Lucan by Western to monitor low frequency sound waves detected a series of four impulses that lasted about a minute, starting at 11:12 p.m. on July 31. Five minutes later a low frequency rumbling was detected coming from the Kincardine area. “If you had been in London and it was really quiet outside, you should just have been able to hear the low rumble from these explosions. That’s unusual at this sort of a distance,” said Brown. With Ontario’s largest nuclear plant located just north of Kincardine, the explosions have triggered international media interest. Officials at Bruce Power have said there was nothing unusual at the nuclear station. South Bruce OPP were inundated with 911 calls shortly after 11 p.m. that night with residents describing walls shaking and windows rattling. Brown said the signals detected at Lucan, probably five or six minutes after the original blast, were intense. If it had been caused by a meteor, there should have been a bright fireball in the sky, he said. The university has a camera system at Kincardine aimed at the sky to capture the image of any meteors. “We have already looked during the time interval of interest,” said Brown. “It was clear that night and no meteor.” The monitoring devices at Lucan indicate all of the explosions occurred in the same area south and west of the Kincardine area and south of Goderich. In the past, the same instruments have picked up mining explosions in Wyoming in the western U.S. and the Shell refinery explosion in Sarnia. “Based on frequency content and the phenomenology of the signals, these are not consistent from what we would expect from a meteor at all,” said Brown. But the signals also don’t fit another theory, that it was caused by a sonic boom from a jet, he said. “They are not all that consistent with shockwaves you would see with supersonic aircraft,” he said. The closest fit for the signals from the explosion, particularly the low rumbling, would be surface blasting at a mine, Brown said. The only mine in the area is Sifto Salt’s underground operation at Goderich. A worker at the mine yesterday who lives nearby said he has never felt any tremor from blasting at the salt mine that stretches under the lake. http://lfpress.ca/newsstand/News/2008/08/07/6379236.html

April 28, 2008: MARYLAND: Police Make Headway In Baltimore Co. Mystery -- Officers Vickie Warehime and J. Posluszny Jr. have solved a lot of mysteries, but this one is over their heads--literally. In fact, it may be about 30 to 40 feet in the air. For months, the Baltimore County Community Outreach officers have been investigating a bizarre phenomenon disturbing neighbors in an area of Pikesville near Beth Tfiloh Community School. Now, they say they may be closer to an answer. Derek Valcourt reports 911 callers complain about a deafening explosion and a bright flash of light in the middle of night. "The bedroom actually lights up like day," says Elaine O'Mansky, who lives in the Stevenson Commons condominium building near Beth Tfiloh. "It's instantaneous and wakes us up out of a very deep sleep." She isn't alone. Barbara Friedman is Homeowner's Association president for the area. She was up late one night sweeping her back patio when she heard the boom. "I hit the deck," Friedman explained. "It was so loud, I thought I was being shot. I literally hit the deck." After she realized she hadn't been shot, she started emailing other homeowners to see if they heard it too. "Then my email got flooded because hundreds of people were hearing these noises and thought it was their imagination," she said. The noise was so upsetting, Elaine O'Mansky decided it was time to start keeping track of the phenomenon when it occurred. From late September until now, she's heard it 25 times, always between midnight and 7 a.m. with no consistent pattern. Convinced something was wrong, Friedman and O'Mansky contacted police, who were skeptical at first. "We were a little bit concerned that this was maybe a little bit of an exaggeration," said Sgt. Vickie Warehime. "They were saying they could see (the light) through their window blinds." Police were concerned that if something really was as loud and as bright as neighbors described, it could potentially be dangerous. So they began to investigate. Like many of the neighbors in the area, police first guessed that the noise could be coming from a hunter's rifle. But O'Mansky reminded them of the bright flash of light. So police started investigating whether it was an electrical or gas problem. Experts with BGE began checking all of the power equipment in the area. They climbed on rooftops of the nearby Beth Tfiloh School and nearby condo building to check all of their electrical equipment and air compressors, but found no evidence of problems. There was no electrical charring, burning or malfunctioning equipment. A BGE spokesman confirms their investigation found no electrical problems or gas leaks in the area.Then police decided to take the next step and install two cameras hoping to videotape the boom. Elaine O'Mansky volunteered to wake up every night around midnight to turn on the camera officers had set up in a fifth floor window of her building. "It wasn't until we caught it on tape that we realized the magnitude of what they were actually talking about," said Sgt. Warehime. "The sound is almost deafening. You can't describe it. Seeing it on tape without hearing the sound doesn't do it justice." Videotape taken at 3:34 a.m. on April 23 does show a flash of light that lasts a fraction of a second and lights up an area the size of a football field in the middle of the night. The flash on the tape is accompanied by loud boom that sounds like a crack of electricity or lightning. WJZ meteorologist Bernadette Woods analyzed the dates, times and weather conditions when the phenomenon occurs. "There's nothing coming out of the sky," said Woods, who added that weather likely isn't the primary cause of the flash and boom, but it may be a contributing factor. "The atmospheric conditions could be such that they are supporting the event." Cameras have videotaped the event on two other occasions. Police have used the shadows cast by the light flash to determine an approximate area where they think the light source may be coming from--30 to 40 feet in the air in the parking lot between the Beth Tfiloh Community School and the Stevenson Commons condominiums building. Officer Posluszny has already repositioned two cameras several times hoping to see the source of the boom and flash. "So when we get it again, and we will get it again, we should be able to narrow down where it's starting," said Posluszny. "I will not retire until I find out what this is." Police say they've consulted with many experts and they're running out of options. "Everything we can rule out, we are ruling out, and we're almost at a loss right now," said Warehime. "We need some help." "Whatever it is there's a scientific explanation," said Johns Hopkins University Physicist Dr. Peter Armitage, who reviewed the video tape evidence and went to the neighborhood where it's happening to see if he could find any possible causes. Armitage says more evidence is needed before he can form a scientific conclusion. "Right now it's hard to say the phenomenon is definitely occurring though," said Armitage. "It's not some people with creative imaginations that's for sure. When there's repeated eyewitnesses, and then there's something on tape like this, you really have to pay attention." For now, neighbors like Bonnie Friedman and Elaine O'Mansky say their quality of life depends on whether this mystery is solved. "We would like it to stop," said O'Mansky. "You go to sleep at night just wondering in the back of your mind, 'Is it going to happen again?" Friedman agrees. "We even said maybe it's aliens. We're at the point where we'll listen to anyone's theory. We just need to stop it because my homeowners need to sleep." Police say they will release more information about the case Tuesday afternoon. http://wjz.com/local/baltimore.county.mystery.2.710503.html

APRIL 16, 2008 - INDIANA: Mysterious Lights, Boom Baffle Residents, Authorities : Bright Lights, Loud Boom Reported In 2 Indiana Counties-- Strange sights and sounds filled the nighttime sky in Howard and Tipton counties late Wednesday night, leaving residents and authorities wondering what they had seen and heard. Reports of lights in the sky, crashes and vibrations on the ground baffled residents, who began calling authorities right after the rumblings at about 10:30 p.m. Calls flooded dispatch centers and 6News from people concerned that what they had seen and heard might have been a crashing plane, a meteorite or something else. Many said the light display was followed by an explosion -- a boom that shook their homes. A slight metallic smell was reported in Kokomo shortly after the incident. Crews scoured a field near U.S. 31 and County Road 300 North in Tipton County, but found nothing, 6News' Derrik Thomas reported. "I had heard the boom. It kind of woke me up," said veterinarian Dr. Jack Hughes. "It was louder than anything I'd heard before. You would think a sonic boom from a jet, or something like that. This was big." Hughes' clinic is near the area crews searched for any sign of debris. Indiana State Police and local sheriff's departments dispatched at least 50 emergency responders to the scene. "We had civilians report things falling from the sky, almost consistent with something like flares or sparks," said ISP Sgt. Jeremy Kelly. "Also, very consistent with a meteor shower. If we had to guess what it was, that's what we would say." David McDonald said he was startled by what he thought was someone shooting a gun behind his house. "It was totally eerie. What could make that kind of a noise and justify that kind of a response?" McDonald said. The Federal Aviation Administration said early Thursday that there were no reports of missing planes. No debris was found. http://www.theindychannel.com/news/15907638/detail.html

June 4, 2007 -- EXETER, NEW HAMPSHIRE - After people called 911 to report hearing explosions, emergency officials initially thought there had been underground methane gas blasts. But it turns out that New Hampshire actually had three small earthquakes over the weekend. The tremors caused no damage or injuries. The state Emergency Management Agency said the quakes were felt Saturday night and Sunday afternoon in the Portsmouth-Exeter area. The U.S. Geological Survey listed two of the quakes as magnitudes 1.4 and 1.9. A magnitude for the third quake was not available. Initially, officials investigated whether the sounds and tremors were caused by underground methane gas explosions, and the naturally occurring gas was found escaping from the ground in Portsmouth on Saturday. However, authorities were able to rule that out as the cause, Assistant Fire Chief Steven Achilles said. He said the methane gas discovery was either a coincidence or a result of the tremors. New Hampshire experiences an average of three to four earthquakes per year, most of them so minor they aren't even felt, said Jim Van Dongen, spokesman for the state Office of Emergency Management. http://www.comcast.net/news/national/index.jsp?cat=DOMESTIC&fn=/2007/06/04/680124.html&cvqh=itn_earthquakes

May 14, 2007 - TENNESSEE -- Dozens of people in Knox County woke up to some rumbling this morning and investigators are still working to figure out what it was. Dozens of calls flooded central dispatch at about 1:15am, mostly from two neighborhoods off Northshore Drive in West Knoxville; Admiral's Landing and Northshore Landing. Many people tell us they woke up to loud rumbling and thought there were animals or prowlers in their basements or attics. Others thought there was some sort of explosion shaking the ground. J.R. Andrews lives in Admiral's Landing and says it woke his entire family up and they all ran outside to see what was going on. "Half of our neighborhood had come outside and there was these constant shakes in the ground, constant thud. It felt like some type of missile attack," he said. "It wasn't an earthquake, I've been through an earthquake." KUB not reporting any problems in the area and so far, there has been no reports of a possible earthquake. http://www.volunteertv.com/home/headlines/7491652.html

Mar. 14, 2007 --Mysterious Explosion Sounds in Colorado Springs Sound disturbs neigbors Tuesday night --Residents of a central Colorado Springs neighborhood say they've been rudely awakened the past few weeks, by a series of explosive sounds which seem to be growing louder each time. "I didn't hear it," says Lisa Gostnell, who was asleep at the time. "But my husband did. he looked out, and there were a lot of cop cars and people outside their houses--so it must have been pretty loud." Neighbors around Sausalito Drive, west of the Colorado Springs Country Club, heard the latest noise Tuesday around 11 p.m. They say it was loud enough to shake homes. Some neighbors left their homes, and went out on the street to see if they could see anything. Some saw a cloud of smoke; others saw a flash of light--but still no clues to the source of the mysterious explosion. Residents say it's the third explosion in as many weeks--all occurring just before midnight. "The first one was in the back of the house," explains resident Terry Harrison. "It shook the house, it was loud. The second one, there was a ball of light that went through the house here." She says her dog hid when he heard the sound. The mystery deepens after listening to resident Rex Rudy. "About an hour before (Tuesday's noise), we heard a shooting-type of firework. It was really loud, going over our houses. It sounded like a pop bottle rocket, but louder. It sounded like a meteor or something." Police are investigating, and say they've found no evidence so far to explain the noises. A raised area bordering part of the neighborhood is an old coal mining shaft-- but although it has caused sinkholes in the past, residents say they don't believe it's related to the explosions. Whether it's someone's prank--or something more serious--remains unknown. http://www.krdotv.com/story.cfm?nav=news&storyID=2595

