Skyquakes and the viral “sky trumpet” sounds are a genuine but largely explainable acoustic mystery, not signs of the apocalypse or a secret weapon
Where the evidence lands: UnresolvedThat strange, powerful sounds are coming from the sky with no natural explanation: deep booms that rattle windows without a storm or blast to cause them, and eerie metallic horn or trumpet tones heard around the world, and that these signal something extraordinary, whether the biblical apocalypse, a covert government project such as HAARP or Project Blue Beam, or an unknown force science refuses to acknowledge.
Believed by: That mysterious booms occur is accepted by geologists and the USGS; the disputed part is the cause. The apocalyptic and secret-weapon readings circulate mainly in end-times and conspiracy communities online.
The full story
What is actually documented
Begin with the part that is not in dispute. In a number of places around the world, people have long reported deep, cannon-like booms that seem to come from the sky or the horizon with no storm overhead and no visible blast. The reports are old and geographically scattered, and each region coined its own name for them. Around Seneca Lake in New York, and later along the Carolina coast, they became the Seneca guns. In the Bengal delta they were the Barisal guns. On the North Sea coast of Belgium and the Netherlands, fishermen called them mistpouffers, roughly “fog belches.” In Japan they are uminari. Collectively, today, they are skyquakes.
This is not fringe material. The U.S. Geological Survey maintains a page titled “Earthquake Booms, Seneca Guns, and Other Sounds,” and the phenomenon turns up in 19th-century writing, including James Fenimore Cooper's 1850 story The Lake Gun, in which he calls the Seneca sound “a sound resembling the explosion of a heavy piece of artillery, that can be accounted for by none of the known laws of nature.” That line captures the honest starting point: the booms are real, they have been noticed for a very long time, and at the moment a witness hears one, its cause is genuinely not obvious.
So the question this file weighs is not whether strange booms occur. They do. It is what causes them, and whether the far louder claims bolted onto them, apocalyptic trumpets and secret weapons, survive contact with the evidence.
The ordinary suspects, and why they fit
When scientists actually chase these sounds, they keep arriving at unglamorous answers, and there is more than one. That plurality is the key. A skyquake is a description of an experience, a boom from nowhere, and several different physical events can produce that same experience.
The best-anchored candidates are these. Very shallow earthquakes, too small to feel as shaking, can send high-frequency vibrations to the surface as an audible boom; the USGS notes that deeper quakes lose those vibrations before they reach us, which is why a boom can come without a felt tremor. Sonic booms from supersonic military aircraft travel for many miles. Bolides, meteors that explode in the atmosphere, generate airbursts heard across whole regions, as the 2013 Chelyabinsk event demonstrated. And distant thunder, blasting, or heavy industry can be bent and focused by atmospheric ducting: a temperature inversion acts like an acoustic channel, delivering far-off noise amplified and seemingly from directly overhead.
Notice what these have in common. Each produces a loud, abrupt, hard-to-locate sound with no obvious nearby source, which is exactly the skyquake signature. None requires anything unknown to physics. The reason no one can hand you a single tidy cause is not that the phenomenon is supernatural; it is that a Carolina coastal boom and an upstate New York boom and a Bengal delta boom may simply be different ordinary things wearing the same acoustic mask.
“No single cause” is not the same as “no cause.” Several mundane events sound alike, which is why the mystery resists one tidy answer.
The trumpet videos, and where the audio came from
The modern chapter is different in character. Starting around 2011, a wave of YouTube videos added a new sound to the old booms: eerie, metallic, groaning, horn or trumpettones, often over a city or a stretch of forest. These “sky trumpets” spread far faster than any boom report ever had, and they are where the apocalyptic and conspiracy readings took hold.
They are also where the evidence turns against the videos. The single most viral early clip, shot over Kyiv, Ukraine, paired a skyline with deep metallic groans, and the audio was later identified as a sound effect from the Transformers films, dubbed onto the footage. As copycat clips appeared from Conklin in Alberta, Terrace in British Columbia, and elsewhere, audio analysts caught the giveaway: the same bird calls and the identical groan recurring across videos supposedly filmed on different continents. That is the fingerprint of reused, dubbed audio, not of a global sound event.
