Stories from the edge of explanation.
About 7 min readFor more than a century, people across the Bengal delta heard what sounded like distant cannon fire rolling in from the sea — in threes, in fair weather, with no fleet, no fort and no battle anywhere. The British called them the Barisal guns, and they never found the guns.
About 7 min readAlong the coasts of Belgium and the Netherlands, people once heard cannon fire rolling in from a sea where no ships were firing — booms that seemed to blow the fog itself apart. The Dutch called them mistpouffers, ‘fog dissipators’. Their cousins, the Barisal guns of Bengal, were heard in threes for a century. No one has heard either since about 1950.