Skyquakes: The Cannon Fire That Comes From a Clear Blue Sky

2026-06-19 · Signals & Sounds · 8 min read

The sound arrives without warning. A deep, concussive boom, like distant cannon fire or a heavy door slammed by a giant, rolls in off the water under a cloudless sky. Windows rattle in their frames. Dogs lift their heads and bark at nothing. People step out onto their porches and scan the horizon for the storm, the explosion or the low-flying jet that must have caused it, and they find nothing at all. No smoke. No wake. No aircraft. Just the sea, the sky and the slowly fading memory of a noise that should not have been there. Then, a month or a year later, it happens again.

The phenomenon is old enough and widespread enough to have collected names on three separate continents. Along the coast of North Carolina, where the booms are reported often enough to reach the local newspapers every summer, they are called the Seneca Guns. The name was borrowed from James Fenimore Cooper's 1850 short story 'The Lake Gun', which described mysterious detonations heard around Seneca Lake in upstate New York. In the delta country of what is now Bangladesh, British colonial officials of the nineteenth century recorded the Barisal Guns, phantom artillery booming out over the flat waterways near the town of Barisal, usually toward the south and southeast, and often in damp or foggy weather.

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