I thought that might be a possibility as well... We'll see...

A similar incident happened to me several years ago. Like you, I was inside. In fact, I had just gone inside, and missed what was apparently a fantastic fireball that was seen across several states on the East Coast. The boom was so loud and shook the house so badly, that the first thing I did was look down the cellar stairs to see if our oil burner blew, or had a back-blow.

Happened where I am too. Big boom that shook the house. I checked with my neighbor 500 feet away and he didn't feel or hear a thing. Controlled burst? Does this have anything to do with HAARP ?

Wonder if there is a rock quarry nearby?

We used to live close to one when I was a child and occasionally there would be these tremendous BOOMs and I could literally feel the shockwave approach and overtake the entire house.

I have since learned that this happens when packing the blast holes with whatever that powder is that they use and not packing the hole all the way. The excess of air inside the hole acts like an explosive propellant as it pressurizes everything around the explosives (eh, my blaster budy could describe this much better than I can.)...

For instance, explosive charges are markedly more violent on cloudy days because of the barometric pressure in the atmosphere.

If they drill a hole and hit a pocket of open air in the quarry, that is a no-no and the result can be a massive explosion.

My friend was telling me the story of a rock the size of a basketball being thrown out of the quarry, off the property the quarry was on and 1/4 of a mile (1,320 ft) down the road, through a gentleman's roof and destroyed his computer desk and bedroom.

That would be my first guess.

Well.. here are my takes on those theories..

Sonic Boom - There have been some reports of hearing at least 3 "booms" close together by some folks... I am not 100% sure of it, but I believe that a Sonic Boom is usually a single pop once the barrier is breached... Also, the closest airbase has stated that all of their fighters were grounded as of 4:15 PM.. I think the "boom" happened around 5:40 PM... If this is the case, the plane could have come from another base, or this base could be covering their tracks...

Earthquake - I could see this as well.. However, my area, rumored to be on one of the largest faults on the east coast, has never had an earthquake as far as I remember. The ground didn't really shake, and any report of shaking that has been brought up has clearly been that it was more of a sudden "pop" rather than a drawn out "rumble"... Also, one of the people who reported it stated that they had checked seismic activity for our area, and nothing registered...

Quarry Blast - To me, this is what it seemed like most.. However, there are no quarries, to my knowledge, that operate here on a Sunday, and the closest one that even exists, again to my knowledge, is not in an area that would affect the places that have had reports of it...

Right now, I think I am leaning towards meteor, or some sort of covered up sonic boom...

If it was an explosion or crash of some sort, they would have found out by now... If it were an earthquake, one would think that seismologists would have registered something?!?!?

I think I am going to try and pool together the locations the sound was reported... and maybe find a rough center point...

Do you live in clayton? I live in clayton and was sleeping and heard two loud bangs that woke me up, sounded like someone beating on my door, but no one was there. Very interesting....

I live in a rather large mining community. We are on the Canadian shield and have no earthquakes but from time to time there are rock bursts in the mines that measure 3.0 in the richter. You hear a booming sound in the distance and then it shakes for a couple of seconds and then stops, sometimes there are aftershocks.

From what i understand this has to do with pressure buildup on certain rocks in mines and is quite common.

Im in Raleigh, but i have friends in Wendell and Clayton who reported the booms. Have you checked out the WRAL.COM website and read the eyewitness accounts? Wow-something definitely happened.

Originally posted by Carrion
Do you live in clayton? I live in clayton and was sleeping and heard two loud bangs that woke me up, sounded like someone beating on my door, but no one was there. Very interesting....

New theory:

With the recent heavy rains from TS Hanna, would it be possible that a vast amount of groundwater entered an underground fissure of some sort?

I could see this as being some sort of tectonic event if so...


Also, I would like to add...

When we were first investigating the incident, my mother had told me that one of her friends had been informed by a volunteer fireman aquaintance that their initial report was that "a military plane had crashed near the Bojangles in Clayton"...

My wife drove out and picked up my mom just down the road, and headed towards that Bojangles. They never saw anything at all, so we just kind of wrote it off as hearsay... They even took route all over other reported areas and never saw anything out of the ordinary...

I live west of raleigh on the edge of cary. saturday morning i heard a loud rumble. hanna was going by and the last update showed it 40 miles east of raleigh. i thought it was a plane going overhead at first, since i'm close to the airport i hear it all the time. this one was different though, it lasted much longer than the rumbles i hear from planes. i actually started to wonder if there was a tornado coming, but after about 30 seconds or so it trailed off. might not be related, but maybe it was.

[edit on 8-9-2008 by an0maly33]