January 2007 -- OXFORD TWP. - Did you hear that? Did someone break the sound barrier, have aliens landed on the corner of Drahner and Coats roads, or is Detroit Tiger Joel Zumaya lobbing snowballs at the front door? Well, don't start the "X-Files" theme just yet, as there seems to be a scientific explanation behind why residents in four counties said they heard loud booms and bangs Thursday night. In what is being explained as a possible weather phenomenon involving a drop in temperatures, officers and sheriff's deputies in Oakland, Genesee, Lapeer and Shiawassee counties were dispatched to several locations to investigate suspicious noises in neighborhoods. Oxford Township police dispatcher James Sommers said the department received eight calls between 8:32 and 11:30 p.m. from residents, complaining about the "explosions." Typically, he said, it may get one or two complaints about bangs during the time of year when fi reworks might be set off. But this wasn't a case of someone setting off bottle rockets, at least not as far as police could tell, he said. "We just couldn't figure it out," Sommers said. Well, Greg Smith, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service forecast office in White Lake Township said there is a reasonable explanation why so many people were hearing these "explosions." Smith said rapidly dropping temperatures could have created a stable layer in the atmosphere called a temperature inversion. That temperature inversion will trap sound waves close to the surface of Earth. Those sound waves, when dispersed, are forced to move horizontally from their source, instead of upward and horizontally, he said. The weather office monitored the many calls from residents in the four counties between 7:30 and 9:30 p.m., Smith said. "So that may have caused what people were hearing," he said. "It has occurred before, when people hear sonic booms and the sound waves just got trapped." While Smith admitted he didn't know the origin of the booms and bangs, he did say sound waves can travel as far as 50 miles from their source. "So it was not directly caused by the weather, but indirectly," he said. And since sound waves can't talk, many people were frightened by the noises, which some claimed sounded as if something had hit their homes. Lapeer County Sheriff's deputies said cars were dispatched just after 10:15 p.m. to check on neighborhoods in North Branch Township and Arcadia Township. Not finding footprints or anything suspicious, deputies said they figured someone was just shooting a gun in the area. Sommers said most of their calls were from people living in the township, especially off Drahner, Davison Lake and Baldwin roads. "A person up on Davison Lake Road said it shook his house," he said. "One lady described it as sounding like someone was banging with both fists on her door." http://www.theoaklandpress.com/stories/012707/loc_2007012725.shtml

April 27, 2006 - San Deigo, CA - A group of local scientists has uncovered some clues to the source of a mysterious disturbance that rattled San Diego County on the morning of April 4, shaking windows, doors and bookcases from the coast to the mountains. The scientists, based at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, say the disturbance was caused by a sound wave that started over the ocean and petered out over the Imperial County desert. Using data from more than two dozen seismometers, they traced its likely origin to a spot roughly 120 miles off the San Diego coast. That spot is in the general vicinity of Warning Area 291, a huge swath of ocean used for military training exercises. The Navy operates a live-fire range on San Clemente Island, which is within Warning Area 291 and sits about 65 miles from Mission Bay. The researchers also have charted dozens of similar, if less dramatic, incidents that seem to have originated in the same general area of the ocean. They aren't sure what caused any of them. Peter Shearer, a Scripps professor involved in the research, has no idea whether the April 4 disturbance was natural or made by humans. “I would guess it's either an explosion that somebody hasn't told us about or it could have been a meteor coming into the atmosphere,” he said. “But it was certainly a big disturbance in the atmosphere.” Steve Fiebing, a Coronado-based Navy spokesman, said the live-fire range on San Clemente Island was inactive April 4. He also said there was no Navy or Marine Corps flight activity in Warning Area 291 on that day that would have caused a sonic boom or a countywide tremor. The area, also known in military circles as Whiskey 291, covers 1 million square miles and is off-limits to civilian planes and ships, Fiebing said. “There was no unusual training that would have caused anything close to what people here felt,” he said. Cmdr. William Fenick, another local Navy spokesman, said no San Diego-based warships were conducting operations in Warning Area 291 that day. “We don't know at this time where this earthquakelike sensation came from,” Fenick said. The April 4 disturbance hit San Diego County shortly before 9 a.m. A quake was quickly eliminated as the cause, leaving a mystery that has been the source of three weeks of speculation from Pacific Beach to Lakeside to the Internet. The Scripps researchers believe the disturbance was the result of a low-frequency wave that traveled through the air at the speed of sound as it moved from the ocean to the desert. It was picked up by more than two dozen seismometers in San Diego and eastern Riverside counties, the researchers said. According to data analyzed by the scientists, the wave was felt on San Nicolas Island, northwest of San Clemente Island, at 8:40 a.m. It hit Solana Beach at 8:46 a.m., the western edge of the Cleveland National Forest at 8:47.30 and the eastern side of the Salton Sea at 8:53 a.m. From there, it appears to have dissipated. Elizabeth Cochran, the lead researcher on the project, said the wave moved at 320 meters per second, roughly the speed that sound travels through the air. Its velocity was too slow to be that of an earthquake, she said. Cochran, a postdoctoral researcher in the geophysics and planetary physics department, said the only explanation is that the wave was traveling through the atmosphere, not through the ground. At each location, the wave could be felt for roughly 10 seconds, she said. Several months before the April 4 incident, the team had begun studying other nonquake disturbances that were registering on San Diego County seismometers, including 76 that apparently originated in that same general area of the ocean in 2003. Shearer said he and his colleagues figured that some of those disturbances surely must have come from offshore military exercises. The researchers haven't been able to determine whether the April 4 wave was more powerful than the earlier ones or whether it simply felt that way because of atmospheric conditions. If the disturbance was caused by the military, no one has owned up to it. The Navy and Marines say none of their planes were flying at supersonic speeds that morning. “I'm told that a sonic boom would not cover that distance at all,” said Fiebing, the Navy spokesman. The Navy uses Warning Area 291 for a wide range of training, including large-scale ship maneuvers and battle exercises, but Fiebing and Fenick said they were unaware of any such training April 4 that would have caused such a disturbance. Authorities have said a meteor probably wasn't the cause because it would have been noticed by the scientific community. The American Meteor Society reported no fireball sightings over Southern California on that day. http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/metro/20060427-9999-1n27boom.html

April 23, 2006 - San Diego, CA - Phenomena produce theories, but no answers. Life can serve up a good mystery every once in a while. Weird things happen that defy explanation, that make us wonder how much we really know about the world. Something of the sort happened in San Diego County shortly before 9 a.m. Tuesday, April 4, and so far no one has come forward with an explanation. Whatever it was, it caused a woman's bed to shake in Lakeside. It created waves in a backyard pool in Carmel Valley. It set off car alarms in Kearny Mesa and rattled windows from Mission Beach to Poway to Vista. At various spots throughout the county, people reported a rumbling sound or a booming noise. Scientists insist it wasn't an earthquake. The Federal Aviation Administration has no record of any planes producing a sonic boom by breaking the sound barrier. Camp Pendleton officials say no activities on the Marine base could have created such a disturbance. There were no large explosions in San Diego County that day, and no meteor fireballs were reported in the sky that morning. What was it, then? Maybe it was the same thing that caused a strange disturbance in Mississippi on April 7, when the locals heard a loud boom that rattled windows all over Jackson County, throwing emergency workers “into a tizzy,” said Butch Loper, Jackson County's civil defense director. Authorities in that state still don't have a clue as to the cause. Nor, to this day, can anyone explain what was behind similar episodes in Maine two months ago, or Alabama three months ago, or North Carolina four months ago. In each of those cases – as well as in other incidents around the nation over the years – residents reported hearing windows rattle and feeling floors shake even though no earthquake was detected. There's almost certainly a simple, unromantic, “Aha!”-type explanation for each of these odd occurrences, something that everyone has overlooked for whatever combination of reasons. But who knows? Maybe we're not being told everything. Maybe the Earth still does things that present-day humanity doesn't understand. The morning of April 4 was cloudy in San Diego County, with rain in some areas and temperatures in the low to mid-60s. In Lakeside, Judi Mitchell, an emergency medical technician who works the night shift at a hospital, had returned to her home on Lakeshore Drive and was just about to fall asleep. It was 9 a.m., give or take a few minutes. Suddenly, the earth started to vibrate. “The windows shook; my bed moved,” she said. “It moved my bookcase.” The rattling lasted a few seconds. Mitchell, 44, has lived in East County all her life and considers herself an expert at judging the size of an earthquake. She quickly guessed this one was a 4.5 on the Richter scale. But to the astonishment of everyone, a quake wasn't the culprit. Within hours, both the U.S. Geological Survey in Pasadena and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla issued statements saying no earthquake had been detected. Last week, USGS spokeswoman Stephanie Hanna said the agency stands by its initial conclusion. “No, it wasn't an earthquake,” she said. “We haven't changed our minds about that.” By noon on the day of the incident, The San Diego Union-Tribune was being inundated with e-mails from people wondering what could have caused the strange tremors. “My garage door is double steel and it weighs about 500 lbs.,” a man in University City wrote. “It was rattling back and forth like a leaf in the wind for about 3 or 4 seconds.” A Mission Beach resident compared the sensation to “somewhere in between an explosion and an earthquake.” A woman in Carmel Valley noted that the rattling was very distressing to her cats. In recent days, the Union-Tribune has tried to get to the bottom of this mystery. Our efforts haven't met with much success. Was it a sonic boom? If so, it didn't come from any aircraft at Miramar Marine Corps Air Station, Maj. Jason Johnston said. And it didn't come from any Navy planes in San Diego, said Cmdr. Jack Hanzlik, a Coronado-based spokesman for the Naval Air Forces. “There were no Navy aircraft operating in this area during that time capable of flying at transonic speed,” he said. Officials with the California National Guard and several Air Force bases also insisted their planes weren't the culprit, as did a Colorado-based spokesman for the North American Aerospace Defense Command. If a plane had been traveling over San Diego County at supersonic speeds, the Federal Aviation Administration would have picked it up on radar, said Cheryl Jones, the FAA's San Diego-based liaison to the Marine Corps. Jones checked with FAA control centers in Palmdale and San Diego, which monitor 180,000 square miles covering Southern California, southern Nevada and western Arizona. The agency has no records of any plane, military or civilian, breaking the sound barrier on the morning of April 4, she said. Under federal law, Jones added, the military can fly at supersonic speeds only in certain restricted areas, three of which exist in Southern California. One is 150 miles to the north of San Diego, the second is 220 miles to the east and the third is 27 miles off the coast. The odds of a plane in any of those areas creating a sonic boom that could be felt all over San Diego County are virtually nonexistent, she said. Could some sort of rocket be the cause? A spokeswoman at Vandenberg Air Force Base, 60 miles north of Santa Barbara, said the base didn't launch any rockets that day. Neither did NASA, a spokesman for that agency said. Was it a meteor? Unlikely, said Ed Beshore, a researcher at the University of Arizona's NASA-funded Catalina Sky Survey, which monitors asteroids and other heavenly objects. Every few months, a meteor enters Earth's atmosphere and produces an “airburst” that can cause a disturbance on the ground, Beshore said. In one recent case, an airburst over the Mediterranean Sea broke the windows on a ship, he said. In the most extreme incident ever recorded, a 1908 airburst over Siberia flattened trees for thousands of miles. But an airburst powerful enough to cause tremors all over San Diego County would have been noticed by scientists, Beshore said. And the American Meteor Society reported no fireball sightings over California on April 4. A spokeswoman for Camp Pendleton scoffed at speculation that some sort of Marine mortar training exercise at the base might have caused the countywide rumbling. “It was not us,” 2nd Lt. Lori Miller stated flatly. Miller was home in Vista on the morning of April 4 when her windows began to rattle. There is no possible way, she said, that a Pendleton training exercise could have caused a sensation like that. Two months before the San Diego incident, Robert Higgins, the emergency management director of Somerset County, Maine, was confronted with a nearly identical set of puzzling circumstances. In February, panicked residents in a 15-mile radius reported feeling earthquakelike tremors. Authorities quickly ruled out an earthquake, explosion or industrial accident. “I've called it the mystery of Somerset County,” Higgins said in a telephone interview last week. He still hasn't figured out the cause. “I'm not done with it,” Higgins said. “I don't forget.” Then there was the incident in Mobile, Ala., on Jan. 19, when residents in two counties reported hearing what sounded like an explosion and feeling “quakelike tremors,” according to news reports. To this day, no one is certain of the cause. By process of elimination, authorities have settled on the sonic-boom theory, even though no branch of the military has owned up to it. There have been other similar unexplained events over the past few years. Something of the sort happened in Wilmington, N.C., on Dec. 20, 2005; Winston-Salem, N.C., on March 5, 2005; Charleston, S.C., on Aug. 1, 2003; and Pensacola, Fla., on Jan. 13, 2003. “The large boom that shook walls and windows from Century to Milton on Monday remains a mystery, and probably will stay that way,” a reporter for the Pensacola News Journal wrote after the Jan. 13 episode. On those occasions when a logical explanation is wanting, it's sometimes necessary to consult that archive of wisdom otherwise known as the Internet. Among bloggers and Web-based conspiracy theorists, one of the leading explanations for the San Diego disturbance is that the military is testing a top-secret spy plane called the Aurora, which supposedly can travel several times the speed of sound. “Sir, I've never even heard of that plane before,” an Air Force spokeswoman in Virginia responded when asked about the possibility. Even UFO experts are baffled by what happened in San Diego. Asked whether a flying saucer might have caused such an event, Peter Davenport of the Seattle-based National UFO Reporting Center said, “Probably not.” “UFOs almost never generate sonic booms or shock waves,” he added. “They accelerate so rapidly that they leave a vacuum in the sky, much the way lightning does.” What happened in San Diego on April 4 seems destined to remain one of life's little mysteries, as inexplicable as those Bigfoot sightings in the Pacific Northwest. Mitchell, the Lakeside hospital worker, remains convinced that an earthquake was the culprit, regardless of what the experts say. The tremors were too strong, she said, too violent to be anything else. “The earth actually moved,” she said. “You could feel it. If it moved my bed, it moved the earth.” If anyone out there has any answers, would you please be kind enough to share them with the rest of us? A lot of folks are really curious. http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20060423/news_1n23bigboom.html

