Did you hear it? Loud and mysterious boom in Missouri baffles residents
.png "Many Missouri residents reported hearing a loud boom recently, but so far, military officials and local authorities aren’t sure what caused it.")
A loud boom echoed across a large swath of Missouri on Wednesday, leaving the many residents who heard it to wonder: what was that?
“Did anyone hear a large boom earlier today??” Johnson County Emergency Management asked the public in a Facebook post.
County residents, and others in surrounding counties, called in to authorities with reports of a massive bang, according to the post.
Some captured the boom on videos taken by their home security systems.
It was powerful enough to rock people’s homes, some said.
“I heard a faint droning from the south and then a violent boom that shook my windows and walls. I jumped up and ran out of the house to see what had hit my roof, but nothing was there,” one person commented on the post.
Emergency Management officials mentioned unconfirmed reports of an earthquake in nearby Benton County.
But there hasn’t been an earthquake in Missouri for the last week, of any magnitude, according to the USGS.
Maybe it was a sonic boom from a jet? After all, Johnson County is home to Whiteman Air Force Base.
The air base is well aware of the boom, but it wasn’t them or any of their aircraft, a spokesman for Whiteman AFB told McClatchy News.
After fielding some phone calls from residents both curious and concerned, the spokesman did a little digging.
“I went and talked to our flight planners right away yesterday,” he said. “It was not one of our aircraft.”
However, it appears a jet was still the culprit. An F-15, specifically, Boeing told McClatchy News.
“We can confirm that it was an F-15 aircraft operating out of St Louis Lambert Airport under contract to the USAF conducting a test flight required by the contract to verify system performance,” a Boeing spokesperson said.
In the past, Boeing jets have caused loud booms while testing aircraft, KOMU reported in 2019.
This story was originally published July 15, 2021 at 6:30 PM with the headline "Did you hear it? Loud and mysterious boom in Missouri baffles residents."