A boom in the night.

So last night I was working away on homework at around 11:00 pm. Dawn had already gone to bed (big surprise). And there was a loud boom.

It didn’t sound like a crash, it sounded like a boom. It had deep resonance about it. I felt it. I looked up, thought “what the heck was that,” and promptly went about my homework. This morning I asked Dawn if she heard the boom last night. She said that she hadn’t.

Little did I know that was this morning’s most popular game around Huntsville is asking people if they heard the loud boom. The Huntsville Times reports has the following:

What was it?

That's the question being asked in four north Alabama counties
today.

Around 11 p.m. a loud boom was reported in southeast Huntsville, east Limestone, Morgan and Marshall counties.

EMA officials do not know what caused the boom.

If you know, let us know.

Holy cow. It was loud enough to be heard in four counties? I wonder what the heck it was. It seems that if you have a boom that loud there ought to be a missing building or something to show for it.

Conspiracy theorist, start your engines.

[Edit: Thanks Griner. I had meant to include a link to the story this morning and forgot.]

[Update: Redstone Arsenal confirmed that they made the boom. It was a rocket motor test at Test Area 4. They said similar tests have been conducted all week. Evidently the weather conditions were particularly favorable for propagating sound last night. That’s why so many people heard it.

I was hoping for something more sinister. Where are the tentacle wielding spaceships?]

[Update 2: Dawn found an article with some actual details in it….and they’re awesome. Redstone does some cool work. In this case they were baking a missile segment in an oven to see how long it would take before it would blow up. They expected yesterday’s missile to pop sometime in the afternoon but didn’t go boom until 11 PM. Neat.]