April 8, 2006 -- Mysterious boom shakes Jackson County, Mississippi. People here haven't had anything rattle their world much since Katrina. But Friday morning, when "an extremely loud boom" shot through the air, people filed out of businesses to look up, a deputy climbed onto the roof of the courthouse scanning the horizon for plumes and the county civil defense director rushed home from Biloxi. The boom occurred at about 9:30 a.m. and shook windows of businesses along U.S. 90, trailers near the beach, industry along the river and was heard miles away in Hurley. Don Stewart, chief deputy with the sheriff's department, was stopped at a traffic light on Old Mobile Highway when it hit. "I was in a Ford Expedition, that's a big vehicle, and it felt like someone rear-ended me," Stewart said. "I got out and looked. There was no vehicle behind me. I knew I wasn't going crazy." Investigators and deputies evacuated the office trailers at the courthouse, and Maj. Mike Robichaux climbed on the roof to try and spot any source of the noise. Butch Loper, county civil defense director, tried to work it by phone as he rushed back to Jackson County. He was flooded with calls. His people contacted the usual suspects, the chemical plants, the refinery and the gas pipeline near Industrial Road. All reported nothing. Signal International, the industry that repairs oil rigs along the Pascagoula River, checked the rigs to make sure nothing had exploded, said one employee. Inside the Northrop Grumman shipyard, a supervisor of shipbuilding employees said it sounded like someone had fallen off the roof. Too loud to be a transformer and too widespread to be a train, it was heard along Martin Bluff Road in Gautier. Some people reported a second boom; others reported a sulfur smell. By midday, Loper was satisfied it wasn't an industrial explosion. Keesler Air Force Base, the Air National Guard at the state level and Eglin Air Force Base near Pensacola reported they had no planes flying in the area. A man in downtown Moss Point said he missed the boom on Friday, but claimed to have seen evidence of military jets dog-fighting at about 20,000 to 30,000 feet over the Gulf on Thursday. On the ground Friday, Loper said he had patrol cars reporting from several law enforcement agencies. "We put full patrol out and found nothing," he said, so he favors the sonic boom theory. He said the jets don't mean to create the boom, but it happens sometimes when they make a tight turn. "I know we can't find a trace of anything else," he said. http://www.sunherald.com/mld/sunherald/news/local/14294474.htm

April 7, 2006 - Central California -- Mysterious Boom. Yesterday about 3:12p.m. here in Central California, there was a huge BOOM noise, the feeling like a 4.0+ earthquake (single jolt, not rolling) and the windows rattled like crazy, all at once. Only thing is, according to the USGS, there was no earthquake at that time, or even a local quarry explosion (which they also list). http://www.foxvox.org/

April 4, 2006 - San Diego, CA - A mysterious booming sound rocked the region Tuesday morning, causing a flurry of phone calls to authorities who couldn't explain the cause. "It sounded like someone was dropping a 500-pound bomb," said Sgt. J.T. Faulkner at the Poway Sheriff's Station. Officials said there was no definite evidence to link the blast about 8:55 a.m. to atmospheric conditions, earthquakes, sonic booms or explosions from artillery training at Camp Pendleton.

"We really don't have anything to confirm the cause," said Stephen Rea, emergency services coordinator for San Diego County's Office of Emergency Services. "There was no damage throughout the county." The U.S. Geological Survey didn't register anything in the immediate area. "We felt something shake our building," said Lt. Jim Bolwerk at the sheriff's communication center in Kearny Mesa, where dispatchers immediately fielded phone calls from concerned residents. Cpl. K.T. Tran, spokesman for Camp Pendleton north of Oceanside, said he didn't feel any shaking in his building. The base started training at 6 a.m. with 81mm mortars that can sometimes be heard up to 50 miles away. "I felt it at my home, University City," said forecaster Philip Gonsalves of the National Weather Service. "All that happened was that my windows rattled. There's a lot of speculation (about the cause), but that's all it is." http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2006/04/05/news/sandiego/10_41_384_4_06.txt

April 4, 2006 - San Diego, CA - It wasn’t an earthquake, and it wasn’t Marine Corps artillery practice. No one knows for sure what it was, but it rattled buildings and shook windows around San Diego County this morning [4/4/06]. The mysterious boom was heard or felt about 8:45 a.m. The county Sheriff and police departments around the area say they got dozens of calls asking what it was, but they didn’t know either. The Geological Survey says there were no earthquakes at the time and Camp Pendleton says, although exercises are going on, there were no explosions when the boom was heard. Officials at Marine Air Station Miramar say there were no flight operations in the area that could have caused a sonic boom. That leaves a sonic boom caused by a high-flying aircraft operating under high security, possibly from Edwards Air Force Base. Experts say that is the most likely explanation. http://sandiegoblog.com/archives/2006/04/05/or-it-could-have-just-been-a-house-party/

A mysterious boom was felt across San Diego county today. It rocked buildings, but it doesn't appear to have been an earthquake. http://www.kusi.com/news/local/2577691.html

Residents Throughout County Hear Booms, Rattling-- San Diego County residents heard mysterious booms and felt some rattling Tuesday morning, 10News reported.   Residents from all over, including Ramona, called police and 10News to report the loud noises, which some speculated was sonic booms or an earthquake. But no measurable seismic activity was recorded in San Diego County Tuesday morning, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, and Navy and Marine Corps Air Station Miramar officials had no reports of a sonic boom occurring Tuesday. However, Marines at Camp Pendleton were conducting mortar training Tuesday morning. No damage or injuries were reported. http://www.10news.com/news/8464244/detail.html?rss=sand&psp=news

