CAMBRIA, Calif. -- For
the past two days, Central Coast News has received calls and emails about the
mysterious shaking felt across the Central Coast.
Edwards Air force Base
officials told us the mysterious explosion was a sonic boom caused by an F-22
fighter jet as it was making a test flight but some skeptics aren't convinced.
"In a typical
earthquake, what we have is the first waves that arrive, the 'P waves'" says
Cambria Geophysicist Lou Blanck.
"Then we get the shear waves, where the real shaking
starts but there was never this shear wave so this was completely
different."
Edwards Air force Base
says the shaking was caused by an F22 fighter jet making a routine flight over
the Pacific Ocean.
"Having grown up on
air force bases, this is unlike any sonic boom I've ever experienced before,"
says Blanck.
Thursday morning, Lou
heard rattling outside a building in Morro Bay, then 50 minutes later he heard
it again.
"The windows were
rattling and it seemed to go for at least ten seconds," says Blanck. "Which is
pretty anomalous for a sonic boom."
He says the unusual
duration of the shaking may have also been caused by the sonic boom bouncing off
a layer of smog or it could've been something else altogether.
The duration of a
sonic boom is brief, typically, less than a second. One hundred milliseconds for
most fighter jets.
Blanck says the sonic
boom could've encountered a thick layer of fog which may have caused the
shockwave from the F22 to bounce back and forth between the ground and the layer
making the boom longer than usual.
"This was probably a
plane that I wasn't around growing up on air force bases," says Blanck. "So it's
a new one, I guess!"
