Earthquake, Airplane Or Asteroid? Thursday's 'Boom' Leaves Residents Speculating
While a cause has yet to be determined for the large boom or thump that occurred at around 3 PM last Thursday, March 10, people all over town and Facebook are speculating as to what the source might be.
A Facebook post on Falmouth Discussion, a community forum page, prompted discussion of the sound shortly after it happened. A page administrator posting at 3:13 PM asked if anyone else heard or felt something like a sonic boom in the area. More than 100 users commented, most saying they had heard or felt it, and offered their theories on what it might have been.
“I heard/felt it also, thought something crashed into my house,” one user wrote. Many others agreed, writing that they thought the boom was a car or truck crashing into their home or a nearby building.
“It shook my house and sure scared the dog,” another user wrote, sharing that the location, when the sound was heard, was in Falmouth Heights.
One user in Teaticket reported that the boom shook the user’s car, while others reported rattling windows and ground vibrations.
People from all over Falmouth and beyond—Main Street downtown, Teaticket, Hatchville, Sippewissett, Sandwich, Mashpee, Martha’s Vineyard and Wareham—chimed in to report that they, too, had heard and felt the boom.
A user who had been out walking in East Falmouth at the time of the boom reported that the sound seemed to come from over the water and that it occurred after a low-flying plane came through the area.
At least six other commenters mentioned seeing a low-flying plane and many suspected it had something to do with Joint Base Cape Cod. Although nothing has been confirmed, one user, who reported living nearby, said that the base was allegedly running takeoff and landing exercises.
If not a sonic boom from an aircraft, others speculated that the sound could be attributed to an earthquake. Some people reported feeling ground vibrations, and there were a few references to a report of an unconfirmed earthquake in the area on a website called Volcano Discovery, a German-based web portal that reports on earthquake and volcano events in real time. The online report is unconfirmed by experts, but has 88 user reports that describe weak to moderate shaking.
A spokesman from the National Earthquake Information Center, part of the US Geological Survey, told the Enterprise that its analysts reviewed their material for the time and location in question and did not find anything they could call an earthquake.
“That doesn’t mean you haven’t had [an earthquake],” he said. “It’s just if you have, it’s so small that we really are not seeing it.”
The spokesman also suggested that it may not have been an earthquake, as sonic booms are a possibility in the New England area.
A few other reports suggested that the sound might have been the result of a meteor entering Earth’s atmosphere, with two different sources being referenced. One user shared a link to a website called EarthSky, which reported the discovery of an asteroid that impacted the atmosphere just two hours after its discovery. The article reported, however, that the asteroid entered the atmosphere somewhere north of Iceland.
Another Facebook user shared a link to an article referencing a similar event of another boom that was heard in the southern New Hampshire area that occurred on Saturday, March 12.
This is not the first time a mysterious boom has rattled Massachusetts residents; two very similar events occurred in October and November 2021, which left residents and authorities with plenty of theories but very few confirmed details.