This does not mean every clip is fake. Some almost certainly recorded real distant noise, ducted industry or a far-off boom, and a few witnesses in places like North Battleford, Saskatchewan, phoned local radio in good faith. But the body of “trumpet” footage is so contaminated by hoaxes and copies that it cannot bear the weight placed on it. Fact-checkers such as Snopes, tracing the 2015 “sound of the apocalypse” montage back to those earlier uploads, landed exactly where the evidence allows: some clips may be real, some are demonstrably not, and the dramatic whole is not proof of anything extraordinary.
The apocalypse and the secret weapon
Onto that shaky video record, two big narratives were grafted. One is scriptural: the sounds are the seven trumpets of Revelation, heralds of the end times. The other is technological: the noises are a covert weapon, usually HAARP, the ionospheric research station in Alaska, or Project Blue Beam, a claimed plan to stage a fake, sky-projected event.
Both deserve to be stated plainly and then measured. The apocalyptic reading is an interpretation, not a finding. It attached to a 2011–2013 video fad, much of it hoaxed, rather than to the centuries-old boom reports, and nothing in the acoustics of the sounds points to a supernatural source. Reading prophecy into a groaning recording is a choice a believer brings to the clip; it is not something the clip contains.
The HAARP and Blue Beam claims fail on the facts. HAARP is a documented research facility whose real capabilities are public and do not include broadcasting horn tones over cities worldwide. “Project Blue Beam” traces to a 1990s hoax theory by Serge Monast and has never been connected to anything real. No leaked file, no whistleblower, no measurement ties either to the skyquake record. What these explanations offer is not evidence but a villain: a way to convert a random, unnerving noise into a story with an author and a purpose.
Where the evidence lands
Keep the layers apart and the picture is coherent. The booms are real and have been reported for more than a century. The leading explanations are ordinary: shallow earthquakes, sonic booms, meteor airbursts, and above all distant thunder or industrial noise focused by atmospheric ducting, with a small, unproven role floated for very-low-frequency geomagnetic or auroral effects. And the apocalyptic and secret-weapon claims are unsupported, resting on a video record that is itself heavily hoaxed.
That is why the verdict here is unproven rather than debunked. It would be wrong to say the phenomenon is fake, because the booms genuinely occur and some individual cases are never nailed down. It would be equally wrong to say the mystery vindicates the trumpets of Revelation or a HAARP weapon, because it does not. The honest statement sits in between: skyquakes are a real, mostly explainable, multi-cause acoustic puzzle that no single answer resolves, and the doomsday and conspiracy layers are stories laid over the top, not findings drawn out of it.
The right posture is the same one the USGS takes: report the sounds, name the plausible causes, and resist filling the residual gap with certainty in either direction. Something is genuinely making these booms. It is almost certainly the sky and the ground behaving in ordinary, if locally hard-to-identify, ways, not a trumpet from heaven or a machine in Alaska.
The booms are real; the leading causes are mundane; the apocalypse and the secret weapon are not in the evidence. That gap between real and explained is the whole file.
What's still unexplained
- Coastal booms in low-seismicity areas remain only partly explained. Where there are few local earthquakes, the shallow-quake mechanism does not apply, and it is not always clear whether a given Seneca-gun boom is a distant sonic boom, a bolide, ducted industrial noise, or something else. Recent work suggesting an atmospheric path for East Coast booms narrows the field without closing it.
- The proposed very-low-frequency geomagnetic or auroral coupling is intriguing but unproven. The idea that geomagnetic activity or the aurora could produce faint audible or infrasound effects has been floated by physicists for some sky sounds, yet it is far from established and, at most, would explain a small subset of reports.
- Separating real recordings from hoaxes in the “sky trumpet” corpus is genuinely hard. Some clips almost certainly captured real distant noise; others are dubbed with movie audio. Without original files and metadata, individual videos often cannot be cleanly sorted, which is why honest fact-checks stop short of ruling every clip in or out.
- Why the sounds cluster in certain places and periods is not fully understood. Local geography, industry, weather patterns, and reporting culture all plausibly shape where booms are noticed and named, but the relative weight of these factors, versus any real geophysical concentration, has not been pinned down.
Point by point
The claim: The booms are not imaginary or a modern internet invention: they have been reported for well over a century under many local names.
What the record shows: True, and important. Seneca guns, Barisal guns, mistpouffers, and uminari are documented across 19th- and 20th-century sources, long before YouTube. The USGS keeps a page titled “Earthquake Booms, Seneca Guns, and Other Sounds” precisely because the reports are real and recurring. Accepting that the sounds happen is the correct starting point; it says nothing about the exotic causes some attach to them.
