What Are the Unidentified Powerful 'Boom' Sounds Heard Around the World?

For more than 150 years, people all around the world have been reporting strange booming sounds known as 'Seneca Guns' in North Carolina. Oftentimes they are so long and powerful that they can rattle windows and shake buildings, Live Science reported. 

"It is a sound resembling the explosion of a heavy piece of artillery, that can be accounted for by none of the known laws of nature," James Fenimore Cooper, a writer in 1850 shared regarding the noise, Live Science reported. "The report is deep, hollow, distant, and imposing. The (Seneca) lake seems to be speaking to the surrounding hills, which send back the echoes of its voice in accurate reply. No satisfactory theory has ever been broached to explain these noises."

People have claimed that these sounds come from the sky, IFL Science reported. All across the world, the sound has been given a different moniker. It is called "Barisal guns" in the Ganges delta and the Bay of Bengal, "yan" in Shikoku, Japan, and "mistpouffers" (fog belches) in Belgium. Researchers to this date haven't been able to determine the origin of these sounds. 

Civilians reported these strange noises during the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811-1812 and the Charleston earthquake in August 1886. Certain researchers attempted to establish a connection between these reverberations with earthquakes. In 2020, scientists analyzed seismic data from the EarthScope Transportable Array (ESTA) from 2013, to figure out if earthquakes could cause such noises.

Experts from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill examined news reports from North Carolina that discussed these noises, IFL Science reported. The team's objective was to align these reports of noises with the data they had gathered from ESTA. If the noises happened during or around the earthquakes, then the team would have the required evidence to link both phenomena. The team did not find any such proof.

The team believes that the sounds are a result of an atmospheric event, Live Science reported.  "Generally speaking, we believe this is an atmospheric phenomenon – we don't think it's coming from seismic activity," researcher Eli Bird claimed. "We're assuming it's propagating through the atmosphere rather than the ground."

Bird and the team believe that there is a possibility that these sounds were not coming from a single source, Live Science reported. Some of them could be coming from military planes or are sonic booms, that are amplified by a natural signal. The researchers are advocating for more extensive analysis of the sounds to once and for all solve this elusive mystery of 'Seneca Guns.'