You weren't imagining things if you heard a loud boom between 2 and 3 a.m. this morning.
Dr. Gary Senn, director of the Dupont Planetarium in the Ruth Patrick Science Education Center at USC Aiken, says it was a large meteor, technically called a bolide.
"We've had a couple of calls this morning from people," he said. "It seems like a few people were outside and actually saw the thing itself. Others reported hearing the sound."
He said people have reported the sound to be like a clap of thunder. Sightings were of a large fireball in the sky.
Christine Sexton
EchoWed, 18 Mar 2009 19:47 UTC
Paranormal investigators are looking into reports of a mysterious UFO seen flying over Pitsea.
A woman and her son witnessed the "burning fireball" whizzing across the sky at the speed of an aeroplane.
The 40-year-old was driving in Ashlyns, Pitsea, with her son, aged 20, when she spied the spectacle on the horizon at 8.30pm on Friday.
The woman, from Pitsea, said: "We couldn't believe it. We actually pulled over to watch it. It seemed to be near to the Barstable School area.
WKRGThu, 12 Mar 2009 21:43 UTC
News 5 has received reports from Spanish Fort to the Mississippi state line about a big boom that shook their homes. We've done some digging, but so far, no one has an answer for us.
The National Weather Service had no reports and suggested we check with the US Geological Survey.
The USGS is not showing any signs of seismic activity in our area. In fact, the closest earthquake to Mobile within the past week was 718 miles away in Sullivan, Missouri on Saturday night.
Jim Scott
NBCTue, 10 Mar 2009 17:49 UTC
The loud boom many southern Westchester residents heard Saturday morning might have been caused by a meteor traveling through the atmosphere.
Bill Thys of the Rockland Astronomy Club said there was a very good chance a meteor could have caused the sonic boom, lohud.com reported.
Jorge Fitz-Gibbon and Danielle DeSouza
LoHudTue, 10 Mar 2009 20:06 UTC
A second loud boom may have rattled windows in parts of Rockland County yesterday - and its origin remains as mysterious as the explosive noise that blew through southern Westchester County over the weekend.
"It was about 5:15 a.m., and it woke up the whole house," said Nanuet resident Keith Wallenstein. "The house was shaking. It sounded like someone had flown an F-16 over the house."
"If it was thunder, it had to be right on the house," Wallenstein said. "And I know a bunch of people who heard it within 3 to 4 or 5 miles away. So I don't know if it was thunder."
Spokesmen at several Rockland police departments said they were not aware of any reports of loud booms early Monday morning.
Comment: With all of the meteor/fireball sightings there have been, and even recorded, you would think that comments like the one above:
Taylor said. "It is possible that something in the atmosphere can do that, but it is very rare. But her seeing it moving in a downward arc would be an optical illusion. You would not be able to see that.
There have been a lot of "sonic booms" or "loud noises" reported over the last couple of years, and very, very few have had anyone even whisper that it might be a meteor exploding in the atmosphere, or creating a sonic boom as it streaks through the skies.
However, there was this very
recent article that someone did finally admit that the Hudson Valley "sonic boom" could have been a meteor.
It's as if it is forbidden to even think that meteors could be to blame for these "sonic booms". Amazing, isn't it?
© Unknown
The loud boom heard throughout southern Westchester early yesterday morning might have been a meteor crashing through the atmosphere at thousands of miles per hour.
What people said sounded like an explosion, thunderclap or a sonic boom was heard around 12:24 a.m. People from Scarsdale, Mount Vernon, Yonkers, Tuckahoe, Eastchester and Bronxville contacted
The Journal News or police.
People in Yonkers, Mount Vernon, Eastchester, Scarsdale, Tuckahoe and Bronxville heard a loud noise they say sounded like an explosion early yesterday morning.
But what the noise was remained a mystery.
Tuckahoe police said several residents called about the loud noise, but that checks with the Yonkers, Eastchester and Bronxville departments yielded no answers.
A Mount Vernon man said his clock read 12:34 a.m. when he heard the boom.
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."
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.
Though many Central Coast residents felt a rattle Wednesday morning, the source of the shaking was not under their feet, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. At 9:15 a.m., USGS sensors detected ground movement, but the signals did not resemble an earthquake, said Leslie Gordon, a USGS spokeswoman.
The movement appeared to originate off the Monterey Bay coast, Gordon said. "Our best guess is that it was a sonic boom from a jet off the coast," Gordon said. "That's all we can say scientifically." Jet airplanes create sonic booms when they break the sound barrier. As a jet rips through the air at supersonic speeds, it emits shock waves that produce a tell-tale bang and rattle buildings.
But the Air Force did not have jets flying off the coast Wednesday morning, said Steve Bauer, a spokesman at Vandenberg Air Force Base. After receiving calls about a similar boom in Southern California, the Federal Aviation Administration said it was searching through flights its employees monitored Wednesday morning to find the supersonic jet. "We haven't found anything ... that would explain the sonic boom," said Ian Gregor, a spokesman for the administration.
© UnknownBizarre: The USGS reported a 2.2 quake at 9:30 a.m. Tuesday that supposedly shook much of Orange County. But we didn't receive any calls or emails then. The emails didn't start until 9:15 p.m. tonight, almost 12 hours later -- even though much of tonight's shaking came from areas depicted in this map. Seismologist Bob Dollar called the situation "mysterious."
The mysterious door and window rattling that thousands of people felt across Orange County Tuesday night about 9:15 p.m. was likely caused by a sonic boom produced by a high speed jet, says Bob Dollar, a seismologist at the U.S. Geological Survey.
And, in an extraordinary odd coincidence, a similar event occurred at 9:15 a.m. today (Wednesday) in Central California.
Click here to read story.
"This morning Kate Hutton (of Caltech) reviewed seismograms from the event last night in Orange County," Dollar said in an email. "These data are consistent with a sonic event coming onshore near Dana Point and traveling northward inland.
Comment: It is amazing, isn't it? How, even though it is known, meteorites exploding in the atmosphere, or crashing into the ocean also makes a "sonic boom" reverberation and are never mentioned as a cause of these effects.
Is it simply denial or do they know about
something else but don't want you to know.
Comment: With all of the meteor/fireball sightings there have been, and even recorded, you would think that comments like the one above: There have been a lot of "sonic booms" or "loud noises" reported over the last couple of years, and very, very few have had anyone even whisper that it might be a meteor exploding in the atmosphere, or creating a sonic boom as it streaks through the skies.
However, there was this very recent article that someone did finally admit that the Hudson Valley "sonic boom" could have been a meteor.
It's as if it is forbidden to even think that meteors could be to blame for these "sonic booms". Amazing, isn't it?