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Mysterious Booms

Page 7

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.'"

March 8, 2005 Winston-Salem, North Carolina

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.

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 and 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... ."