March 10, 2006 - RICHMOND, VA -- Va. Tech will study causes of quakes -- Prompted by minor earthquakes west of Richmond and the microquakes that rattled the city in 2004, scientists hope to catch central Virginia in motion with a new network of seismic equipment. Two quakes in 2003, including one of magnitude 4.5, a lesser temblor in 2004 and the "booms" that shook Richmond's North Side that fall convinced the Virginia Tech Seismological Observatory's director that he needs to know more about underground activity in central Virginia. "If we can actually catch these things in the act . . . we'll begin to know what's going on, in terms of the frequency and how big they are," said Martin Chapman, who heads the Virginia Tech earthquake center. Once alerted to a spate of temblors, seismologists could then bring in additional equipment to spot future movement, he added. The new network involves placing a monitor in Richmond, which hasn't had seismic equipment for more than 20 years since the U.S. Geological Service transferred monitors to earthquake-prone California, according to Benjamin Johnson, the city's emergency management coordinator. Virginia Tech's seismic network, part of the Advance National Seismic System, includes equipment at the seismology center in Blacksburg and in Giles County, and in Forest Hill and Princeton in West Virginia. Federal officials also have equipment in Blacksburg. The sensors feed data to Virginia Tech and is shared with the U.S. Geological Survey and other federal agencies. The network is being expanded to focus on central Virginia because of the area's increased seismic activity over the past few years. A short-period sensor was moved from Walker Mountain near Wytheville in December to Virginia Western Community College in Roanoke. A more sophisticated broadband station, a three-piece, $30,000 seismometer system that can more fully characterize the ground motion at greater distance, has been installed at the University of Richmond. It was online just in time to catch the 7.4 magnitude quake on Feb. 23 that shook Mozambique, more than 8,000 miles away from the campus. The new equipment at UR was paid for by a federal grant and reviewed by the Virginia Department of Emergency Management and the federal Department of Homeland Security, Johnson said. Although it belongs to the city, the system will be maintained by Chapman's staff and may be used for academic purposes. In addition, Chapman hopes to install equipment at the J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College campus in Goochland County and seeks funding to install another monitor elsewhere in central Virginia. Equipment was placed in Richmond because of the mysterious "booms" that rocked the Ginter Park neighborhood. At the time of the shaking, in the fall of 2004, little was known about these microquakes, but there had been a few recent reports in eastern Henrico County and earlier in the area in the winter of 1986-87. Now, Chapman says it appears that the microquakes occur in episodes that can last just a few days or even weeks. The epicenter for these swarms seems to be underneath Confederate Gen. A.P. Hill's statue and grave at the center of the intersection of Laburnum Avenue and Hermitage Road, "as best I can tell," he said. Although some of the booms were blamed on two teens, later convicted, who set off homemade explosive devices, Chapman said he believes that some were microquakes so minor that they wouldn't register on monitors far away. "If we're going to monitor these things and be able to record these little bumps, these little tiny earthquakes like that, we have to be in town," he said. Chapman said he thinks the granite and other hard rock underneath the city is strained by some unknown factor, possibly groundwater fluctuations, triggering the shaking. He hopes the new monitors will shed some light on the cause. "It's a curious phenomenon, and I'd like to know a lot more about it," he said. Virginia has had more than 160 earthquakes in the past three decades, but only about a sixth of them were felt. The state's biggest earthquake, a magnitude 5.8 temblor in Giles County, came in 1897 and was felt in 12 states. Elsewhere in central Virginia, smaller earthquakes that cause little or no damage are felt each year or so. What worries Chapman is a repeat of the 4.5 magnitude earthquake that struck Dec. 9, 2003, centered in Goochland. That quake was felt locally and in New York. "That's just a little taste of what's liable to happen at some point in the not-so-distant future. There's no reason why a much bigger earthquake couldn't happen there," Chapman said. "I don't know if there's going to be 'the big one,' but if anything starts to happen . . . we want to be in front of it and get the information out there," the city's Johnson said. "If you get the information a half a day late, it doesn't allow you to get ready or prepare." http://www.timesdispatch.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=RTD/MGArticle/RTD_BasicArticle&c=MGArticle&cid=1137834630032

February 25, 2006 --SKOWHEGAN, MAINE -- EARTH SHAKING REPORTS POUR IN http://morningsentinel.mainetoday.com/news/local/2473364.shtml
Reports continued to pour in Friday from residents who said they experienced what appeared to be earthquake tremors at about 10 a.m. Thursday morning. Although state officials said no seismic experience was recorded on any of the instruments in Maine or New England, Somerset County's Emergency Management Director Robert Higgins Sr. said he still aims to get to the bottom of the mystery. Higgins said the number and validity of reports received Thursday and Friday -- in addition to similar reports last Friday in Solon -- indicate Thursday's event was significant and not just a sonic boom. "Something was wrong," Higgins said. "What bothers me is that it didn't show up on any of the seismic equipment. Those overseas (jet) flights are up 24,000 to 30,000 feet. That wasn't it. The incidents covered such a large area of such significance, if it didn't show, why didn't it?" On Thursday, at least a dozen residents reported tremors within a 15-mile radius between Anson, Madison, Skowhegan and Norridgewock. On Friday, however, the calls about Thursday's incident came from further away -- including Winslow, Freedom, Clinton and Johnson Flats Road near the Burnham-Pittsfield town line. Bill Jefferson, a customs official at Coburn Gore, said he was at his North Pond Road in Winslow Thursday, working on his computer, when he heard and felt the earth shaking. "My dogs went berserk," Jefferson said. "I've experienced an earthquake before, and this was an earthquake."     Lawrence Tilton on Dudley Corner Road is just as sure it wasn't an earthquake. He said he was going to his mailbox Thursday when the earth shook and he saw jets going overhead: "It was a sonic boom. Mystery solved." Sheila Gilbert on Johnson Flats Road, said the earth movement "shook my whole home; it rattled the whole trailer." Margaret LaRochelle, U.S. Route 2 Norridgewock near My Cousin's Place, said the shaking and thud scared her dogs and her daughter. Bob Poulin, at a mobile home park in Clinton near Galusha's store said his wind chimes started shaking and he turned on his scanner to see what was happening: "It was quite a shake."    Most of the callers said they were glad to read in Friday's Sentinel that they were not alone in their experience.    "I heard the noise and I thought it was an accident out front... I'm glad I wasn't the only one," said Victoria Bowring of Clinton. Katherine Waite, an American living in Munich, Germany, wrote in an e-mail that she read the Sentinel article and had an explanation. She said she belongs to an active Web forum that recently discussed "big boom noises." She said some of the members are engineers from the aerospace industry and they said that if military jets are scrambled, they break the sound barrier at a lower altitude than normal, which could cause a sonic boom.   Attempts to reach a military official for a response were unsuccessful.

January 19, 2006: NBC - WPMI - MOBILE, AL -- It wasn't an earthquake, but it felt like it to many of you. What sounded and felt like an intense explosion rocked much of the local area around 2:30 Thursday afternoon, shaking homes and businesses and shaking up a lot of residents. "I heard a shaking and a rattling,” said Lana Cook, who experienced the boom in her home off Moffet Road. "It was like someone pounding with their fists." The boom created some scary moments for residents throughout much of the local area, who experienced what sounded and felt like an explosion. "This was hard, loud and continuous,” Cook added. Mobile County's Emergency Management Agency says crews were dispatched to check for any type of explosion or industrial accident. They say they're looking at the incident as most likely a sonic boom whose intensity was amplified by local weather conditions. Chris Norton was at work at a warehouse off Moffett Road when he felt the boom. “I kind of felt like the walls had expanded,” Norton said. “You could feel the walls and doors sort of blow open. It was pretty intense." For the time being, the exact cause remains unknown. The National Earthquake Information Center in Colorado registered no unusual activity, and officials at Eglin Air Force Base say they had no high-speed flights that would have caused a sonic boom.
No injuries or structural damage was reported after this afternoon's boom. http://www.wpmi.com/news/local/story.aspx?content_id=4B3F4225-1C4A-450B-82A2-B32D973A2C4D

December 21, 2005: WRAL-TV - CAROLINA BEACH, N.C. -- Carolina Beach authorities were investigating reports of three loud booms in the area Tuesday.   Valita Quattlebaum, a public information officer for Carolina Beach, said that about 4:20 p.m., she heard a loud boom and felt the building she was in shake. Numerous other residents and professionals in the area also called police reporting the same. Quattlebaum said that Tuesday afternoon she was unaware of what may have caused the booms, but officials were looking at causes ranging from a plane flying too low to the ground to an earthquake. “We are making phone calls to the local weather stations and to the National Weather Service, but we don’t have any confirmations,” Quattlebaum said. The U.S. Geological Survey Earthquake Center said it had not record of an earthquake along the North Carolina coast and local police that there were no scheduled activities in the area that would have cause the booms or buildings to shake. Officials said no reports had been received of injuries or structural damage. http://www.wral.com/news/5592178/detail.html

December 21, 2005: Wilmington, N.C. Star - Mysterious booms lead to surge of speculation -- Tim McKinney knows for sure what caused the blasts – the Seneca Guns, he said. He’s heard the mysterious coastal rumblings a thousand times, but never with the intensity he did Tuesday while working on the set of One Tree Hill in downtown Wilmington.“That’s the strongest I’ve ever felt it in my life,” he said. Something certainly caused a series of thunderous booms about 4 p.m. that sent some hurrying to call 911 and others looking skyward for answers. Curtis Reeves, who lives near Belville, said he initially feared an explosion at the Military Ocean Terminal at Sunny Point, near Southport. “It felt like an earthquake,” he said. “It shook every house in this neighborhood.” But officials reported no problems at the ammunition depot or elsewhere. And with nary a cloud in the sky, the booms weren’t weather related, said Ron Steve, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Wilmington. Steve said he spoke to the U.S. Geological Survey, which said there had been no seismic activity in the area. The weather service radar did, however, pick up signs of “chaff” off the coast of New Hanover and Brunswick counties, he said. Chaff is like metal confetti that military fighters emit to trick radar-seeking missiles, he said. It’s possible that jets off the coast broke the sound barrier as part of a military exercise. The public relations office at Cherry Point Marine Corps Air Station in Havelock was unable to confirm by press time if Marines were on exercises nearby. Some people reported seeing military planes and helicopters flying in the area after the booms. But McKinney said the sound came from the ground, blaming the mysterious booms that have been reported in the area for centuries. The name, “Seneca Guns,” comes from a similar phenomenon in New York and Connecticut. Legend has it that the Seneca Indians are getting their revenge with the guns that Europeans used to displace them. More scientific explanations say the boom of the guns comes from earthquakes, material falling off the continental shelf, or pockets of hot air exploding like balloons. http://www.wilmingtonstar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051221/NEWS/51221005/0/sports

December 16, 2005: WKRG-TV - A mysterious force shook buildings from Pascagoula, Mississippi to Chumuckla, Florida Friday morning, but no one News 5 talked to knows exactly what caused it. Sometime between 9:00 and 9:30 am, a thunderous sound rumbled through the Gulf Coast. Not everyone felt it, but those who did all described it in much the same way. Ruthstein Woods in Eight Mile said, "I was laying in the bed watching TV and all of a sudden, it was like big boom, like the ceiling or something was like falling. I jumped up and ran and looked, and I looked outside, but I didn't see anything. It was like real, real shaking and stuff." Donny George in Midtown felt it, too. "It was more like a sonic boom. I questioned whether or not the space shuttle had come back into the atmosphere, because I'm from Florida. And when the space shuttle comes in there, it makes a sonic boom, rattles the windows," said George. He added, "It rattled the building, rattled the windows. I thought somebody had hit our building." It shook Harvey Smith as well. "I just heard a loud boom, I thought maybe some kind of sonic boom or something like an airplane breaking the sound barrier, or...but it shook my house. I still don't know what it was." People from as far away as Pascagoula, Mississippi to Flomaton, Alabama to Chumuckla, Florida called News 5 to tell us they heard and felt something. But because not everyone felt it, speculation rose from the ground to the air. Some suspected military aircraft causing sonic booms by breaking the sound barrier. But News 5 was unable to confirm whether it was a jet. So, the mystery and the speculation continue. http://www.wkrg.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=WKRG%2FMGArticle%2FKRG_BasicArticle&c=MGArticle&cid=1128768768378&path=%21news%21local