The claim: Some skyquakes are caused by very shallow earthquakes too small to feel as shaking.
What the record shows: This is one of the better-supported explanations. The USGS notes that high-frequency vibrations from a shallow earthquake can generate a booming sound at the surface, while deeper quakes’ vibrations dissipate before they reach it. In seismically active regions this accounts for a share of the booms. It does not cover coastal booms in places with little local seismicity, which is why it is one explanation among several.
The claim: Others are sonic booms from aircraft or exploding meteors, not anything unknown.
What the record shows: Well established. Military jets going supersonic produce booms that carry for many miles, and a bolide (a meteor that explodes in the atmosphere) can generate a powerful airburst heard over a wide area, as confirmed for events like the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor. Both are ordinary physics. They fit the sudden, sourceless “cannon shot” character of many skyquakes without invoking anything paranormal.
The claim: Atmospheric conditions can make distant, ordinary noise appear to come from the sky right above you.
What the record shows: Correct, and this is central to the acoustics. Temperature inversions and other layering can duct sound, bending and focusing distant thunder, industrial noise, blasting, or aircraft so it arrives amplified and seemingly from overhead. Skeptics and acousticians point to ducting as a strong candidate for the eerie, directionless quality of many recordings, including some of the metallic “trumpet” tones.
The claim: The viral “sky trumpet” videos prove the sounds are real and worldwide.
What the record shows: They prove no such thing, and several are demonstrably faked. The widely shared Kyiv clip used a sound effect from the Transformers movies. Analysts found the same bird calls and identical groans reused across clips supposedly filmed in different countries, a signature of dubbed audio. Some genuine clips likely captured real distant noise, but the corpus is heavily contaminated by edited and copycat uploads, so the videos cannot carry the weight believers place on them.
The claim: The sounds are the biblical trumpets of Revelation announcing the end times.
What the record shows: There is no evidence for this, and the timeline argues against it. The “trumpet” framing attached to a specific 2011–2013 video trend, much of it traced to hoaxed audio, rather than to the centuries-old boom reports. Reading a scriptural prophecy into an acoustic phenomenon is an interpretive choice, not a finding; nothing about the physics of the sounds points to a supernatural or eschatological source.
The claim: HAARP or “Project Blue Beam” is generating the noises as a weapon or a staged event.
What the record shows: Unsupported on every count. HAARP is a well-documented ionospheric research facility whose capabilities are public and do not include broadcasting horn sounds over cities worldwide. “Project Blue Beam” originates in a 1990s hoax theory by Serge Monast and has never been shown to correspond to anything real. No leaked document, whistleblower, or measurement links either to the skyquake reports; the claim substitutes a familiar villain for an ordinary acoustic puzzle.
The claim: Because science can’t name one cause, the phenomenon must be something extraordinary.
What the record shows: This inverts the actual situation. “No single cause” is not the same as “no cause.” The reason skyquakes resist one tidy answer is that they are almost certainly several different ordinary things (thunder here, a shallow quake there, a sonic boom or bolide elsewhere, ducted industrial noise in another case) that happen to sound alike. Multiple mundane causes is a stronger fit for the scattered, varied reports than one hidden exotic one.
Other readings
Angles that don't fit neatly into the claim or its rebuttal, laid out and weighed, not endorsed.
The multiple-mundane-causes read
The explanation best supported by the evidence is also the least dramatic: skyquakes are not one thing but a bundle of different ordinary events that share an acoustic signature. A ducted peal of distant thunder, a shallow micro-earthquake, a supersonic jet, an exploding meteor, and blasting or heavy industry carried on an inversion layer can all present as a sourceless boom. On this read the “mystery” is real chiefly in the sense that no observer can tell, from the sound alone, which mundane cause they just heard.
The mass-media-suggestion read
For the “sky trumpet” wave specifically, the driver looks partly psychological and social. Once a template video went viral, people were primed to notice, record, and interpret ambient or distant noise as the same eerie horn, and copycat uploads (some openly hoaxed) reinforced the pattern. This does not mean every witness is mistaken; it means the trend amplified and reshaped a real, mundane substrate of sounds into a single apocalyptic narrative.
Timeline
- 1850James Fenimore Cooper publishes the short story “The Lake Gun,” built around the mysterious booming heard at Seneca Lake in upstate New York. He describes “a sound resembling the explosion of a heavy piece of artillery, that can be accounted for by none of the known laws of nature.” The settlers’ name for it, the “lake gun,” is the ancestor of today’s “Seneca guns.”
