A mystery boom heard

This is from reports today in UK -

Police probe mystery boom


A mystery boom which shook an area is being investigated by the police.

The ear-splitting noise happened on the Devon and Cornwall border between Bude and Holsworthy around noon, according to local people.

Bude householder Anne Kyle said that after the "frightening'' noise, a hairline crack in a wall in her home had widened.

Mechanic Barry Burrow said his workshop vibrated and he had a headache for two hours afterwards.

No one was injured by the big bang, which is being investigated by Devon and Cornwall police.

"One theory being considered is perhaps a military aircraft has broken the sound barrier a little too close to the land and that has caused this sonic boom and this, in turn, caused some light damage around the north Cornwall area,'' a police spokesman told the BBC.

Western Power Distribution said engineers had completed checks and found no faults with its systems.

The Ministry of Defence and the RAF said there were no records of their aircraft flying over the area.

The Civil Aviation Authority said it was also unaware of the cause.

The British Geological Survey had no signals from their instruments in the area.


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Could this be some secret plane??? Surely a sonic boom would not do that much damage?????????

NE Thoughts on this one??

Quite likely IMO but the sonic boom must have been massive to widen cracks in a house wall. Is the UK developing any supersonic planes atm? If this is the case why would they fly it so close to towns? Any bases around the area?

[edit on 29-10-2006 by distorted vision]

Here is an interesting quote from the DARPA website

"The SED effort seeks to design, fabricate, and fly a hypersonic vehicle powered by the HyTech scramjet engine over a broad range of Mach numbers. The SED flight vehicle will be boosted to Mach 4.5 where the scramjet engine will be started and the vehicle will accelerate to Mach 6.5 to Mach 7+. "

It would seem plausible that such an aircraft be tested either off the west coast of the US or from an airbase in scotland, due to remoteness of location. There have been many "mystery booms" both around the UK and off the coast of California. A boom of this type would certainly be generated by an aircraft travelling at speeds even approximating the speeds listed by the DARPA project. Here's the URL to the DARPA page:

www.darpa.mil...

Seems like a good explanation to me.

There's another thread elsewhere on this. Most are satisfied that it was a high altitude meteor explosion.
BBC News

??

sorry, my 3 paragraph reply was lost because of the ATS server
deleted my reply as i tried to "Preview Post" before posting it !!


i tried to link youse to home.att.net...

They might provide a report on this explosion on next Sunday, Nov 5th,
as they only update on Sundays..
and recently they've reported +14 meteors, trails, explosions, hits on ground
in the Norway area in recent weeks/months

there was something about this in the sun newspaper, i left it in the car so i'll type up what it said tomorrow, cant remember exactly what it said as i just scanned past it but i think it said it was a small piece of meteor coming into the atmosphere, apparently it broke loads of windows in some town