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Mysterious Booms

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"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.

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.)

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.)

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.

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.