© ABC7 (screen capture)
Friday night was far from the first nervous one for residents of Fair Lawn, New Jersey, who have been plagued by loud booming sounds for about a week.
As CBS2's Dave Carlin reported, the source of the nuisance is a mystery.
"We were, like, looking at each other like, 'What was that?'" said Danielle McManus.
It happened twice in the past week to McManus and her family. While inside their home in a usually very quiet Fair Lawn neighborhood, things went bump in the night.
"If we didn't know any better, it almost sounds like a cannon," McManus said,
"It was so deep and just like, echoey."
Elsewhere in the neighborhood along the Passaic River, residents say they have heard loud booms as early as 6 p.m. and as late as 2 a.m..
"It was, 'Pssh, pssh, pssh,'" one young boy said.
"I was like, 'Grr! Grr! Brr!' like that," another said.
"I heard the noise, so I came out here," added Susan Kuqi of Fair Lawn. 'Sometimes, you know, people dump garbage. It sounded like a garbage truck."
Comment: Last year mysterious earth-shaking booms also rattled residents in New Jersey, and elsewhere across the US. These strange sounds often remain unexplained by the authorities.
As meteor fireball and seismic activity have increased dramatically in recent years, we suspect that a number of these booms can be attributed to overhead meteor explosions or are earthquake-related. See also:
Unexplained loud booms: A compilation from 2015