Modern Mysteries

California 'booms' mystery has been solved

By T.K. Randall
August 4, 2015 ·  24 comments

The sounds were coming from a US military base 100 miles away. Image Credit: US Military / Cpl. R. Logan Kyle Residents of California's Gold Country had been left perplexed by the noise which mysteriously started up last year and seemed to occur mainly between 11:00am and 2:00pm on weekdays.

So many people were affected by the din that locals set up a Facebook page entitled "Mother Lode Mystery Booms" to collect witness testimonies and to discuss what the strange sounds could be.

Fortunately at around that same time a team of scientists from Southern Methodist University was granted permission to set up a monitoring station at Columbia College as part of a much larger project designed to pick up signs of nuclear explosions.Thanks to their listening equipment the researchers were able to record and triangulate the source of the sounds which turned out to be a US military installation located over 100 miles away - the Hawthorne Army Depot - which as it happens disposes of obsolete munitions on weekdays during the exact period of time during which the loud booming sounds had been reported.

The revelation was particularly remarkable due to the distances involved and because people living much closer to the site of the explosions hadn't been able to hear anything at all.

"I can't explain all the physics involved, but the atmosphere is bouncing in response to the energy and it's reflecting and bouncing (the sound) back down," said science instructor Glen White.

"The really odd part is people fairly close to the source of the energy, the explosions, aren't hearing it. The sound goes over them."

Source: Phys.org | Comments (24)

Tags: California, Booms