‘No ordinary boom.’ Loud, mysterious boom heard and felt by many in Texas

A loud boom echoed across Texas’ largest city, rattling homes and startling residents — but where it came from remains a mystery.

People in the Houston area flocked to social media, looking for answers as to what caused the blast. According to social media posts, the boom occurred shortly before midnight, around 11:40 p.m. on Monday, March 7.

“Something just exploded in Houston wtf,” one Twitter user wrote.

Some suggested it may have been a transformer that exploded, but the bang was heard too far and wide for that to be the case.

Others thought the strange sound was a sonic boom.

Jets flying at high speed overhead sometimes cause sonic booms, which may reverberate for many miles, as happened in Missouri last summer, McClatchy News reported.

It’s not clear if that’s the case with Monday night’s boom. While the area is home to Ellington Field Joint Reserve Base, no aircraft from that base capable of supersonic flight were in the air, an Air National Guard spokesman told McClatchy News.

McClatchy also reached out to officials at NASA’s Johnson Space Center for comment.

The National Weather Service can’t explain the boom either, it said in a tweet, adding it “could have been a meteorite,” as some have guessed, but “nothing showed up on radar or satellite at the time the boom was heard so can’t verify anything.”

There were no reported sightings of a meteor in Texas on Monday, according to the American Meteor Society. But that isn’t entirely surprising because, as some twitter users pointed out, it was cloudy overnight.

Though the cause is up for debate, most seem to agree on one thing, it “was no ordinary boom.”

This story was originally published March 8, 2022 at 9:17 AM with the headline "‘No ordinary boom.’ Loud, mysterious boom heard and felt by many in Texas."