Seneca Lake in New York at dusk, mist hanging over the water — the lake that gave the 'Seneca Guns' their name

Skyquakes

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About 4 min read

It is a clear day. There is no storm, no aircraft, nothing in the sky at all. Then a boom rolls out of nowhere — deep, hollow, distant and imposing, like a piece of heavy artillery fired miles away. Windows rattle. Dishes shake. People step outside and look up at an empty sky.

The sound has a name in almost every country that hears it. In the United States it is the Seneca Guns. In Bangladesh, the Barisal guns. In Italy, brontidi. In Japan, uminari — cries from the sea. In the Netherlands and Belgium, mistpoeffers, the fog dissipators. In France, canons de mer, sea guns. The phenomenon itself is called a skyquake: a loud sound reported to originate from the sky, with no visible source. People have documented it on every continent except Antarctica, and its cause has never been positively identified.

The Lake Gun

The best-known skyquakes in America belong to Seneca Lake, the largest of the Finger Lakes in western New York, about sixty miles southeast of Rochester. The booms there have been heard for as long as anyone has lived beside the lake. Early white settlers were told by the Haudenosaunee Iroquois that the sound was the Great Spirit continuing his work of shaping the earth.

The writer James Fenimore Cooper, author of The Last of the Mohicans, gave the phenomenon its famous name. In 1850 he published a short story called “The Lake Gun”, describing the sound heard at Seneca Lake. “It is a sound resembling the explosion of a heavy piece of artillery,” he wrote, “that can be accounted for by none of the known laws of nature. The report is deep, hollow, distant and imposing.” The story popularised the terms “Seneca guns” and “mistpouffers”, and the name stuck.

The booms are not confined to Seneca Lake. They were reportedly heard in 1804 during the Lewis and Clark Expedition near Great Falls. They were heard during the great New Madrid earthquake of 1811, a magnitude 7.2 shock in Missouri. They are reported from the North Sea, the Ganges, Canada, Colombia, Japan, Finland, Vanuatu, Australia, Italy, Ireland, India, Malaysia and Indonesia. The sound is nearly always the same: a single sharp shockwave, or a short series of them, like distant thunder without the storm.

Testing the Booms

For most of their history, skyquakes were a matter of anecdote. That changed in the 2010s, when researchers at the University of North Carolina decided to test the phenomenon with hard sensor data. Between 2013 and 2015, they cross-referenced thousands of news reports and social media complaints about mystery booms in North Carolina against the EarthScope Transportable Array — a network of more than 400 ground stations designed to record seismic vibrations and low-frequency air pressure waves. A fuller analysis followed in 2020.

The results were striking. Most reported booms showed no matching ground movement on seismographs: the ground was not shaking and making the sound. Instead, specialised microphones captured pulses of infrasound — sound waves vibrating below 20 hertz, too low for humans to hear directly, but easily able to shake building walls and rattle window panes. And the signals reached atmospheric sensors before they reached surface devices. Whatever caused the noise was happening high above the earth or far out over the ocean.

The study proved two things at once. Skyquakes are real physical events, not imagination or mass suggestion. And no single mechanism triggers every blast. Geophysicists now weigh several explanations, and the honest answer is that different booms probably have different causes.

The Candidate Causes

The strongest candidate is the sky itself. A moderate-sized meteor — a bolide — entering the lower atmosphere produces a sonic boom as it breaks apart, and can do so over a wide area with no visible trace by daylight. Military aircraft can produce the same sound, though that does not explain booms heard long before aviation, or in places where no aircraft were flying. Shallow earthquakes can generate sound waves with little ground vibration, through a process called seismo-acoustic coupling: the ground moves almost imperceptibly, but the air above it carries the shock. And certain atmospheric conditions can act as a duct, carrying an ordinary sound — a distant explosion, a sonic boom, thunder from a storm over the horizon — much further than it would normally travel, and delivering it as a single sharp crack.

Sometimes a boom does get solved, and quickly. At about 2:06 in the afternoon on Saturday, 30 May 2026, a boom rolled across eastern Massachusetts and beyond, shaking houses and setting off dogs. Within hours it was traced to a meteoroid that had entered near the Massachusetts–New Hampshire border, broken apart high above the coast and dropped what was left into Cape Cod Bay. NASA counted more than 71 fireball reports from nine states and two Canadian provinces. The event was caught by a weather satellite, by radar, by seismometers and by infrasound sensors. That is what a solved skyquake looks like — and it is a reminder of how many booms are never traced to anything at all.

Why the Mystery Endures

The reason skyquakes endure as a mystery is not that scientists have no explanations. It is that they have several, and none of them covers every case. A boom over Seneca Lake on a still night, with no meteor, no aircraft and no earthquake on any sensor, remains exactly what Cooper called it in 1850: a sound that can be accounted for by none of the known laws of nature — or rather, by laws of nature we have not yet pinned to that particular sound.

The booms will keep coming. Sensors will keep listening. And every so often, as in Massachusetts in May 2026, one of them will be caught in the act, and the sky will give up one of its secrets.

What Is Documented, and What Is Not

Documented: Loud, unexplained booms from the sky have been reported for centuries under local names including the Seneca Guns (Seneca Lake, New York), Barisal guns (Bangladesh), mistpoeffers (Netherlands and Belgium), brontidi (Italy) and uminari (Japan). James Fenimore Cooper described the Seneca Lake sound in “The Lake Gun” in 1850. A University of North Carolina study using the EarthScope Transportable Array (2013–2015, published 2020) found most reported booms had no matching seismic signal but did show infrasound signatures of atmospheric origin. A boom across eastern Massachusetts on 30 May 2026 was traced to a meteoroid, with more than 71 fireball reports counted by NASA.

Unverified or disputed: That any single cause explains all skyquakes; that individual historical booms were caused by meteors, earthquakes or aircraft, where no sensor record exists; the more exotic proposed causes, including coronal mass ejections.

Sources

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