November 22, 2005: ISRAEL -  NetNews.com Mysterious 'booms' rattle homes - Residents report hearing loud blasts in different parts of country, claim their homes shook as result; IDF says in response no unusual military activity that may have caused blasts detected, Seismology Institute says no earthquakes recorded; Rita from Herzliya: I don’t buy it. They should just tell us what is causing these shockwaves and blasts. Just three weeks after dozens of readers from across Israel told Ynet about unusually loud 'booms' and tremors throughout the night, residents again reported hearing loud boom-like sounds in different parts of the country Tuesday, mainly in coastal regions, claiming their homes shook as a result. Police officials confirmed people reported they heard “explosions,” but added that the source remains unknown. The IDF said in response that no unusual military activity that may have caused the “explosions” was detected, and the Seismology Institute said no earthquakes were recorded. Rita, a resident of Herzliya in central Israel, said, “Suddenly the entire house began to shake; even our cat felt it and began to act in a peculiar manner. It lasted for a few seconds. It was as if someone was forcefully rattling the home’s windows and doors.” 'I don't buy it' However, she said she did not hear any explosions. “The rumbling was similar to last month’s incident, but then it took place at nighttime and we were able to hear the blasts, which were strong,” she said. “Last time they said it was ultra-sonic booms from planes that flew over the Gaza Strip. I don’t buy it. They should just tell us what is causing these shockwaves and blasts. It is getting a bit scary because we do not know what the source is.” Most of those who reported of the blasts reside in the Sharon region, in central Israel; they said the shockwaves came from the direction of the sea. Last month Ynet readers offered several explanations for the mysterious blasts - from an alien invasion to underground nuclear tests. The IDF said at the time the blasts may have resulted from a rare combination of IAF activity over Gaza and a unique weather conditions. An Israel Air Force officer said at the time, “this is an unusual phenomenon in which cold and warm layers are alternately formed in the air, and the sound waves move like a ping pong ball between the ground and layers. http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3173415,00.html

November 5, 2005: UK Guardian Palestinians hit by sonic boom -- Israel is deploying a terrifying new tactic against Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip by letting loose deafening "sound bombs" that cause widespread fear, induce miscarriages and traumatise children. The removal of Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip opened the way for the military to use air force jets to create dozens of sonic booms by breaking the sound barrier at low altitude, sending shockwaves across the territory, often at night. Palestinians liken the sound to an earthquake or huge bomb. They describe the effect as being hit by a wall of air that is painful on the ears, sometimes causing nosebleeds and "leaving you shaking inside". The Palestinian health ministry says the sonic booms have led to miscarriages and heart problems. The United Nations has demanded an end to the tactic, saying it causes panic attacks in children. The shockwaves have also damaged buildings by cracking walls and smashing thousands of windows. "I have never heard such a loud explosion. I thought it was right over the top of my building," said the owner, Tareq Dayyeh. "Sometimes you hear the rockets the Israelis fire but this was different. I felt like I was in the middle of a bomb. When I ran out the door I thought I might find the rest of the street was gone." Over the past week, Israeli jets created 28 sonic booms by flying at high speed and low altitude over the Gaza Strip, sometimes as little as an hour apart through the night. During five days in late September, the air force caused 29 sonic booms. A senior Israeli army intelligence source, who the military would not permit to be named, said the tactic is intended to break civilian support for armed Palestinian groups. "We are trying to send a message in a way that doesn't harm people. We want to encourage the Palestinian public to do something about the terror situation," he said. "What are the alternatives? We are not like the terrorists who shoot civilians. We are cautious. We make sure nobody is really hurt." Yesterday, two medical human rights groups asked the Tel Aviv high court to outlaw the use of sound bombs on the grounds it amounts to illegal collective punishment and is detrimental to health. "The stress is phenomenal," said Eyad El Sarraj, a psychologist and director of Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, one of the groups filing the petition. "The Israelis do it after midnight and then every one or two hours. You try to go to sleep and then there's another one. When it happens night after night you become exhausted. You get a heightened sense of alert, waiting continuously for it to happen. People suffer hypertension, fatigue, sleeplessness. "For children, the loud noise means danger. Adults may know it's only a sound but small children feel threatened. They are crying and clinging to their parents. Afterwards they are dazed and fearful, waiting for something to happen." The UN Palestinian refugee agency said a majority of the patients seen at its clinics as a result of the sonic booms were under 16 and suffering from symptoms such as anxiety attacks, bedwetting, muscle spasms, temporary loss of hearing and breathing difficulties. Although the Israelis say the shockwaves do not cause casualties, doctors at Gaza's Shifa hospital said the overflights had forced women to miscarry. The number of miscarriages had increased by 40%, according to Jumaa Saqqa, a surgeon and hospital spokesman. "There were no other symptoms and the rise happened after the sonic booms. We can see no other explanation. The number of patients admitted to the cardiac care unit doubled. Some of them proved to have suffered serious harm." Dr Saqqa said one overflight occurred while he was operating. The Palestinian health ministry estimates the sonic booms have caused at least 20 miscarriages. The UN's Middle East envoy, Alvaro de Soto, wrote to the Israeli high command this week saying he was "deeply concerned at the impact on children, particularly infants, of the use of sonic booms". Mr de Soto said he did not accept that the tactic was a legitimate response to Islamic Jihad and Hamas firing rockets into Israeli towns. "Sonic booms are an indiscriminate instrument, the use of which punishes the population collectively. We ask therefore that their use be stopped without delay," the letter said. The military was forced to apologise after one sonic boom was unintentionally heard hundreds of kilometres inside Israel last week. Maariv newspaper described it as sounding "like a heavy bombardment. The noise that shook the Israeli skies was frightening. Thousands of citizens leapt in panic from their beds, and many of them placed worried calls to the police and the fire department. The Tel Aviv and central district police switchboards crashed."   http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,1607450,00.html

July 22, 2005: MSNBC - Eerie recording captures sound of tsunami -- Sound from last December's huge tsunami-causing earthquake was picked up by underwater microphones designed to listen for nuclear explosions. Scientists this week released an audio file of the frighteningly long-lasting cracks and splits along the Sumatra-Andaman Fault in the Indian Ocean. The spine-tingling hiss and rumble is an eerie reminder of the devastation and death that is still being tallied in the largest natural disaster in modern times. At least 200,000 people are thought to have died as a result of the magnitude 9.3 earthquake, the tsunami, and the lack of food, drinkable water and medical supplies that followed. The audio recording of the quake starts out silent. A low hiss begins and the intensity builds gradually to a rumbling crescendo. Then it tails off but, frighteningly, builds again in waves as Earth continues to tremble. The audio file is sped up 10 times to make it easier to hear. As it was recorded, the sound was at the lower threshold of human hearing, but it could have been noted by someone paying attention. "If you were diving even hundreds of miles away you could hear this," said study leader Maya Tolstoy of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. "You would hear it as sort of a 'boom.'" http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8670264/

March 8, 2005: Winston-Salem Journal / NC / Paul Garber -  The mysterious booms that rocked much of downtown Saturday night may remain forever a mystery. About 8:20 p.m., 911 dispatchers started getting a wave of calls reporting the booms, said Shawn Cline, the hazardous-materials coordinator for the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Office of Emergency Management. The calls covered an area of downtown between Glade and Cherry streets, from Brookstown Avenue to the south and West 24th Street to the north, he said. Cline said that he spent most of yesterday looking at whether a small earthquake or sonic boom might have caused the noise, but by the end of the day he didn't have a solid answer. There may not be enough earthquake-measuring equipment in the area to determine whether a small earthquake occurred, said Tyler Clark, the chief geologist for the N.C. Geological Survey. "This is likely to go down in the history books as a mystery," Clark said. Saturday's booms were about the 10th such report he has had from the Winston-Salem area in the past five years, Clark said. "These are not anything new," he said. "They've happened to our state for a long time." There are more active fault lines in the states that border North Carolina then there are inside the state, he said. "In North Carolina, we sit in the quiet zone," he said. Because of that, there is not a network of seismic equipment to track local earthquakes. It would be too expensive to track activity that almost never causes death or destruction here, he said. It's also possible that the noise was a sonic boom, which is more likely to make the kind of explosive sound reported than an earthquake, Clark said. But a sonic boom could not have come from a plane leaving or landing at Smith Reynolds Airport because the plane would be going too slow, said Dave Short, the air traffic manager at the airport. Sonic booms occur when an airplane goes faster than the speed of sound. Smith Reynolds air-traffic controllers do not track anything above its air space of 12,000 feet, Short said. City public utilities officials considered the possibility that a methane explosion in a nearby sewer could have caused the booms but have ruled out that possibility. "If an explosion had happened, there's got to be a release of pressure somewhere," said Ron Hargrove, the deputy director for the City-County Utilities Division. There have been no such reports, which would include such things as blown manhole covers or bubbles in toilet water. Loud noises and vibrations that struck the Konnoak Hills neighborhood in 1994 turned out to be small earthquakes, the largest of which measured 1.7 on the Richter scale.

December 13, 2004: Associated Press - Mysterious S.C. booms now heard in N.C. -- A loud boom breaks the stillness on a clear day. There are no storms in the area, no jet aircraft flying by and no reports of earthquakes or explosions. The booms, heard from time to time in South Carolina and more recently, in North Carolina, are popularly known as Seneca Guns, a folk term for unexplained booms that have been noted along the East Coast for years. The name comes from Seneca Lake in upstate New York where the booms have been heard at least since the 1800s. Author James Fenimore Cooper, who wrote "The Last of the Mohicans" among other novels, wrote about the phenomenon in a short story more than 150 years ago. Recently, the booms have been heard frequently along the coast of North Carolina, particularly around Wilmington. One was heard in the Charleston area on Aug. 1 last year. Another apparent Seneca Gun was heard in May 2000 in the Midlands of South Carolina. While there is apparently no official records of such booms, they generally bring dozens of phone calls to law enforcement officials who can generally have no explanation. There is no agreement on what causes the booms. Rich Thacker, a senior forecaster with the National Weather Service in Charleston, said they could result of colder air meeting warmer Gulf Stream air. There have also been suggestions the booms might be caused methane gas explosions on the ocean floor. "I think that this is going to be a harder one to pin down than the Loch Ness monster," Thacker said. "It really is truly kind of mysterious." Tyler Clark, the chief geologist for the North Carolina Geological Survey, said he has heard explanations ranging from sonic booms carrying over the ocean to methane gas explosions, meteorites and even unidentified flying objects. "I've heard all kinds of crazy things," Clark said. "The bottom line is that nobody's been able to come up with an explanation for it." He discounts the popular idea that the booms are caused by earthquakes. "The problem that we have is that earthquakes, contrary to popular belief, don't make a whole lot of noise," he said. Duke University seismologist Peter Malin said he knows how to tell where the noises are coming from. He suggests putting a recorder under ground and then comparing the readings to readings from a recorder above ground. He suggests the booms are caused in the atmosphere by electrical discharges with no visible lightning. But Thacker is skeptical of that theory. "I can't perceive of how that could occur without some kind of cloud," he said. "It defies all logical explanation at this point," Clark said. http://www.journalnow.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=WSJ%2FMGArticle%2FWSJ_BasicArticle&c=MGArticle&cid=1031779656473&path=!localnews&s=1037645509099

