Santa Cruz - The search for the cause of the sonic boom, or booms, many Central Coast residents felt Wednesday morning looks to be a bust.
Thursday, a Federal Aviation Administration official said the search for the source of the mysterious morning rattle has turned up nothing.
"We reviewed all the radar data for flights in the airspace in Northern California around the time that people reported this boom," said Ian Gregor, FAA spokesman for the Western-Pacific Region. "There were several military aircraft operating but they were slow. None of these aircraft were going supersonic."
Of course, just because officials can't trace the boom -- which was reported across the Central Coast and almost exactly 12 hours earlier in Orange County -- doesn't mean people imagined the shaking around 9:15 a.m. Wednesday. Some reported other booms in the hours after that.
To create a sonic boom -- shock waves that rock buildings and produce a thunder-like crack -- a jet must travel faster than the speed of sound, which is 767 mph.
Gregor said that because air traffic controllers handle so much traffic it's possible a speeding jet in their midst didn't register as unusual.
The mystery has spurred its share of conspiracy theories. On the Sentinel Web site, readers suggested the boom was E.T.'s return, an intercontinental missile from North Korea or test runs of new, secret U.S. Navy jets.
"It was a chemtrail weather-modification program jet making rain for you," one poster stated.
A few suggested it was the sound of their retirement accounts crashing.
Orange County residents had similar theories after thousands of doors and windows across that county rattled and vibrated. Some blamed jets from nearby Camp Pendleton or suggested a passing asteroid was the source of the shaking, according to an Orange County Register story. The asteroid passed Monday night.
A U.S. Geological Survey spokesman, meanwhile, said Wednesday's shaking was not caused by an earthquake, though several people called 911 to report a possible rattler after the boom.
The National Weather Service, meanwhile, said there were no thunderstorms in the region.
Gregor said he doesn't know if they will ever know what caused to boom.
"Obviously something happened, but I don't know," he said.
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Comment: It is utterly amazing that even with someone who is a reader of the Orange County Register mentioning that it could have been an asteroid, none of the government, military or scientific authorities will "go there." At least not publicly.
The fact that THE asteroid went by on Monday does not signify that there couldn't have been other asteroid/meteors trailing along in it's wake and it is these that were heard, and felt, exploding in the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean.
The fact that one sonic boom was heard on March 4th at 9:15pm and the other on March 5 at 9:15 am is a little different, but it doesn't negate the fact that these could have been meteorites exploding in the atmosphere.. There could have been quite a trail of these things that either burnt up over uninhabited places or weren't heard.
The strangest fact of all is, as mentioned above, that government and military and scientific personnel do not want to go there - at least publicly.