Scientific progress goes "BOOM"

Something is causing thunderous booms across the nation.  Last weekend in Atlanta, a "boom" noise of unknown origin rattled windows and foundations.  After numerous 911 calls, authorities were unable to discern a cause for the noise.  Nothing had exploded.  No aircraft had crashed.  No meteors had smacked into the ground.

The leading culprit is a sonic boom from an aircraft.  The rub in that theory is that since the retirement of the Concorde, there is no civilian aircraft that can go faster than sound and the military says that none of their aircraft were in the area.  

This is not an isolated incident.  Another such boom with no known source was heard over Pennsylvania last May.  And of course, cases of this nature are numerous in California, Nevada, and The Rockies where the military has restricted zones for weapons testing.  In fact, the frequency of such sourceless booms has generated a nickname among the locals: "skyquakes."  One important trait that skyquakes share with the booms heard in Atlanta and Pennsylvania is that they are heard over widespread areas, thus ruling out a source such as construction equipment being moved or quarry blasting.  The web site Above Top Secret has been tracking skyquakes and other strange booms in the sky.  Their findings show that the booms occur in waves and usually still localized to a given geographic area and sometimes they're even confined to a specific time of day, like say, 11:23 PM.  After a while, the boom waves move on to another locale.

So what are they?  Aliens?  Mass hallucinations brought on by our collective existential angst and ennui?  

I have no idea, but were I to give a shirt tail opinion as to the origin of these booms, I would guess a new military aircraft, perhaps even overflights made by the Aurora spyplane.  After all, would the military lie to us about not having in aircraft operating in the vicinity of the booms?  Yeah, that's what I thought.

Heck, it's probably just KISS promoting their latest album, Sonic Boom.  Think about it.  Wouldn't Simmons try to pull off a marketing stunt like this?

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