…that’s the way some residents of Clintonville, Wisconsin described the unexplained noises they heard early Sunday into Monday morning. The sounds seem to have affected only an eight-block radius where ground shaking was also felt.
All public utilities were checked and nothing unusual was found. According to these article from fox11online, cnn and JSOnline here, here and here, the sounds are all over the place in terms of the witness accounts.
Very interesting descriptions from the news articles:
“It was kind of like constant boom, boom, boom!” said resident Joseph Clauson. “And you could feel like the ground shaking beneath you and whatnot.”
“It almost felt like a heavy duty thunderstorm, but it was shaking though,” said resident Al Miller.
The sounds — variously described as rattling pipes, clanging metal, thunder or firecrackers — have continued on and off since early Sunday night in just one part of the small town of 4,600, located about 180 miles northeast of Madison.
Jolene VanBeek, who lives on Lincoln Ave., said she first heard a loud sound – like a sonic boom or two trains coupling – about 9:30 p.m. Sunday night.
“We thought neighbors were slamming their doors super hard,” she said Monday. “It was a loud noise and then shaking.”
There have been many incidents of strange rumblings in unlikely places recently. I haven’t been posting these accounts because there are so many and they’re all unexplained. I have included this incident because of the bizarre witness accounts. Since this seems to be affecting a small area, I suspect the source will be discovered. If not it’s just another mystery noise.
UPDATE 3/20: The noises appear to have intensified overnight and are spreading. They’re reexamining the water system.
CLICK IMAGE TO WATCH VIDEO ON WEBSITE.
UPDATE 3/20 #2: The water system has been ruled out again. See here.
UPDATE 3/20 #3: The city may deploy motion sensors to determine the source. Most of the booms are occurring at night. See here.
From the article:
Scientists are telling Kuss that this is not seismic activity. It is not related to a local dump and it is not being caused by the sewage treatment plant on the river. It is not being caused by military activities, blasting, quarrying or sand and gravel mining, Kuss said.
UPDATE 3/20 #4: Melting ice to blame for ground-shaking in Clintonville? A very interesting theory here.
UPDATE 3/21: Witness interviews in video below.
UPDATE 3/21 #2: Wow they can hear and feel it but they can’t record it. Weird. Story here.
The city of Clintonville set up audio and video recorders overnight Wednesday but didn’t capture anything. There was at least one loud boom at 5 a.m.
UPDATE 3/21 #3: This has now made national news. Probably the first time this has happened since I started documenting these events. If they can’t find it yet and have ruled out all possibilities with experts, I wonder if they will. Remember, there have been tons of these booms all over the country that haven’t been explained. Most made the local news stations. The big difference here is that the booms are recurring over days. This hasn’t happened before with most events being single or multiple booms in minutes. Here are some videos of booms from recent months here. There are more scattered throughout this blog. Also most of the time the booms are described as both sky and ground felt. Some of them are meteors. The national news article and video are here.
MORE AFTER THE JUMP…
The below video was recorded and covered in this blog back at the beginning of February. I wrote a long article about it and will include it in this post because it’s 100 miles from Clintonville. If you aren’t familiar with this Fish Creek video the post is here.
The unexplained booming noise in the sky was heard several times in NW Central Alabama about a few weeks ago.
Saw this in the Journal Sentinel this morning and was just about to post it. It was front-page, headline story. Should’ve known you were already on it, Jay Man! Some of the accounts are amazing:
“Then around 3:30 a.m. all hell broke loose. The booms were coming one right after another,” said Shari Pfeiler as she sat on her front stoop next to her daughter Jordan. “The cats were freaking out.”"
—-
“It was louder at times than a tornado,” said Bickford, who admitted she’s never been in a twister but heard they sound like freight trains. “When you don’t know what it is, it gets kind of scary. If it was thundering and lightning, I could understand.”
And, perhaps most interestingly:
“The source of the racket? No one knows. Though they’re pretty sure what it wasn’t.
