Fracking, HAARP, and Worldwide Strange Booming Sounds

In March of 2012 Residents of Clintonville, Wisconsin were wakened in the dead of night by loud booming sounds. The booming noises occurred nightly over the course of an entire week. Local authorities could find not cause for the sounds and investigation by the U.S. Geological Service (the USBS) at first revealed nothing.

The sounds could not be attributed to transformers blowing up, electrical storms, aircraft, or geological events.

The Clintonville sounds have stopped, but similar sounds were heard in late May in West Michigan towns, just across the lake from Wisconsin. One Kalamazoo Michigan man awoke in the middle of the night to the sound of one of these deafening booms, looked outside to see if a storm had hit, and saw that the weather was calm and dry but two huge trees in his front yard had cracked neatly in half at exactly the same spot.

These strange booms, which sound much like the sonic boom caused by a high speed aircraft, have since been heard all over the world, in places as diverse and as far apart as Scotland, Florida, France, and Australia.

Explanations, such as they are, have been sketchy and frustrating.

One city council official in a small Australian town who attributed the booms to the release of numbers of cockatoos back into the wild, noting that the birds can be 'quite noisy'.

Two months after the Clintonville Wisconsin sounds were heard, the USGS found that a magnitude 1.3 earthquake had in fact hit near Clintonville that same week. No one made the connection to the booms, because an earthquake of that size is so faint as the be nearly unnoticeable.

The official who offered up the tiny earthquake explanation even admitted that it was difficult for him to understand how such minor seismic activity could create such huge sounds, but since that was the only anomaly found that week, it must be the cause.

Some explanations are plausible but none have been confirmed. Others veer toward conspiracy theory, but just because an explanation sounds paranoid doesn't mean it is wrong. Certainly the U.S. military has a history of keeping new weapons secret until they are used, and national security demands secrecy on other issues as well.

A few of the more compelling possible explanations include:

1. Fracking. Fracking is a controversial process for extracting natural gas from deposits of underground shale. Recent evidence indicates that fracking may well increase the number of small earthquakes in the immediate vicinity. Some people believe that fracking is capable of triggering a large scale geological event if the practice continued at the current level.
2. Sonic Booms from Stealth Aircraft. The U.S. military has been openly working on a number of vehicles, both on land and in the air, which cannot be detected by radar and cannot be seen. One of the more openly shared examples is a truck which is fitted with technology that projects the scenery on the opposite side onto the truck itself, making it nearly invisible to the naked eye. Tests on aircraft which have been rendered undetectable could create large booming noises that are impossible to trace.
3. HAARP. HAARP is a US government test programs that is the target of numerous conspiracy theories. HAARP stands for High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program. HAARP's stated purpose is to scan the ionosphere for radio communications and surveillance, but conspiracy theorists claim that HAARP is capable of modifying weather, and may be responsible for the mysterious booms. The US government has recently announced that it plans to disable HAARP in the near future.