Potentially Useless Musings of S. Brooke
May 17, 2020
Of course I'm aware of the strange jet-like, or trumpet-like sounds, people have been hearing, and recording, all over the world. I'm sure most people are, by now.
The documented video and audio evidence goes back many years, and even James Fenimore Cooper wrote about a similar phenomena taking place near Seneca Lake in New York State, first published in 1850. He called the sounds, “Seneca Guns”, or “Lake Guns”. Seneca Lake is frequently noted as being in the Catskill Mountains, but it's actually one of the finger lakes, in central, western New York State, near Buffalo, and is probably more appropriately identified as being near or part of the Allegheny Plateau, which the Catskill Mountains also are a part of. However, The Catskills are usually identified on maps as being south of Albany, and north of New York City, in the Hudson Valley region. Washington Irving also wrote of strange sounds occurring in New York State, in his piece, Rip Van Winkle published in 1819. These sounds are heard 'round the world, and video evidence is just the most recent kind of documentations of them.
If you haven't seen video of these sorts of sounds yet, a quick youtube.com search will give you hours of mysterious and baffling entertainment.
Depending upon the sound heard, people refer to them as Skyquakes, sky drums, strange jet sounds, sky trumpet sounds, booms, and so on. Folks never seem to be able to identify the source, and wonder if it might be some low frequency generated by HAARP, alien spacecraft, or angelic trumpets heralding the coming of an ethereal king.
There's at least one lone skeptic on youtube, an audio engineer, who surmises that all of these videos are fakes - mere hoaxes. Good fun, maybe, but not to be believed as being a real, natural, auditory phenomena.
And that position seems very logical, and probably the most rational of all the youtube videos. A person might just think themselves silly for even believing all of those sounds ever existed . . . until they hear the sounds for themselves, in person, in real life. Meaning not on youtube.
That's exactly what happened to me, and my 'husband a few days ago. Because of the Sars CoV 2/Covid 19 viral pandemic that has been sweeping the globe recently, we, like most everyone else, have been staying in our house a lot. And it's not like we don't like our house. We just had a new roof put on, after all. But we are feeling a smidge of cabin fever, which is not at all dangerous, but it is itchy, and because of that once a week or so, we've been taking a long drive somewhere, preferably out in the middle of nowhere. Since we're in New York near Albany, and the highest infection rates in our state are south of us near New York City, we usually head north.
Luckily, we keep the Adirondacks up that way, a place I love to visit, whenever I can.
On the 14th of May, 2020, we headed to a short trail we know of in Hamilton County, for about a half mile long walk along a small stream, to a small lake we had visited previously. The last time we had trekked to the lake a week and a half before, I noticed all kinds of sounds that I wished I could capture. The peepers were singing, the waves were lapping the shoreline, and the wind was breathing through the tops of the hemlocks in just the way I like. That wind is so soothing and peaceful, it's one of my favorite sounds, and I thought it would be nice to capture it, and share it with others, online, during the pandemic. So we planned to return with my camera, and a small audio recorder my husband has.
When we arrived at the trail head, I decided to leave my phone in the car, since I was bringing my camera, and I don't get cell service in that area, anyway. My camera was in my backpack, and my husband's recorder was in his backpack. He was bringing his phone, which does get service on that trail. There seemed no reason to carry a second phone.
We were about a quarter of a mile in, when all of the sudden, we heard what sounded like an incredibly loud jet, right above us. Generally, this sort of thing is an annoyance to us. We drive 2 hours from Albany, out into the mountains, and we still hear highway noise, or air traffic. Silence is hard to come by, these days, I guess. We frequently complain to each other when this sort of thing happens.
But this particular noise was different. It stopped us in our tracks, and we both started trying to catch a glimpse of the skies through the tops of the cedars, which were not moving at all; as I had already noted on the drive up, it was a fairly still day, and I was worried I wouldn't get the wind in the treetops audio I wanted. This “jet” sound was not only very loud, but it also was making some eerie 'under sounds' that seemed off, somehow. More like a metallic wind, or the hull of a large ship scraping bottom, somewhere off in the distance. My husband is sure he saw a tiny jet somewhere up there, with two air streams coming off of the wings for a second or two, but I didn't see it.
