# Skyquakes and the viral “sky trumpet” sounds are a genuine but largely explainable acoustic mystery, not signs of the apocalypse or a secret weapon

**No verdict.** 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; 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.

Category: Unexplained Phenomena · Era: 1850s–present · First circulated: Booms of this kind were written up as early as the 1800s (James Fenimore Cooper fictionalised the Seneca Lake “lake gun” in 1850, and the Barisal guns of the Ganges delta reached the scientific literature by the 1890s); the modern “sky trumpet” panic dates to viral YouTube videos in 2011–2013 · 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.
URL: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/skyquakes-sky-trumpets

## Summary
For at least two centuries, people in scattered places have reported deep, cannon-like booms with no visible source, no storm overhead, and no obvious blast. Different regions gave them different names: Seneca guns around Seneca Lake in New York and along the Carolina coast, Barisal guns in the Bengal delta, mistpouffers (“fog belches”) on the North Sea coast, uminari in Japan. Collectively they are now called skyquakes, and they are a genuine, catalogued phenomenon. Starting around 2011, a wave of viral videos added a new twist: metallic, groaning, horn-like tones that people called “sky trumpets,” which end-times believers read as the trumpets of Revelation and conspiracy channels blamed on HAARP or Project Blue Beam. This file keeps the two apart. The booms are real and mostly explainable by ordinary geophysics and acoustics, though no one cause covers them all. The apocalyptic and secret-weapon claims are unsupported, and much of the viral trumpet footage is edited or faked.

## The claim
That 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.

## Origin and timeline
- 1850: James 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–1890s: British 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–1930s: The 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.
- 2011: Videos 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.
- 2012: Copycat “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.
- 2012: The 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.
- 2015: A 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.
- 2016: The 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.
- 2020: Seismologists 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.

## The evidence, claim by claim
- Claim: The booms are not imaginary or a modern internet invention: they have been reported for well over a century under many local names.
  Evidence: 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.
- Claim: Some skyquakes are caused by very shallow earthquakes too small to feel as shaking.
  Evidence: 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.
- Claim: Others are sonic booms from aircraft or exploding meteors, not anything unknown.
  Evidence: 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.
- Claim: Atmospheric conditions can make distant, ordinary noise appear to come from the sky right above you.
  Evidence: 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.
- Claim: The viral “sky trumpet” videos prove the sounds are real and worldwide.
  Evidence: 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.
- Claim: The sounds are the biblical trumpets of Revelation announcing the end times.
  Evidence: 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.
- Claim: HAARP or “Project Blue Beam” is generating the noises as a weapon or a staged event.
  Evidence: 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.
- Claim: Because science can’t name one cause, the phenomenon must be something extraordinary.
  Evidence: 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.

## Why people believe it
- The sounds are genuinely unsettling and genuinely real. A deep boom that rattles your windows with no storm, blast, or plane in sight is a legitimately strange experience, so the instinct that “something” unexplained is happening starts from a true premise before the exotic theories take over.
- The mystery has a long, respectable pedigree. Because Seneca guns and Barisal guns appear in old scientific writing and even in James Fenimore Cooper’s fiction, the phenomenon carries an air of established enigma that lends credibility to whatever explanation gets attached to it, sober or not.
- Viral video does the persuading. Dramatic clips with metallic groans spread far faster than a dry acoustics explainer, and once thousands of people have watched an ominous “sky trumpet” montage, the edited origin of much of that audio rarely catches up with the impression it leaves.
- The apocalyptic and conspiracy frames offer meaning. “The trumpets of Revelation” or “a secret government weapon” turns an uncomfortable, random noise into a story with agency and significance, which is more satisfying than “probably a ducted sonic boom.”

## Open questions
- 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.

## Sources
- Earthquake Booms, Seneca Guns, and Other Sounds, U.S. Geological Survey: https://www.usgs.gov/programs/earthquake-hazards/earthquake-booms-seneca-guns-and-other-sounds
- Sky Trumpets (Episode 526), Skeptoid (Brian Dunning) (2016): https://skeptoid.com/episodes/526
- The Sound of Apocalypse, Snopes (2015): https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-sound-of-apocalypse/
- Skyquake, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyquake
- The Lake Gun, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lake_Gun
- What's behind the mysterious, earth-shaking boom of the 'Seneca Guns'?, Live Science (2020): https://www.livescience.com/agu-seneca-guns-cause.html
- Seismologists Investigate Unexplained Skyquakes, Forbes (David Bressan) (2020): https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidbressan/2020/12/22/seismologists-investigate-unexplained-skyquakes/
- Are the 'Strange Sounds' Videos a Hoax?, HuffPost (2012): https://www.huffpost.com/entry/are-the-strange-sounds-vi_b_1258049
- Sky sounds, RationalWiki: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Sky_sounds
- The Mistpouffers of Clintonville, Wisconsin: A Brief History of Brontides, Icequakes, and Other Mysterious Booms, Chicago Magazine (2012): https://www.chicagomag.com/city-life/march-2012/the-mistpouffers-of-clintonville-wisconsin-a-brief-history-of-brontides-icequakes-and-other-mysterious-booms/

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