Today has been a tiring day already.  We had two very huge booms around 11am today.  They were so loud and the house shook just a little bit, that it frightened my little ones.  Brian didn't waste anytime getting out of harms way.  He scrambled on top of the end table, making his way across the arm of the couch and then leaping into the safety of my shoulder.  It was quite funny honestly.  Poor guy, yes I know.  I feel awful that he was that scared and I found humor in it.  I did soothe him and ease his nerves and after a few minutes he was calm again.  It wasn't long before he climbed back down to play with his brother Mikey.  The two of them were jumping as hard as they could to imitate the sound of the booms that shook our home just a little bit earlier.

So what are those strange booms that we hear all the time?  If you're reading this I'm sure you are most likely wondering.  The first time I experienced them, they scared me so bad that phoned Mike and told him that I thought something exploded down the road.  To my shock, he laughed.  He told me that the area we live in has been experiencing these booms for quite some time.  We have a nuclear power plant in the area and that concerned me too.  It has taken me a long time to get used to these sporadic booms, and even now they still startle me.  The local news reports on them every time as well and yet they can't explain this strange phenomenon.  Some people think that these booms are the direct result of Military activity off of our shore.  Which does seem like a very plausible answer.  However, the Military fully denies this.  Others say that its the Seneca Guns.  Now if you don't know what that is, which I honestly didn't till a couple years ago, then you would think "gun".  Guns have bangs, but what is a Seneca Gun?

During the 1800's a man named James Fennimore Cooper, wrote a short story in relation to these strange booms.  The following is from a website I found online relating to this.

The Lake Gun" is almost certainly based on local lore picked up by Cooper while visiting his son Paul, who in the early 1840s attended Geneva College (now Hobart College) at Geneva, at the head of Seneca Lake in central New York.²⁴ The story is narrated by a man called Fuller, described as "an idler, a traveler, and one possessed of much attainment derived from journeys in distant lands,"²⁵ who is casually investigating two legends of Seneca Lake. The first legend is of a tree trunk, misnamed the "Wandering Jew," that has floated upright around the lake since before the arrival of the earliest white settlers, defying wind and current, and seemingly unsinkable.²⁶ The second is of the "Lake Gun," a mysterious sound like an explosion of artillery, which is heard at intervals around the lake and cannot be explained by science.²⁷


One thing I should add, Mike reminded me that these booms do not register on Seismometers and many believe that it is not ground based.  Which means they are an air based phenomenon.  Either way, they are loud, they rattle homes, and they can scare people at times.  I think I'm going to come up with my own story and share with the boys as to what these booms might be.  As this is the time of year when the booms seem to be most active.  I'll share the story on here later.