A series of unexplained Mysterious booms rattles windows, and people, from North Yorkshire to New York
Thousands of people right across Britain reported hearing a series of loud bangs in the sky
around 10.30pm on Saturday, 29 November, shaking windows and scaring pets. Many described them as sounding like explosions or thunder, while others thought they were similar to sonic booms (made by aircraft passing through the sound barrier). Such booms
were heard in Kent earlier in November, when two RAF jets intercepted a Latvian cargo
plane. Britain has been on its second-highest terrorism threat level – ‘severe’ – since August.
However, the Ministry of Defence said that no jets were scrambled on the Saturday in question. Calum MacColl at the Met Office said: “It definitely wasn’t meteorological”. Some said the bangs sounded more like a series of loud crackling pops, and so suspected fireworks; however, when they looked outside, none were to be seen. Oddest of all, a
loud bang was heard in Buffalo, New York, around the same time.
Social media naturally went into overdrive. Many attentionseekers Mysterious falsely reported hearing the noises; others innocently reported similar noises they heard at the same time for which there will be mundane explanations – such as military training or, indeed, fireworks. Claudia Angiletta, 27, recorded the bangs from her house in Croydon, south London. “I couldn’t hear the [TV] programme due to the loud noises. It went on for ages. I went out to look for fireworks but I couldn’t see anything.
That’s when I recorded the clip.” She said her family, who live seven miles (11km) away in
Norbury, also heard the sounds. However, it turned out that, at around the same time, there was a large and very loud fireworks display for a wedding party at the Walcountians Sports Club, four miles (6.4km) from the centre of Croydon. It was a still night, and the sound would have easily carried for miles… though obviously not as far as Bedfordshire, Glasgow, North Devon, and Leicestershire – let alone New York.
Just to complicate the situation, 19 hours earlier, at 3am on Saturday, at least eight staff at Catterick Army Barracks in North Yorkshire reported an explosion, leading the police
to close off a six-mile (10km) stretch of the A1 motorway for 12 hours while they searched for the site of the blast. “A number of aging detonators” were found near the perimeter fence, but these were not the cause of the reported explosion. And five days earlier, at 10.25pm on 24 November, hundreds of people across Greater Manchester, from Eccles to Rusholme, reported hearing a massive explosion and experiencing disturbances to television and mobile phone networks. No evidence of a fire or any other disturbance could be found.
Somebody writing a blog called The End Time, commented: “I believe the booms are manifestations of spiritual warfare we happen to hear on this side of the veil or the preparations God is making for imminent tribulation judgments.”Thousands used the Twitter hashtag #OMGWeAreAllGoingToDie to report the bangs, though often only in jest. Others dragged in space aliens to account for the bangs. Dr Bhupendra Khandelwal, a scientist at Sheffield University working on so-called ‘pulse detonation engines’, pointed the finger of blame at ultra-top secret American hypersonic spy aircraft using such engines to reach five times the speed of sound – but given the increasingly sophisticated satellite system, there seems little point for fearsomely fast (and expensive) manned aircraft. Anyway, why develop an aeroplane quite so absurdly noisy?
Maybe the sounds were made by a fireball – a meteor burning up as it entered the atmosphere above Britain.The larger the meteor, the bigger the sound. When a large meteor hit the ground near the village of Wold Newton in the East Riding of Yorkshire in December 1795, a Mr L Wilson said: “I heard noises in the air like the report of cannon at a distance,” while Charles Preston, 11, described the sound as being like “the noise as of firing of cannon, heard at the above time a hissing in the air”. Many local inhabitants thought the repeated noises were “guns at sea”.
Witnesses of other meteorite falls have recorded hearing similar Mysterious sounds. “A noise like thunder or the rolling of drums broke overhead, followed by a whizzing noise or the sound of escaping steam,” said one. If the bangs of 29 November were made by a meteor and it landed in the UK, then somewhere there is going to be a very large crater – unless it landed in the sea. Sceptics of the meteoric explanation point out that no airline pilots reported any bright lights as they flew above the cloud cover.
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