Local News

What was that loud ‘boom’ you heard in Utah?

Published

4 years ago

January 26, 2021

SALT LAKE CITY (ABC4 NEWS) – Did you hear it? ABC4 received multiple reports of loud booms and shaking heard and felt throughout Davis, Utah, and Salt Lake Counties.

Well, try not to worry. Here is one possible explanation:

Hill Airforce Base tweeted on Sunday evening saying, “Starting tomorrow, we’ll be flying later in the evening at @HAFB, with last landings between 9-9:30 p.m until Friday. Not truly late, like the summertime, just a heads up. Here’s a video on why we need to train at night.”

In a Twitter video, officials with Hill Force Base went into detail on why it is beneficial for their pilots to train at night.

“Our mission with the F-35s involves deploying the aircraft quickly to anywhere in the world and then being ready to deploy those aircrafts in combat very soon after we arrive in theater,” F-35 pilot Lt. Col Yosef Morris said. “

“And so that mission may require us to fly at night, and as a matter of fact, the way the aircraft was designed, and many of the missions that we do, we prefer to fly at night in actual combat because it makes us harder to see,” Lt. Col. Morris added.

This isn’t the first time that the F-35 testing caused some panic among Utahns who heard a “boom”. A “sonic boom” was reported after aerial combat training was conducted at Hill Air Force Base in October of last year.

Many reports circulated on social media on Monday evening claiming that the “booms” were accompanied by shaking, which could lead some to believe that an earthquake was responsible.

The University of Utah Seismograph Stations took to Twitter to quickly debunk the theory that an earthquake was the culprit saying, “We’ve heard some reports of people hearing “booms” and feeling shaking along the Wasatch front. While it was energetic enough to be recorded by our seismometers, the waves are traveling too slowly to be seismic. Aka not an earthquake.”