Earthquake? No. Methane gas? No. Wastewater? Nada. Change in water pressure? Nope. Mining, military missions or dynamiting in the area? Zip.”
The only guess as of now, it seems, is this stab in the dark:
“It kept me awake, and I began to wonder what it was,” said Demitriou, who by 1 p.m. Monday had been awake for about 11 hours. “People said we had such a warm spring that maybe something was happening underground.”
I wish someone would’ve had the presence of mind to record it. Who knows, hopefully some video does emerge.
This was posted in the CNN article comments section by “Carl Lyse” 3 hours ago:
“Good morning everyone. Yes it began again last night around 8:20pm. Now they are looking again at the water distribution system under ground in the area. It may be something like an air lock some houses get in their water pipes, and when you turn on the faucet it booms and rattles. Right now there is no answer but experts are coming in from all over today to try and find the problem. Last night the booms and rattles are beginning to expand throughout the town slowly.”
Thanks Bobby, it will probably be explained. They’re taking it seriously, especially if its spreading. I expect it will be something like a water issue because it’s in a small area. If it was the whole town it would be more troubling.
Lets hope. Interesting that the water system has been ruled out again. There’s a member in the AboveTopSecret forums named “diablo222″ who lives in Clintonville and had this to say:
“Rumbling – constant, consistent – like rolling thunder or a distant freight train that’s bearing down on you but never passes (and for the record, nope, no train – no tracks!). Every once in a while, the ground would shake a bit, like the sound of distant mine blasting (at 3 in the morning?? I don’t think so!). With the intermittent distant “blast” noises came a bit of a shake. Not much, but you could feel something wasn’t right.
The rolling just kept building and building and getting louder. It ended in one of the “booms”. And then – nothing. Suddenly there’s just the calm of night.
The next time I heard it, there wasn’t any rolling, but the same, intermittent booms. Next few times? 30 seconds to a minute of rolling, then a boom – then nothing.
This all happened from about 10pm CST to 4am CST. That’s when my shift ended, but the news reported one or two more booms before sunup. Then nothing…until – apparently – tonight.”
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread821189/pg4
They also said (a few pages back) that it sound “EXACTLY” like this (which I think you’ve posted on here before):
In that same thread, another user said:
“One lady on the Fox 11 Facebook page said she lives in Clintonville and last night during the sound and rumbling her two cats threw up and her dog had an accident on the carpet (she said it was unusual).”
Some people, while not at all official or investigated, are speculating it’s something called “cryoseism” (or, “frost quakes”):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryoseism
http://www.620wtmj.com/news/local/143507116.html
Weather has been abnormally warm here (60-80 degrees for the past week…normally 20-40 degrees for this time of year…this after a very mild winter), but I’m not sure if that would validate the theory or not.
Great job finding this! Thanks!
That florida video is the most interesting video of all. It’s 100% real and it’s 100% an electric event and a sky sound caused by some sort of electrostatic discharge in the clouds.
This type of videos is the one we should be looking for and this type of sounds are of interest to me at least because their nature and appearance is electric and can be related to unusual electrical activity in the upper atmosphere.
That video is why I started this blog. It still scares the crap out of me when I watch it. There have been many of these type of jet noise videos but none compares to this one.
The links left by Bobby on cryoseisms/frost quakes were very interesting! I followed them to some other posts about the subject and was AMAZED at how closely the accounts coming out of Clintonville match the reports that people have given about Frost Quakes in other areas. The accounts mimic each other right down to the very localized nature of the events- with one big exception- there was no sudden ground freezing in Clintonville. Apparently that’s a prerequisite for a cyroseism. Although we’ve been having record high temps in WI the evening temps in Clintonville on March 19th only got down to 54 degrees.