I turned around in circles, trying to identify where the sound was coming from, but it was literally coming from all directions, at the same time. There was no source, other than simply, the sky. I complained to him that I didn't like the sound of it. It was creepy, and not nice. It gave me an ominous feeling. Whatever it was sounded big. It lasted for possibly a minute or two, and then suddenly vanished, never to come back.
Why didn't he take out his phone, or recorder? Why didn't I take out my camera? Why didn't we record the sound? I can't really say! We were so frozen there, just trying to identify the source, I guess it was gone before we thought to make a recording. maybe if I had my phone, I would have gotten it. Bad decision!
Anyway, because he was sure he saw a jet, he became convinced the sound was some kind of unusual jet, and the sound was being amplified by the mountains. And because I grew up in the mountains, and we now live very close to Albany International Airport, I was sure that was not a jet. I've heard plenty of jets, and I've heard jets in the mountains. That's not the sound I was hearing. The sound I heard was weird.
We listened for another half a minute, hoping for the sound to return, and then when it didn't, like any other person with a short attention span, moved down the trail. I was glad it was gone, and hoped it didn't come back.
We briefly explored the lake area, and discovered a new trail at the back we had never gone down before. We thought it might go around the other side of the lake, and decided to follow it.
Two hours later, it became obvious that we had made a mistake. We had walked much farther than I intended carrying so much electronic equipment. My feet were killing me in my boots, which are a little too small. We had very little food, and not enough water, because we had thought we were only hiking a half mile in, and a half mile back. He checked his GPS on his phone, which showed that we had walked pretty far from the lake, were heading towards a river which cut between us and the road, we didn't know if there was a bridge over the river, and there was a second river also between us and the road. The trail had been rocky, endlessly hilly, muddy, buggy (I ate two, and he ate one), and I was complaining because there had been precious few views of the lake. The sun would be setting in about 3 hours, and I could see clouds coming in, although he had checked the weather earlier, and reassured me it wasn't set to rain until 8 pm. Still, the Adirondacks are a rainy place, and we had to decide what to do. Keep following the unfamiliar trail forward, hoping there would be a bridge or two, or turn around and suffer the walk back.
After a short discussion, we decided that the safe thing to do was to turn around and go back, since we knew the trail, and knew we could probably get back just before sun set, if we did. As an added bonus, we had a resupply of food and water in the car. I swore next time I would bring more food and water, and less recording equipment, which I hadn't yet taken out of my backpack!
We headed back as fast as I could pace it, gasping for breath and with me whining the whole way. The bugs escorted us in good humor.
We arrived at the car at dusk, and recovered for a day and a half, before that strange noise started nagging at my memory again. What was it, after all? I wanted to see if I could find recordings of it on the internet. So I started searching youtube, and found plenty of videos of very similar sounds to what we heard. For a couple of hours, I went through them, listening in grateful amazement at the audio people have managed to capture. Some of the sounds go on for many minutes. Some people report hearing them repeatedly, several days in a row. Some have sounds even stranger than what we heard. A lot of people think they're jets, but they don't really see jets, or if they see one, it seems very far away to be responsible for such a loud sound.
The following three videos are very similar to what we heard on the trail:
This one is in Romania
This one is in the Netherlands
In Denmark, not long before we heard it in the Adirondacks
These videos are not as similar to what we heard in the Adirondacks, but are relevant to the rest of the conversation:
Thunder Bay "trumpets"
Drum like sounds coming from the clouds
England sky "trumpets"
In Israel, you can see the clouds moving, while hearing trumpet and jet sounds
Many thanks to these talented youtubers, and the many others who have captured these sounds, and even stranger ones, and put the recordings online for everyone to see and listen to! I really appreciate the effort that took! Especially knowing how easy it would be to just stand there, flabbergasted, and never record the sound at all, even with your recording equipment strapped right to your back!
