© Vice
Alhambra, California
Out of nowhere on Tuesday night, around 8 PM, Alex Arevalos, a student and graphic designer in Alhambra, California, ten miles east of downtown Los Angeles, heard a single, loud thud.
He immediately asked his sister if she'd slapped his bedroom wall. "She said she didn't, so I automatically blamed the train," Arevalos, who lives near train tracks, told VICE.
Then on Thursday around midnight, two similar sounds woke up Arevalos's father, and when father and son spoke about it in the morning, the younger Arevalos became convinced it was something abnormal. "
This time as soon as I heard it, and heard the walls shake a bit, I listened for the train, but didn't hear anything," adding, "I can tell the difference now [between] the train and the booms."
Arevalos is far from alone. According to the local news site Alhambra Source, residents first reported hearing
the booms on
February 16 when a woman named Noelle Dominguez alerted her neighbors to them in a private section of the community social network nextdoor.com. "I know this sounds weird. But since [I've been] living in Alhambra, every other night or so I hear a loud explosion-like noise," she wrote. Soon, other nextdoor.com users shared similar experiences with the booms,
according to Alhambra Source.
Two nights later, Alhambra Police Department posted about the booms
on Facebook. Just after 8 PM, officers received reports of "a loud explosion heard in the northern end of our city."
The police wrote that they've received multiple similar reports in recent weeks, but that "unfortunately, we were unable to locate the origin. We are as puzzled as everyone," Jerry Johnson, the Alhambra police sergeant, told VICE. He said two on-duty officers heard the booms recently, and they rushed toward the source, arriving just 90 seconds after the sound dissipated.
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