“A cryoseism, or frost quake, is a natural phenomenon that produces ground shaking and noises similar to an earthquake, but is caused by sudden deep freezing of the ground…” -(from the first link below)
Both of these links are pretty fascinating:
http://www.maine.gov/doc/nrimc/mgs/explore/hazards/quake/quake-cryoseism.htm
http://www.maine.gov/doc/nrimc/mgs/explore/hazards/quake/quake-cryolist.htm
I’m a sound engineer by trade. I work in the music industry for live shows and studio recording. I have a lot of thoughts about these sounds that do not seem to be addressed on forums and blogs, and so far I haven’t seen any professional “sound” experts addressing these strange SOUNDS. There are scientist dealing with geology, weather, the atmosphere, air planes, industry, but very few people (even “scientists”) have been trained to use their ears to tear a sound apart and figure out what’s really going on. A good “sound guy” can pull apart a sound into frequencies and even pinpoint the length of the sound waves fairly accurately, with no equipment because of their experience with sounds. Different frequencies have MUCH different properties and react MUCH differently depending on the environment, something that cannot be acurately generalized, you have to come up with these figures live, in person, on a case by case basis. This is how we set the EQ on a sound board, by isolating certain frequencies, eliminating or strengthening them, to get the sound we want. When non-trained people listen to sound they describe what they hear very differently than professional engineers would. They talk about hissing and humming and shaking and booming when an engineer would talk about high, mid and low frequencies, pitch, etc. They say something is “loud” when what they’re hearing has nothing to do with the actual volume at all.
I’ve listened to a lot of these “sky roar” videos and unfortunately, it’s just like listening to a concert on video, you can’t pull the sound apart acurately enough to learn anything about what you are hearing. Camcorder microphones are just not built to convey this, they automatically compress and filter sounds to work best with the recording format, making them great for home movies but useless for any of this… and don’t get me started on cell phone mics!
OPINION 1: The only way to learn anything about these sounds is in real life, as they happen, not by using video, and unfortunately, despite all of the reports and video footage, these events ARE EXTREMELY UNCOMMON.
OPINION 2: The TYPES of sounds on these vidios are far too common to jump to the conclusion that they are anything other than misidentified or unrecognized, naturally occuring sounds. Once I started listening to the videos I could hear these same things all around me; hand dryers in the restroom, the cold air return in my living room, my naighbors water pipes, tv soundtracks, feedback, tires on the highway, shopping carts, etc etc etc. While these may not normally happen at night, loudly, seemingly from the sky, they are sounds (frequencies, textures, etc) that we can encounter, examine and manipulate on a day to day basis. People say these sound a lot like the War of the Worlds movie or Cloverfield monster… well, the engineers for those movies got those sounds from someplace, didn’t they?!?! While the scenario is strange, the sounds themselves are not.
OPINION 3: When you watch an old king fu movie you know the audio has been faked, because it doesn’t align with what you are seeing. Therefore, to disguise a fake sound all you have to do is make sure it doesn’t conflict with what you see… meaning that the easiest hoax to create would be a video with a strange back ground noise (i.e. footage of random clouds or buildings with some sound coming from “the sky” or “off in the distance”), especially if any telltale sign of manipulation can also be interpreted as PART of the weird sound (static, hissing, popping, etc.) A video may capture the sound of Big Foot howling out in the woods, but it would be a different story if the vodeo showed a guy dressed as big foot standing out in the woods howling, because we would have a visual to work with, which is a lot better when working with video.
I’m not saying all of these videos are fake, but I am saying that it’s the first criticism that each one should face. While nothing in the video CONTRADICTS what we are hearing, is there anything in the video that would SUPPORT it? Anything supporting it that cannot be faked as easily as the sound it’s self? All questions that a skeptical (scientific) mind should be asking!
I believe some folks are actually hearing sounds they cannot explain. They are rational, intelligent people with no reason to make anything up. They hear something weird and grab a camera to document it. At the same time, there are a LOT MORE people who capitalize on this for profit or just for fun and it becomes nearly impossible to sort the actual evidence from the trash.
