The Bell Island Boom
On April 2, 1978, there was a loud explosion on Bell Island which caused damage to some houses and the electrical house wiring in the surrounding area. Two cup-shaped holes about two feet deep and three feet wide marked the major impact. A number of TV sets in Lance Cove, the surrounding community, also exploded at the time of the blast. It was initially thought to be caused by ball lightning. Meteorologists confirmed that atmospheric conditions at the time were not conducive to lightning. The boom was heard 55 kilometers away in Cape Broyle. The impact occurred in the Bickfordville area, on the southwestern side of the island. According to Tom Bearden, the boom occurred when a bolt of unusually straight lightning impacted the ground at a 45 degree angle.
The incident was investigated by John Warren and Robert Freyman from Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, in New Mexico, United States. It has been speculated that, due to the two men's place of work, they were investigating a secret weapons test and were military attachés. However, reacting to data received from the Vela satellites, they were in fact investigating a superbolt - an unusually large bolt of lightning, lasting an unusually long time: about a thousandth of a second.
A documentary aired on the History Channel about electromagnetic pulse weapons investigated the speculation that the incident may have been a result of top secret experiments. It was postulated that either the Soviet or the U.S. governments were the cause of the 'attack' and that it involved high energy beams focused into the ionosphere that were attracted by the iron in abandoned mines. In the Skeptoid podcast The Bell Island Boom, presenter Brian Dunning dismissed that theory stating "Although iron is magnetic and can be magnetized, natural iron ore has its molecules jumbled in every direction and rarely happens to have a significant magnetic field, certainly not strong enough to divert or attract a particle beam. However, the Skeptoid podcast presenter did not take into account that the natural oolitic iron ore on Bell Island is in fact classified as being magnetic by scientists due to its hematite content.
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Famous quotes containing the words bell, island and/or boom:
“His are the quiet steeps of dreamland,
The waters of no-more-pain;
His ram’s bell rings ‘neath an arch of stars,
“Rest, rest, and rest again.””
—Walter De La Mare (1873–1956)
“Know that, on the right hand of the Indies, there is an island called California, very near to the Terrestrial Paradise, which was peopled with black women.... Their arms were all of gold.”
—For the State of California, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.”
—Joan Didion (b. 1935)