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

2025-06-08 · Signals & Sounds · 2 min read

The sound arrives without warning. A deep, concussive boom, like distant cannon fire or a door slammed by a giant, rolls in off the water under a cloudless sky. Windows rattle. Dogs bark. People step outside looking for the storm, the explosion, the jet — and find nothing at all. Then it happens again, a month or a year later, and again nobody can say what it was.

The phenomenon is old enough to have collected names on three continents. Along the coast of North Carolina, the booms are called the Seneca Guns, a name 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 Bengal, British colonial officials of the nineteenth century recorded the "Barisal Guns," phantom artillery booming over the waterways near the town of Barisal; the reports were serious enough to be debated in letters to the scientific journal Nature in the 1890s. On the Belgian and Dutch coast, fishermen spoke of mistpouffers, roughly "fog belches." Japan has its uminari, the "cries of the sea," and Italy its brontidi. Different languages, same experience: guns firing where there are no guns.

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