There was a cnn report that just aired this morning 3/21 (west coast) about this. Apparently the residents of clintonville will be addressed in a town hall meeting tonight.
I live a few miles away… I’m going to head out there one of these nights and see if I can get it recorded.
That would be great! If you do send us a link to YT.
I have been listening to strange sounds in the skies for about 2 weeks now on YouTube and found most to be hoaxes.But alot of them are totally unexplained.After all……….the strange sounds are being heard around the world . This made me aware of them and one day I was sitting at my computer and I live in N.C. and I heard a loud roar like a freight train over head and it lasted a long time and I finally went outside and listened to it and it was the same sound I heard in the Florida video , so I went in and got my little digital camera and tried to capture what I heard. It had diminished alot but I still got it .Now I am really intrigued. I really hope a sound engineer can witness some of these sounds and give us some explanation.
Thanks Donna. Yes many are hoaxes but I try really hard to include ones that I think are real. I usually give reasons and try to debunk them. The Florida sound was the first one recorded and there have been many like it since. Not as loud but the same type of noise. What you heard is a particular type of sky noise. In my documenting these videos I have found that there are different types. Look in the categories section under “sky roars”.
Aviston, Illinois sunday night at approximately 230 am. I was watching tv. Dogs had been acting whiney. I thought nothing of it. my friend came up from the basement asking if it was thundering outside. I stopped to listen and concluded the rumbling was a train. He said no way… And we argued for a second before stopping again to listen. I then went to the back door and opened the door. The sound instantly was deafening. Whatever it was sounded like a freight train but louder. I felt a what I could only describe as humidity plus low pressure. Outside felt “weird” to say the least. I instantly assumed it was a tornado but that due to the pitch black outside I couldn’t see it. I woke up the whole house in a panic, grabbed my child from her bed and ran downstairs. But when we got downstairs we heard nothing anymore. Not one minute later did we go back upstairs and outside. Clear skies except we could see a storm cell over st Louis about 50 miles west. We checked radar and nothing there. Crickets chirping cool air…. No debris no wind. Nothing. My friend and I thought we had just lost our minds. We did see a shooting star… Not odd though for being in the middle of fields in BFE Illinois. I then started wondering if it was a bomb and that was the shockwave. Could never quite settle our minds on what it could have been. Today my friend told me about this being on the news. I dont feel crazy anymore. But it still makes me wonder WHAT THE EFF WAS THAT?!?!? Anyone else experience this in Illinois? Please email me FemmeBMX at gmail of you did…. I really would like to hear your persobal accounts of this.
Be prepared to record it next time. Sounds scary. If you do catch it be sure to post it to this blog comment.
I liver in Indiana along the Ohio River. There is a steel plant across the river in Kentucky. When they take the hot sludge out of the mill and dump it on the wet ground, it forms an explosion. It rocks our houses in Indiana, cracking dry wall, breaking windows, and knocking things off the wall. Is there any plants near Clintonville that would be doing anything with hot slag?
Here’s an article from the local paper. They’re taking this very seriously. http://appletonhub.postcrescent.com/article/20120322/APC0101/203220470
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I’m the Joseph Clauson mentioned at the top of this page. The whole experience has been crazy! No one can explain what it is so far and I myself have not heard/felt it sine between 4-5 PM Tuesday afternoon! It was heard and felt by a few neighbors later than that, but with only getting 7 hrs of sleep the first two days this has been going on. I slept from 7 PM to 10 AM Wednesday. Day 2 of this wasn’t as frequent as Day 1, but more intense. I just thought I’d give you all an update from my view. Also there are a few factories here that work with lead and steal, but I’m not sure of what else may be used at other factories in the area.
Hi Joe, I can imagine how disturbing this must be for you. I hope they figure it out so everyone can relax. It’s a very strange thing.
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I experienced this noise on march 14 by Montello WI. About 2pm clear skis no wind at the time. Sound was low pitch like a blast from mining with an softening like echo,
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