December 4, 2004: WhatDoesItMean.com by Adam Holland - MYSTERIOUS BLASTS IN MASSACHUSETTS -- Looking south from his home on Curtis Road Tuesday night, Chris Lyons saw the bright flash light up the clouds. About three seconds later came the boom a deep thump that shook his entire house.   From Hudson, N.H., to the Chelmsford line, the eastern half of Tyngsboro has been rocked with well over a dozen of these mysterious, pulsating booms over the past five weeks, rattling both windows and nerves.   Lyons said he knows a thing or two about explosives. As a youngster, the engineer used to mess around with M-80s or fashion homemade explosives under proper adult supervision, of course out of black gunpowder and aluminum piping.  "Those are like sparklers compared to what is going on here," Lyons said. "If this were in a house, there would not be a board left. The house would be pulverized.   "Ten sticks of dynamite might not completely blow up a house," Lyons added. "But that happened that night ... I can't even describe it. For a guy who's not afraid of this stuff, my God, I felt very intimidated. "All I could think of, to tell you the truth, was my son going to school the next day, and it was unsettling," Lyons said. All reported incidents have occurred after dark, mostly between 7 and 9 p.m. Nearly all of them have been reported on Mondays and Tuesdays.  When the bangs were first heard in late October, police called the Federal Aviation Administration, thinking they might have been sonic booms from aircraft. They were not.   Residents didn't report the incidents at first, thinking they were related to demolition or construction projects that might be happening in the area. Blasting permits are only allowed during daytime hours, and none were issued during this time period.   Callers initially reported seeing bright flashes of light in the hills west of the Firehouse Restaurant & Lounge which is about a half-mile south of the Tyngsboro Bridge and to the east, near the banks of the Merrimack River. Most of the flashes were white, but other eyewitnesses have reported seeing orange and red flashes. One resident said she saw blue lightning-like streaks. "I didn't think anything of it," said Jackie Baker, who lives down the road from the Firehouse Restaurant. "But then, when it shook the house... ."   On Nov. 1, police received dozens of calls reporting at least six incidents between about 7:30 and 9:30 p.m. The Lowell and Chelmsford police departments also investigated similar complaints stemming from the same incidents.   Tyngsboro patrol cars were even in the area during all of the bangs, but officers could not pinpoint their location. Riding on all-terrain vehicles the next day, other officers searched the expansive woods west of the Boston University Corporate Education Center campus, where some thought the blasts might have originated. More booms were heard Nov. 2, Nov. 9, Nov. 23 and Nov. 30.   "It was very loud," said Henry Moulton, who lives on Lawrence Road, just south of the school complex on Norris Road. "Something like a bomb exploding in World War II."   "I thought it was in my back yard," said Moulton's wife, Yvette. "I thought maybe the swimming pool had blown up."    It took nearly 10 minutes for Henry Moulton to get through to the police dispatcher, whose telephone line was flooded with dozens of similar calls.   What is especially baffling is that, to date, no one has reported finding any evidence of explosions, such as burn marks, splintered wood or rock or other debris.   "There's got to be something, somewhere," said Ellen Lyons. It would seem unlikely that the blasts are being caused by dynamite or more modern explosives. In the wake of 9-11, even blasting caps must be painstakingly accounted for, making it nearly impossible to misplace such materials without drawing attention from federal investigators. Some residents suspect the blasts could be homemade concoctions of fertilizer, chemicals or explosive gases.   "We definitely want to get to the bottom of this ... absolutely," said Selectman Kevin O'Connor. Deputy Police Chief Richard Burrows said the police don't know what's causing the low-pitched booms and are looking for the public's help.   People who have seen the explosions or know who is responsible are asked to call the Tyngsboro Police Department.   http://www.whatdoesitmean.com/index574.htm

December 4, 2004: Mystery Tremors in US, Australia -- Unknowncountry.com is one of the few news sources in the world that is able to assemble similar unusual stories from different areas, and now it appears that mystery tremors, like the mystery booms reported last week, are taking place in diverse areas. Like the booms, the tremors are being explained as local phenomena, but, when they occur in clusters like this, is that really true? Residents of Hervey Bay in Queensland, Australia experienced a mystery tremor on November 29, just after 3PM Australian Time. The tremor was perceived as a low rumble and a fluttering sensation in the air, described by residents as “odd.” Royal Australian Air Force officials could not explain the phenomenon, but said that it was not related to any known air activities. A day later, residents of Northern New Jersey experienced four small seismic events of 1.3 magnitude on the Richter Scale. Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, NY, traced the tremors to a rock quarry in the area. Like the booms that took place worldwide in different areas last week and in recent months, local events seemed to explain them. Or did they? http://www.unknowncountry.com/news/?id=4294

November 19, 2004: WWBT NBC12  Richmond, Virginia - Mysterious 'booms' continue with puzzling regularity in Richmond - Those mysterious booms on Richmond's Northside continue to be-fuddle city officials. They've been happening for three weeks now and residents say no one can tell them why. The latest “boom” was just last night. Based on a map of 911 calls received since the booming noises began, the majority came from the area near Palmyra and Gloucester. For three weeks, city officials have explored a multitude of scenarios. They've come up empty and still the booms and shakes continue. Officials have looked into every logical explanation: a buildup of sewer or natural gas -- both of which have been ruled out for now. As well as other possibilities: including furnaces blowing up (that would be a one time occurrence), weather patterns like thunder, not likely says the city, construction, trains colliding, sonic booms -- all a no go. City officials won't admit they're stumped, but they're certainly frustrated. “It's certainly disruptive and disconcerting when it happens. But I think people understand it's not a public safety issue at this point," says city spokesman Bill Farrar. Another possibility is someone playing pranks. Solving the mystery of these "booms" has now become a full-fledged investigation -- involving the fire department as well as emergency management services on both the city and state level. The councilmen representing the area plan to hold a special meeting on the booms this Sunday for residents. It'll be at 7 PM at Hermitage Home on Westwood Avenue. http://www.nbc12.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=WWBT%2FMGArticle%2FWBT_BasicArticle&c=MGArticle&cid=1031779248261

November 10, 2004:  WANE-TV Newschannel 15, Ft. Wayne, INDIANA - After about a month of silence, Fort Wayne's mysterious "boom" has returned. "You can't describe it," said Helene Lilly, who heard it almost 10 times Tuesday night and Wednesday morning. "You think you're in a war." Newschannel 15 and the Fort Wayne Police Department have each received dozens of phone calls about the noises. This time, the loudest ones seem to have come from near Parkview Hospital on eEst State Boulevard. The people in that neighborhood said their houses were rocked and their windows were rattled repeatedly sinceTtuesday night. According to residents, there were four loud booms between 9:30 p.m. and midnight, and another round of four between 6 a.m. And 8:15 a.m. Wednesday. As of right now, neighbors are concerned. "I need help because I can't sleep, it scares me, and it scares my whole neighborhood and the children over there, they're upset, too. And it just isn't right you know?" Lilly said. The Fort Wayne Police have no answers. "It's a rabbit we're still trying to chase down the hole right now," said PIO Michael Joyner. "We don't know what the source is." Joyner said the FWPD has already increased patrols of the area to try to identify the source. http://www.wane.com/Global/story.asp?S=2546862&nav=0RYbSy3m

November 8, 2004: Eastern Daily Press, Norfolk, England - A suspected sonic boom heard across north-east Norfolk today was not caused by a British aircraft, it was confirmed tonight. The loud bang, heard at least from Sheringham to Halvergate near Yarmouth, startled hundreds of people going about their daily business at around noon. But a Ministry of Defence spokesman said it was not a domestic fighter that caused the incident, although he was unable to confirm the source of the sonic boom. “We believe there was a sonic boom, but it was not a British aircraft that caused it,” said Lt Col Stuart Green. “It was not one of ours.” Whether the aircraft was European or American was not clear, but they would be the most likely suspects. But it would have been a military aircraft, as no civilian plane is capable of going fast enough to make a sonic boom. A spokesman for the UK Civil Aviation Authority said the now out of service Concorde was the only civilian craft that had ever been able to travel fast enough to create the phenomenon. North Norfolk MP Norman Lamb described how he had been sitting in his office in North Walsham when he heard an “incredible boom”. “The building shook and like many people I was shocked. I thought 'has there been some sort of gas explosion?'” Mr Lamb said he felt the “disturbing” incident begged questions that needed to be answered. He pledged to approach ministers for an explanation. Ben Dunnell, assistant editor of Aircraft Illustrated and formerly from Norfolk, said sonic booms were rare in the UK. “There are regulations governing supersonic flight, but it is not clear what happened on this occasion.” When the sonic boom was heard, windows and homes shook while some people were reported to have been running for cover.   “I heard this enormous explosion,” said John Hilton, who was in Stalham at the time. One or two people were very worried, although most realised fairly quickly what it probably was. But I don't feel things like this should be happening.”   Police and RAF bosses received scores of calls from those concerned at the explosion. A sonic boom is a loud noise generated when an aeroplane travels faster than sound waves, which move at approximately 750mph at sea level. Pressure waves merge to form shock waves, which are heard as sonic booms when they hit the ground. Although there has been no official confirmation of the noise being a sonic boom, a spokesman at RAF Coltishall said there had been an assumption it was. He added that the Ministry of Defence in London was handling the investigation into the incident. A spokeswoman for Norfolk police said it was possible the noise was a sonic boom and that the investigation was in the hands of the RAF. The noise was heard in Overstrand momentarily before it was heard in Cromer, suggesting it came from an aircraft travelling east to west. http://new.edp24.co.uk/content/news/story.aspx?brand=EDPOnline&category=News&tBrand=edponline&tCategory=news&itemid=NOED08%20Nov%202004%2017%3A55%3A31%3A097

