For the second time in less than 24 hours, Southeastern North Carolina residents were rattled by a mysterious pair of loud booms that shook them awake and rattled their homes.
No one seems to know for sure what is causing the noises. But dispatchers in New Hanover and Brunswick counties said they got multiple telephone calls around 10:30 a.m. Saturday from people wanting to know why their homes were shaking.
Brunswick County residents in Bolivia, Oak Island, Holden Beach and Southport areas reported a series of mysterious booms and rattles Wednesday morning.
No one seems to have any idea what could be causing the loud noises, but speculation has ranged from the continental shelf shifting and earthquakes to military exercises and Seneca Guns, the unexplained phenomenon that sounds like rolling thunder or distant cannon fire.
Off and on, for several weeks running, residents across Southeastern North Carolina have reported hearing loud booming noises in the distance, some strong enough to shake their houses. Residents reported the booms again on Wednesday and Thursday this week, re-igniting the speculation.
There don’t appear to be any scientific explanations. No seismic activity has been reported in the region. It’s not weather related either. “There is no meteorological explanation for them,” said Ron Steve, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Wilmington.
Increasingly as the pole shift nears, the Earth will give evidence of the compression and tension in her surface by what humans will perceive to be sonic booms. The mechanism is in fact the same, clapping air masses, the same mechanism that produces thunder. Where thunder is caused by air masses separated by what is essentially a vacuum created by the superheating lightning bolt, and where sonic booms are caused by a compressed air mass pushed in front of the plane exploding back to equalize with the thin air mass trailing the plane, pre-cataclysm booms are caused by heaving in large bodies of water. Earthquakes where plates are compressing are measured by humans as the friction causes jolting, but for every compression adjustment there is, somewhere, a widening in a rift. Most often these rifts lie underwater, as water fills low lying places. A widening rift does not jolt the bordering plates, it is a silent adjustment. However, the sea water rushing to fill the new void has an effect on the air masses above, creating a thin air mass and causing the air on all sides of this thin air space to rush in, and clap!