So, because the recordings were there, I listened and listened. I watched and watched. I pondered all the theories. Aliens? Angels? Aircraft? Could be! I'm not a scientist, and I'm not always great at attentiveness, but I am an artist, and I started to notice, possibly, a visual pattern. In almost all of the videos that are shot during daylight hours, in at least one part of the sky, you will notice what appear to be cirrostratus clouds. And here's another good page - cirrostratus clouds, more info.
Cirrostratus clouds, in case you didn't click on the links, are made up of ice crystals, and although they look very thin, they can be a thousand feet thick, or more. They often are an indicator that a snow storm, or rain storm is approaching within the next 12 to 48 hours. Pretty useful things to know about, when you're fool enough to be hiking along an unfamiliar trail in the Adirondacks, farther than you know you should have gone, with sun set pending. As these huge sheets of ice crystals move into an area, they are pushed up over the lowest layer of the troposphere, where it's very cold, and the water droplets freeze into crystals of ice and snow. Cirrostratus clouds are well known for creating visual effects, such as halos around the sun, or the moon. Could they be causing auditory effects, too?
Youtube satisfies my curiosity, yet again! Thanks to all the youtubers who posted snow and ice sounds! Your videos are amazing!
A glacier drumming, tinkling, and popping, in Nepal
Here's an iceberg breaking near Illulissat, and in the background, the jet sounds
An Avalanche in Norway sounds like a jet
Milford Sound Avalanche sounds like a large engine, plus, girls in bikinis at the end
Antarctica shelf vibrates musically, but differently from a jet or trumpet
Just cool, in Antarctica, sounding like an instrument, more than a jet or trumpet
Lake ice groaning and booming and making jet engine sounds in Maine
So...now I'm exhausted, as you can imagine. But I've formulated my own speculation that the recordings of strange sounds in the sky posted on youtube are not hoaxes, or fakes, at all. Sorry, skeptics! I heard something similar myself, in real life. And for now, I have doubts that these sounds are angels trumpeting, UFO's, HAARP, or some paranormal source causing it. Sorry, everyone! I don't mean to be a drag.
Imagine with me a sheet of cirrostratus clouds moving into your area, on a mild spring day. The clouds are pretty high up, but maybe not quite high enough to avoid bumping into the warmer air in the lower troposphere. The clouds are forced upward, and some of the snow and ice crystals cascade downward, generating a loud, jet like sound, similar to the roar of an avalanche. Other ice crystals shear across eachother in the turbulent winds between the two layers of differing weather conditions - warm, watery conditions down here near earth, and icy cold conditions, 20,000 feet up. This shearing movement can cause booming, tinkling, and trumpet like sounds, similar to the sounds that glaciers and frozen lakes are known to produce.
I suspect these are the natural sounds of the snow and ice in the cirrostratus clouds, as they move rapidly past the lower troposphere, and the descending snow and ice crystals begin to thicken. They are the same sounds you can hear glaciers, icebergs, and avalanches make. People can't see the source of the sound, because...who expects what seems to be a thin layer of cloud to make a sound like that? The massive size of those clouds is not evident when we are standing here on the surface of the earth. But they are big as any glacier, and contain more snow and ice than any avalanche.
Having thunk my thoughts, I've determined that from now on, I'm going to be calling cirrostratus clouds “Skycebergs”, and if I'm ever lucky enough to hear one again, I'll refer to the sound as a “Skyvalanche”, just so you know. I'm also itching to begin my new career as a “Prestorm Chaser”, one of those adrenaline junkie types who visits an area 12 to 48 hours before a storm rolls in, and tries to capture some cloud noises, of my own.
You know. For science.
Image shows the sun glowing behind a layer of clouds, over a parking lot in Saratoga, NY, on May 27th, 2020. The cloud cover created a large rainbow halo around the sun. You can see just two points of the halo in this image, on the far left, and far right of the photo, since it was shot with my cell phone. The flag is at half staff by order of Governor Cuomo, in honor of those people New York State has lost to CoVid 19.
Peace.
S. Brooke