- 1870s–1890sBritish colonial observers in the Ganges delta document repeated dull, cannon-like reports over the water near Barisal in Bengal. The “Barisal guns” enter the scientific literature and are discussed alongside similar booms in Belgium and the Netherlands, where fishermen already call them mistpouffers, roughly “fog belches.”
- 1920s–1930sThe anomaly collector Charles Fort catalogues booms and “detonations” from around the world, cementing skyquakes as a recurring entry in the literature of the unexplained. Meteorologists of the era favour distant thunder and mirage-like sound propagation; seismologists suspect small earthquakes.
- 2011Videos titled “strange sounds” begin spreading on YouTube. The most viral early clip, shot over Kyiv, Ukraine, pairs a city skyline with deep metallic groans. The audio is later identified as a sound effect from the Transformers films, dubbed over the footage.
- 2012Copycat “sky trumpet” videos appear from Conklin and other spots in Alberta, Terrace in British Columbia, and elsewhere. In North Battleford, Saskatchewan, a radio station fields roughly forty calls about strange sky sounds in January. Audio analysts note the same bird calls and identical groans recurring across clips supposedly filmed continents apart.
- 2012The apocalyptic and conspiracy framings take hold online. End-times channels tie the noises to the seven trumpets of Revelation; others attribute them to HAARP, the ionospheric research facility in Alaska, or to “Project Blue Beam,” a 1990s hoax theory alleging a faked, sky-projected event. A University of Saskatchewan physicist offers a mundane alternative, suggesting some sounds could relate to electromagnetic activity from the aurora.
- 2015A compilation of 2011–2013 clips recirculates as “the sound of the apocalypse.” Fact-checkers including Snopes trace the montage to earlier, partly hoaxed uploads and note the reused audio, without being able to prove or disprove every individual clip.
- 2016The skeptic podcast Skeptoid devotes an episode to “Sky Trumpets,” walking through the natural and mundane candidates (thunder, sonic booms, industrial noise, atmospheric ducting) and the evidence that many of the dramatic videos are edited or faked.
- 2020Seismologists present work analysing East Coast “Seneca guns” and conclude that many of those particular booms appear to travel through the atmosphere rather than the ground, pointing away from local earthquakes for that region and back toward atmospheric and possibly distant sonic-boom sources. The USGS continues to state there is no single agreed cause.
Unresolved. Two things are true at once here. Unexplained booms, known for centuries as Seneca guns, Barisal guns, mistpouffers, uminari, and generically as skyquakes, are a real, long-documented class of acoustic events, and the leading explanations are firmly natural or mundane: distant thunder, very shallow earthquakes, sonic booms from aircraft, exploding meteor bolides, and industrial or aircraft noise bent and focused by atmospheric ducting, with a minor role floated for very-low-frequency geomagnetic and auroral coupling. No single cause fits every report, which is exactly why the verdict is unproven rather than debunked: the phenomenon is genuine and only partly resolved. The apocalyptic layer is a separate matter. The 2011–2013 viral “sky trumpet” videos are heavily contaminated by hoaxes (the first widely shared Kyiv clip used sound lifted from the Transformers films), and claims that the noises are HAARP, Project Blue Beam, or the biblical trumpets of Revelation have no evidentiary support. This file reports the booms honestly while treating the doomsday and secret-weapon readings as unsupported.
Reviewed by The Conspiratory Editors · Last reviewed July 19, 2026 · How we rate
Sources
- 1.Earthquake Booms, Seneca Guns, and Other Sounds, U.S. Geological Survey
- 2.Sky Trumpets (Episode 526), Skeptoid (Brian Dunning) (2016)
- 3.The Sound of Apocalypse, Snopes (2015)
- 4.Skyquake, Wikipedia
- 5.The Lake Gun, Wikipedia
- 6.What's behind the mysterious, earth-shaking boom of the 'Seneca Guns'?, Live Science (2020)
- 7.Seismologists Investigate Unexplained Skyquakes, Forbes (David Bressan) (2020)
- 8.Are the 'Strange Sounds' Videos a Hoax?, HuffPost (2012)
- 9.Sky sounds, RationalWiki
- 10.The Mistpouffers of Clintonville, Wisconsin: A Brief History of Brontides, Icequakes, and Other Mysterious Booms, Chicago Magazine (2012)
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