January 20, 2004: Manatee County, Florida-- Windows rattled. People frantically dialed 911. Sound familiar? No, it's not Lititz. It's Manatee County, Florida, where in June residents heard and felt the same kinds of thunderous booms reported in the small Lancaster County town eight days ago. The mysterious explosion heard in Florida was only one case among 20 reported to police across the country in the last several years, according to the Bradenton Herald newspaper. Similar phenomena have occurred as close as Dover, Del., the paper reported. And just like those, the booms heard in Lititz on Jan. 12 remain unexplained. Weird. Very, very weird. "It's one of those things people would like an answer for,'' said Randy Gockley, the county's emergency management coordinator. "It's one of those unexplained things.'' In addition to Lititz, the sporadic booms here have also been felt in Elizabeth and Manor townships, Columbia Borough and parts of eastern Lancaster County dating back to Jan. 2. Several good theories have been debunked. Was it roadwork near the Lancaster Airport? Blasting at a Lititz-area quarry? A series of small earthquakes? No, no and no. Was it a sonic boom from a supersonic fighter jet? It depends on whom you ask. Charles K. Scharnberger, a professor emeritus at Millersville University and expert on earthquakes, has ruled out a quarry blast or earthquake -- both of which would have clearly registered on a seismograph. "I would think that blasting is enough of a charge that if that many people felt it, I certainly would have recorded a clear signal,'' he said. "I see quarry blasts all the time. Whatever this little thing I saw was, it was not a quarry blast or an earthquake. "A sonic boom is still the best explanation I can think of,'' Scharnberger said. "The only outfit flying faster than the speed of sound is the military.'' Typically, though, military fighters do not fly exercises over populated areas because of the panic their sonic booms cause below. Officials at both Harrisburg International and Lancaster airports refuted theories that the noises were caused by aircraft traveling at or above the speed of sound overhead. "My operations people aren't aware of anything like that,'' said HIA spokesman Scott Miller. "They don't get many supersonic airplanes through here.'' An air-traffic controller backed up his story: "We didn't have any particularly large aircraft going through here -- nothing large enough that would be going that fast or cause something like that.'' At the Lancaster Airport, air traffic manager John Moeller said that if the noise were a sonic boom, many more people than the several dozen who called police would have felt it. "A sonic boom doesn't fly,'' Moeller said. "When it happens, it happens over a very broad area. Anything that's off the nose of the aircraft is going to feel it. If you feel it in Lititz, you feel it in Neffsville and Lancaster.'' Moeller said the booms heard on Jan. 12 may have been caused by construction near the airport. Mountville-based Abel Construction Co. is relocating parts of Millport and Kissel Hill roads in a $9.1 million project that will lay the groundwork for a runway extension. But Bill Mead, the project manager, poked a pretty big hole in that theory. "We haven't done any blasting over there since before Christmas,'' he said. Jeff Weidman, an accountant who works in Brownstown, suggested the mysterious booms could be "frost quakes'' -- such as the one he and his co-workers felt Monday night. "It actually felt like something fell on top of the roof. It shook the building quite a bit,'' said Weidman, who works at Detweiler, Hershey & Associates on Oregon Pike. "We kind of looked out the window to see if anything fell over or if there was an accident,'' Weidman said. "We didn't see anything.'' A frost quake, Scharnberger explained, occurs when a thick layer of ice covering the ground suddenly cracks. "It can make a loud, sharp banging sound,'' he said. While that explanation is certainly plausible for the loud boom in Brownstown Monday night, it most likely does not explain what happened on Jan. 12, Scharnberger said. There was no ice on the ground, and the temperature was above freezing. "I don't think we had such conditions,'' Scharnberger said. The mystery continues. http://www.100megsfree4.com/farshores/n04boom1.htm

January 7, 2004: San Diego, CA - At 4:20 PM on January 6, numerous residents of the San Diego area reported a mysterious boom in the region. The sound was comparable to a sonic boom, but was of unknown origin. Military authorities claimed that they had no aircraft in the area flying at supersonic speeds at the time. Similar booms were heard in north of this area in the 1992- 1993 period that were so persistent that they resulted in questions being asked in congress. Although the Air Force denied any involvement at that time, it was generally believed that the booms were associated with testing of the secret Aurora aircraft out of Edwards Air Force Base. Witnesses all report that, unlike military craft, UFOs are silent, despite the fact that they have bright lights and make attention-getting maneuvers. Are they trying to hide, or to attract our attention—exactly what is their agenda? http://www.unknowncountry.com/news/?id=3454

June 20, 2003: FarShores.org - Manatee, NC - Theories abound days after mysterious boom  - The mysterious booming noise that shook portions of Manatee County continues to defy easy explanation, adding the local area to a growing list where the unexplained phenomenon has occurred. The thunderous blast, which rattled windows and residents' psyches from Anna Maria Island to East Manatee shortly before noon Monday, remained a hot topic of conversation days later. Theories as to the source abounded, but the answer continued to elude residents, officials and scientists alike. "It sounds like you have a good mystery down there," said Michelle Barret, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Geological Survey in Reston, Va. Manatee isn't alone. Similar inexplicable events have been reported in Pensacola; Cape Fear, N.C.; Dover, Del., and more than 20 other U.S. cities and towns in recent years. In all those places, the source of the startling booms has never been determined. And like those places, officials could only say what they thought the Manatee mystery wasn't. U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy officials dismissed a sonic boom from one of their jets as the source of the noise, saying none of their aircraft were in the skies above Manatee at the time. But that doesn't fly with some area residents, who said they heard two concussions - a loud clap, followed by a fainter one almost immediately afterward - that make it consistent with a sonic boom. "While I'm not surprised that the Air Force didn't admit to it, I'm quite sure that it was a military plane breaking the sound barrier," said Eric Seibert of Bradenton. "As a kid I used to hear B-58 bombers breaking the sound barrier as they flew out of an Indiana Air Force base. This was the same sound and effect." It might have been a military plane hundreds of miles away, said Dick Cutshall, who manages the airspace above Avon Park bombing range. Sonic booms can travel more than 100 miles under certain atmospheric conditions, bouncing off clouds and zones where cold and warm air meet, he said. No residents reported seeing military planes in the sky at the time of the boom, prompting some to speculate that it was a top-secret military flight of some sort. The Air Force has been rumored to be working on a hypersonic jet, which conspiracy theorists and UFO enthusiasts believe is behind several mysterious booms heard across the country. Air Force officials declined to comment. Others think Monday's burst was an explosion of some sort, but emergency officials said they would have known about it if there was one. Officials also discounted a reported transformer explosion at Albert Whitted Airport in St. Petersburg as a possible cause, saying it actually was a small electrical panel box that blew at 11:24 a.m. - more than 20 minutes before the booms heard in Manatee. "I would find it hard to believe that caused it because it was such a minor incident," said Lt. Rick Feinberg of St. Petersburg Fire & Rescue, which responded to the incident. "I really doubt it was this." Although Manatee residents also reported feeling the ground tremble along with the boom, it wasn't an earthquake, geologists said. Their sensitive seismic sensors, which have recorded sonic booms caused by space shuttles returning to Earth, detected nothing out of the ordinary anywhere in Florida on Monday. Nor was it weather-related, the National Weather Service in Ruskin said its equipment recorded no unusual weather conditions that could have caused the burst. That has left some Manatee residents to wonder if something more other-worldly is responsible. "If there is no explanation concerning meteorological events, planes or other possible solutions, could it be extraterrestrial?" asked resident Lori Fullerton-Melton. "Just a thought." Bland Pugh of Gulf Breeze, the Florida state director for the Mutual UFO Network , said he has not received any recent reports of UFO sightings in this part of the state. Residents elsewhere also are grappling with similar mysteries. The unexplained booms, also called sky booms and sky quakes, have occurred from Rhode Island to California in recent years. Residents in the Pensacola area have heard mysterious booms four times since 1989, most recently on Jan. 13 of this year, the Pensacola News Journal reported. Chattanooga, Tenn., citizens heard sky quakes on two successive Sundays earlier this month. Similar cases have been reported in Denver, Narragansett Bay, R.I., Los Angeles and several other cities since 1997, according to the Web site About.com. http://farshores.250free.com/n03boom.htm

August 22, 2002: Sonic Booms Adds To India 'Scarlet Rains' Mystery -- Scarlet rains and vanishing wells are the setting for the monsoons this time in Kerala. Yet, the phenomena have sent scientists scurrying around for answers. Ironically, instead of providing an explanation for the curious happenings, scientists have thrown up more questions. After testing the red rainwater in Changanassery and other places, scientists at the Centre for Earth Science Studies (CESS) and Botanic Garden Research (TBGRI) labs have sought answers to four questions: Is the explosive sound heard preceding the scarlet showers inter-linked? What produced the huge quantity of spores (believed to have made rainwater reddish)? How were the spores injected into the clouds? If the source is local, how was the mass transported without getting distributed over a large area? In fact, the CESS scientists have contradicted their earlier explanation that the scarlet rains were caused by a meteor which travelled from "east to west on the morning of July 25 and exploded over Changanassery". They now say that the coloured rains were caused by fungus. "The biological study conducted partly by the CESS and partly by TBGRI detected red coloured cell structures, which tentatively have been identified as the spores of some species of fungus," said CESS Director M Baba. The latest inference is that the coloured rains are a mystery although they have been reports of similar occurrences in other parts of the world. The scientists have also rejected reports that the rain was accompanied by thunder and lightning. "Lightning does not occur during the southwest monsoons. Lightning is produced from large cumulonimbus clouds which develop only when plenty of humid air is available on the earth's surface. The conditions at the time were not suitable for this. Secondly, people over a radius of around only 1.5 km heard the sound. This is highly improbable," said Baba. "Therefore, the only possibility is that the sound was actually a sonic boom produced by some object moving at supersonic speed at a relatively low altitude. Since no aircraft is expected to fly at supersonic speeds close to the ground, it is opined that a meteor had approached the area and possibly exploded to produce red colour rain," the CESS director said, expanding on the earlier "meteor theory". Scientists are also divided on why scores of wells have reportedly been damaged or disappeared and new ones suddenly sprung up. According to one school of thought, these are a warning for impending earthquakes. Others, however, believe that they are a result of underground water pressure and heavy rains. Similarly, the sudden shrivelling up of leaves in some areas is puzzling the scientists. Meanwhile, Kerala chief minister A K Antony has asked people to await the results of the scientific probes. http://www.rense.com/general28/scart.htm

June 10, 2002: Canberra, Australia -- In the past six months, close to 100 earthquakes occurred in areas around a little village just north of the Australian Capital Territory. They didn't cause any damages but bored residents. The Canberra Times quoted Monday a resident living near the village of Sutton as saying that "It doesn't worry me. it's just a novelty. That's not to say it couldn't end up in some gigantic big bang somewhere down the track." The earthquakes were more often heard as a boom rather than felt as a shake, another resident said. The Australian continent seems to be sitting on a solid plate and no big earthquakes have been registered so far. In 1989, a quake hit Newcastle, a coastal city in New South Wales, killing one person. That was registered 5.6 on the Richter scale. Experts just can't explain the numerous small quakes. http://www.100megsfree4.com/farshores/n02ozqua.htm

