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Mysterious Booms

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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."

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.

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."