Has anyone else had mysterious booms in your area?

[William Seger]

31. I believe I've heard an "electrophonic" meteor

About 1980, just as I was arriving home after dusk, I saw the largest fireball meteor I've ever seen and simultaneously heard a sound like someone opening a soda bottle. It wasn't until later when I told my wife about it that it occurred to me that the sound didn't make any sense: The meteor was so high up that any noise it made would take at least a couple of minutes to reach the ground. So, I decided that it must have been a random sound that my brain associated to the meteor just because they were simultaneous.

Then in the late '90s, I came across a web site that was studying the phenomenon and collecting reports. It's interesting that it's been a controversy for a long time, with astronomer Sir Edmund Halley writing about many reports of a "hissing meteor" in 1719, and then dismissing those reports as "fantasy" because sound can't possibly travel that fast.

There is now at least one claim of hissing meteors being recorded but it's still a very controversial phenomenon, mainly because there isn't any well accepted explanation for how a meteor could create the low frequency radio waves that are believed to cause the "electrophonic" effect. However, the great number of similar reports seems to indicate that the phenomenon is real. In my case, I was wearing metal frame glasses and I have fairly dry hair, which are two fairly common factors in reports, and two things that are believed to be capable of acting as a transducer by vibrating and turning the radio waves into sound.

There are lots of (presumably) natural phenomena that still aren't well understood.