January 12, 1999:  Light, boom a mystery By Jim Hughes, Denver Post Staff Writer (Colorado) -- A mysterious object lit up the night sky up and down the Front Range early Sunday - then startled witnesses with a deafening explosion. There was no official explanation about the object Sunday. Military spokesmen denied the object was a military aircraft. Local scientists speculated it could have been a meteor or an illegal firework. Douglas County resident Gunter Harz witnessed the phenomenon around 12:15 a.m. "All of a sudden, there was an impact that shook our house and then a double explosion immediately after the impact," Harz said. "I don't know if a meteorite makes that noise, but I do know that my house was shaking." Residents from Colorado Springs to Denver flooded area police dispatchers and military operators with calls about the object. But the phenomenon was not related to activities at any of the military installations around Colorado Springs, according to spokespeople for U.S. Space Control at Cheyenne Mountain and Peterson Air Force Base. "There was nothing that would have created a loud noise or explosion," said Lt. Jason Medina, a Peterson Air Force Base spokesman. Katy Garmany, director of the University of Colorado's Fiske Observatory in Boulder, said the object could have been a meteor. But meteors normally burn up 20 to 40 miles in the sky and don't emit any sound. "You have to consider the possibility that somebody was shooting off some high-grade illegal fireworks," she said. Jack Murphy, curator of geology for the Denver Museum of Natural History, said he thinks the object may have been one of the rare meteors that infiltrates the atmosphere and burns up closer to the ground. And if that was the case, scientifically valuable pieces of the meteor may have landed in the area, he said. The loud sound many people heard probably was a sonic boom, he said. Murphy said it would probably take him a few days to identify the object. "It's going to complicate my life for a few days," he said. The last big fireball that came this close to the ground in Colorado was recorded by a security video camera in Colorado Springs in 1995, he said. That same camera recorded Sunday's event, too, he said. The videotape, combined with testimony from witnesses, should help scientists figure out precisely what happened, he said. He is hoping that witnesses - particularly people east and west of Colorado Springs - will call his office. If fireworks were the cause, they were bigger than most found at Fourth of July celebrations, said Atom Abbott, who said he saw the phenomenon shortly after midnight from Downtown Denver. "It was a big, blue fireball," he said. "I thought it was a plane crashing, at first." Abbott's visual report was confirmed by others who claimed to see a white or blue light speeding through the sky early Sunday morning. Larry Sanders of Denver said Sunday morning's event was more dramatic than meteors he has seen before, he said. He was driving in Weld County after midnight when he saw what he described as "a very large bright light that lit up the clouds and several smaller, secondary explosions." Although a variety of military installations monitor the skies over Colorado, nobody other than the occasional astronomer looks for incoming objects from space, said Cmdr. David Knox of the U.S. Space Command unit at Cheyenne Mountain outside of Colorado Springs. "I don't want to say it was a meteorite, because I don't know," he said. "All I can say is it wasn't one of the 8,000 objects that we track." The agency monitors all objects "bigger than a softball" in Earth orbit, he said. http://paranormal.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.cseti.org/crashes/149.htm

January 10, 1999: Fairfield, Ohio -- MYSTERY BOOM HEARD NORTH OF CINCINNATI, OHIO -- On Sunday, January 10, 1999, dozens of people in Fairfield, Ohio (population 39, 729), a small city on Route 127 approximately 18 miles (28 kilometers) north of Cincinnati, heard a stunning and mysterious explosive sound.   The story was reported by newscaster Laura Randall on Channel 9, WCPO-TV in Cincinnati, that evening.  "Ms. Jenny Morgan of Fairfield 'reported that she had heard something similar to a shotgun sound.'"  "A second resident told of suspecting someone had thrown 'snowballs' at her house, while a third person described what they thought was a supersonic crash."  "At least 13 callers (to Channel 9) reported suspicious and frightening noises."  The sound was "attributed to 'ice heaving' or 'frost cracking'" by representatives of the National Weather Service at Wilmington, Ohio.   "Prof. Kenneth Hinkle, a geologist at the University of Cincinnati, refuted the 'frost-cracking' theory and said "such explanations are not workable in this instance."  "'In the high Arctic, frost-cracking resembles a sharp snap similar to a rifle report, which can be felt,' Hinkle told the newscast." A WCPO reporter summed it up: "We are left with an unsolved mystery." (Many thanks to Kenneth Young of Cincinnati UFO Research for this news story.)    http://www.rense.com/ufo2/ufofiles99.htm

January 8, 1999: Mystery Boom Rattles Central Delaware -- On Friday, a mysterious sonic boom rattled central Delaware. Calls poured into police agencies from Dover (27,630), the state capital, and nearby towns, including Lebanon (population 400), Camden (population 1,899) and Wyoming (population 977). "No one is quite sure what caused the sonic boom that shook the Kent County area on January 8. An aircraft of unknown origin shot through the sky at supersonic speeds, causing walls to shake and windows to rattle. Numerous phone calls flooded local police offices demanding answers." "According to 1st Lt. Dale Westover (USAF), spokesman for the Dover Air Force Base, 'Nearby air stations and bases have been contacted in regards to the aircraft, where it came from and why it was flying so low, but no one will take responsibility for the aircraft." "'We're not sure what it was, but it wasn't one of our C-5s,' said Airman 1st Class C. Todd Lopez of the 436th Airlift Wing" office of Public Affairs. The flyover occurred at 6:45 p.m. Inquiries were sent to the Patuxent Naval Air Station in Maryland, to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland and to the Air National Guard in Atlantic City, New Jersey. (See the State News of Dover, Del. for January 9, 1999, "Sonic boom is super mystery" by Bruce K. Ford. Many thanks to Gerry Lovell of Far Shores for forwarding this newspaper article.)
http://www.parascope.com/nb/uforoundup/uforoundup990125.htm#delaware

December 17, 1997: Rogersville, Missouri -- MYSTERY BOOM STARTLES PEOPLE IN THE OZARKS -- On Wednesday afternoon, December 17, 1997, a huge aerial explosion jolted the town of Rogersville, Missouri (population 995). According to news reports on KYTV (Cable Channel 12 in Florida--J.T.), the blast "rattled windows and blew open storm doors" in the small community on Missouri Highway 60 approximately13 miles (21 kilometers) east of Springfield. According to KYTV, a U.S. Air Force spokesman denied that the mysterious blast was a sonic boom caused by low-flying supersonic jet interceptors. The cause of the "sky boom" is unknown. The mystery deepened when Cal W., a retired farmer living in Ozark, Missouri (population 4,243), a town on Highway 14 just seven miles (10 kilometers) south of Springfield, telephoned a radio talk show and told how he and his wife had seen "five or six high-altitude jets" flying what appeared to be a crisscrossing search pattern across the sky. Contrails were pefectly visible in the clear, cold upper air, he reported. http://paranormal.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.cseti.org/crashes/151.htm

September 16, 1997: Univ. N.C. at Chapel Hill - Are you still wondering what shook the campus the afternoon of Sept. 16? So are the experts. But you can help solve the mystery. Christine Powell, professor of geography, is asking people to fill out "felt reports," describing what they felt at 1 p.m. that Tuesday afternoon when a boom shook the ground, registering 1.1 on the Richter scale. And even if you felt nothing, Powell said she and the graduate student studying the event still would like your report. Part of the mystery has been solved, Powell said. Analysis of readings from ground monitoring equipment demonstrate that the energy did not come from the air, eliminating such explanations as sonic booms, she said.   Hundreds of people already have used a web page to fill out felt reports, Powell said. You can fill out a report by going to the web site http://www.geosci.unc.edu/web/tremor.html. More reports are needed from South Campu because that's where early analysis of seismographic data points, she said. The source of the boom was underneath the Health Affairs area of campus, Powell said preliminary analysis of data showed. Although demolition work has been going on there, Powell said UNC Hospitals physical plant officials have insisted nothing out of the ordinary was done that afternoon. "Looking at the signals, we cannot yet determine if it was an earthquake or energy put into the ground," she said. It's possible a small earthquake was triggered by a cumulative effect of the demolition work, Powell said. However, analysis of felt reports may shift the charted center of the event away from the hospital area, she said. http://paranormal.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.unc.edu/news/gaz/archives/97oct08/file.6.html

May 15, 1997: Southern Ohio/Northern Kentucky -- At 1:15 p.m., Thursday May 15, 1997, an explosive sound described as a ‘heavy jolt sounding like thunder’ rolled across a wide area of Southern Ohio and Northern Kentucky. This makes the third such event since April 19, 1997 involving unexplainable explosive sounds heard in the Cincinnati area. Unlike the first two events, the May 15 happening was widely reported from a broad area encompassing at least 104 miles from as far away as Aurora, Indiana to West Union, Ohio, and involved multiple blasts.   Mr. Charles Stuart heard the sounds from his vantage point in West Chester, where he first thought it was thunder. He described the blasts as 6 separate jolts happening over a 10-minute duration. An Adams County resident contacted this writer to report a ‘sonic boom’ heard around 2:00 p.m. The boom greatly startled her and, she said, “shook her teeth.” Like the first two events from Milford and Newtown, the Clermont County area was the locality from which most complaints originated. The Clermont County Sheriffs Department (513-732-2231) advised that they had been ‘kept in a void with a black shroud over our head’ because they had no explanation for the sound. The calls originated at 3:45 p.m. from Tate Township, 3:52 p.m. from Monroe Township, 3:55 p.m. from Washington Township, 4:00 p.m. from Miami Township police departments. “We started getting calls from all over the county, we were swamped. They started out coming from Tate Township, and then they gradually spread out, the reports came from the far south and the far north parts of the county,” the dispatcher stated. A police dispatcher from Delhi Township also said that reports were generated from the entire ‘west side of town’ including parts of Zion Road, Whitewater Township and Anderson. The Delhi dispatcher stated that a second spate of booms were reported at 3:45 p.m. According to Mr. Terry Donald of WKRC Channel 12, the news department had received calls from Aurora, Indiana, Delhi, Clermont County and Boone County, Kentucky. The general suspicion is that something was travelling from west to east. WKRC Ch. 12 News had contacted Wright Patterson Air Force Base, and the base official stated that no super- sonic aircraft were stationed there, only transport planes. At about that time, stated the reporter, an F-16 jet (which can go supersonic) out of Springfield A.N.G. base did perform ‘touch and go’ maneuvers at Wright-Pat, but did not attribute the boom to this aircraft. WKRC Ch. 12 also confirmed that multiple booms were reported, and added that a Delhi resident called the news station to complain that her ‘little glass knick-nacks’ shattered, and also received a call from a resident from Butler, Kentucky, whose front door had exploded from the blast. 700 WLW news reported that DELTA AIRLINES talked to the FAA tower, where the tower said the sound was due to an ‘aircraft engine backdraft.’ They did not explain how this explanation would account for a sound that was heard as far out as Adams County or described as ‘booms’ which happened at least 6 times over an estimated 1-hour time period. A phone call was made to Delta Airlines (606-767-3427) where they denied the explanation. “I have no idea what that sound was,” said the telephone receptionist who said he had fielded a number of previous inquiries. “I’m trying to find out where 700 WLW came up with the explanation of an air-craft backdraft, because nobody out here knows anything about that phenomenon whatsoever.” The suspected sonic booms remain unexplained at this time until military agencies flying supersonic aircraft claim responsibility. At 12:08 a.m., Friday morning May 9, 1997, a mysterious "BOOM" shook a large area in the vicinities of Debolt and Main Street (S.R. 32) in the community of Newtown, Ohio, which is in the eastern section of Hamilton County. Another unexplained disturbance on April 19th was reported to the Clermont County and Miami Township police and fire services by residents of Thielmans Mobile Home Park on State Route 28 near Interstate 275. This explosive sound was accompanied by a flash of light. http://home.fuse.net/ufo/may15_97.html