Bell Island Boom: What's Really Behind Canada's Weirdest Mystery? 

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The best theory that I've heard is that an abnormally large bolt of lightning struck the island which has a very high metal content and has several abandoned mines now filled with highly conductive salt water just below the surface, this created either one massive, or several large arc flashes around the island. Arc flashes are incredibly bright, can create sonic booms and often leave witnesses with spots in their vision.

I grew up in Nova Scotia in the 70's -80's. One summer evening me and several friends were hanging out and talking outside. The topic of conversation was nuclear war, when I looked up into the sky i saw what looked like a missile burning up slowly through the sky. Turns out I and my friends witnessed Skylab breaking up and entering the atmosphere that night at the very moment we were discussing nuclear war. That freaked us all out, and I will never forget it.

Finally!! A mystery from my home province!! Hello from Newfoundland and Labrador!!💖

Denials scripts and Simon's voice and reactions are an unbeatable combination. I rarely watch/listen to anything for a straight hour, but couldn't walk away from this. Bravo!

I was expecting to be told at the end that this was all just a story and a "got you" moment by the author but wow what a fascinating event

Military jets fly over my neighborhood sometimes, day and night, and they can be so loud they shake the house and you can feel it in your chest, but it's a very long, low boom and they've never made a flash or any kind of light

Speculation: SR-71 Blackbird for the pops. Neutron bomb for The Boom

Chelyabinsk in 2013 and Tunguska in the early 1900s comes to mind.

One day someone on a show will pronounce Newfoundland correctly. One day.

No, "Battle for Los Angeles" is not maybe a "masterpiece" but it exist, and Yes Aliens attack there

If little bits of metal were floating in the air, I wonder if that could be chaff. Some kind of new testing for air defense measures.

53:38 not directly but I#m not expert on chicken deaths and its qutie plausible that once they're dead small animals will damage the bodies, etc

Bell island is cool and all but do you know how to get to Bells Canyon?

I wonder if the abandoned mine might've had something to do with this?

If satellites saw it, it happened. From what you say, it sounds like an 'air burst', of something. With no chemical or physical remains of an explosion, it must have been some sort of pure energy (whatever that is). Tunguska was an airburst but with different outcomes. The epicentre was centred on a farm with no major damage. Bizarre. What is that event that happens to sailing ships that used to start glowing? Perhaps it was a much more powerful version of that.

Please do "The Count of St Germaine" very interesting guy.

Ask the Canadians for the autopsy reports on the chickens; might learn something, there...

My own mother, who I consider to be a pragmatic, sensible no-nonsense type... told be about how growing up in northern Labrador she witnessed ball lightning for herself. I take it for fact, as there's no reason I can find why she would lie about it. this account was in the 90's while I was growing up, so I donno. Something may have been up

Best DTU, im calling it

As a 50 year old I find Simon's consistent claims that he is old at 35 amusing.

Congratulations to Simon for covering a topic called "Bell Island Boom" and not employing the phrases, "What a bell," or, "Bell end," even once. 👏👏👏👏

As soon as you said "Canada is weird"...and then followed it up with cold, and maple syrup... One thing popped into my head. You HAVE to do an episode on the Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist from our strategic maple syrup reserves... I think you might have touched on it in another episode, or I thought you should have being a parallel to another theft.

Ball lightning is well attested. Your description of the damage caused is exactly what I found when a house I was living in was struck by lighting via the telephone wire. I wonder if the chicken coop was covered in chicken wire?

Hello everyone! I wrote this episode about a month ago and would like to share with you some insights and additional information I have gathered since then. 😊 - A very popular theory (which I could not include in the episode given the word count) is “weather manipulation experiments”. Artificially controlling the weather is not science-fiction, but an active field of research. Some people speculate that the Bell Island boom may have been the result of "cloud seeding" or similar methods of intentional weather alteration. - There are contradicting reports regarding the US investigation. Numerous sources state that the so-called men in black seized many items regardless(!) of their owners' permission. In retrospect, I think this version of events is more accurate. - Bell Island is very foggy, but not THAT foggy. 🤓

Ball lightning (or, at least, the phenomena that are known as ‘ball lightning’) is a real thing. Nonetheless, I am very impressed by Deniz’s script once again. He’s a very talented wordsmith. I don’t think any other writers on this channel have gotten Simon so close to actually accepting that some things might actually defy understanding.

I'm surprised the writer of this episode didn't mention the (relatively well confirmed theory) that it was a lightning superbolt. It's a rare occurrence, but it has been observed in nature many, many times. It fits all the evidence pretty perfectly. And coincides with a lot of the eyewitness testimonies as well.

Ball lightning can be replicated and is very real, the issue is the circumstances needed for it to happen naturally are exceedingly rare. So much so that it;s rare enough to be easily discounted as unbelievable.

So, Simon and crew, hear me out: Every April Fools day, put out an Encoding the Unknown video. You and your team would make it amazingly funny.

Is Canada weird? I dunno, you'll have to ask the moose in the driveway. Not sure where squirrel currently is.

As a Newfoundlander, I can attest to the fact that we produce great storytellers.…and our rum is awesome.

The "pops" make perfect sense as sonic booms. Especially at night it's super hard to judge size, speed and distance, and the glowing orbs could easily be afterburners. Even when not going supersonic anyone who's been to a fast jet airshow display will have felt that reverb in the chest from them. Personally, I suspect either the US or Canada was doing night-time low flying training and quietly stopped after getting complaints, using Concorde as an excuse to mask the shift for probably operational security reasons. Militaries are paranoid because they know people are literally spying on them.

I have personally seen ball lightning during a tornado when I was a kid. The tornado hit the transformer at the end of the block and what looked like an electrical tumbleweed rolled down the street about half a block before dissipating. I acknowledge that this is not the same as a spontaneous ball of lightning in the middle of the sky, just saying it's not as "wildly theoretical" as it may seem.

One theory is just that it was an exceptionally powerful lightning strike, so a huge discharge reaching from the ground to the sky which does match the description of gathering static in the building suddenly being released. People like to think that random disasters must have a conscious cause, because the fact that nature will just eff you up at random is far more terrifying.

Simon in regards to a meteor making a crater, nope. Airbursts like the Tunguska blast or the recent Chelyabinsk one in Russia heat up and basically explode high up and its the sonic boom and pressure wave that finally hits a few seconds later that can flatten areas or leave damage but no obvious mark. There is a place in Canada you may like to do a project on which is a sky monitoring system called he Canadian Automated Meteor Observatory or (CAMO)

The sonic boom is heard in an area around the plane any time it is above the speed of sound. It is not just when the plane first exceeds it. Very common misconception.

Sorry to say, but my wife and I both saw ball lightning happen right in front of our car. Weren't expecting it so no video (and this was in the 1990s so didn't have that option on our phones). Still, we both watched it shoot across the road mere feet in front of us. There was a buzzing noise followed by a popping sound just as it disappeared. It was truly an incredible and amazing experience.

This is the first time iv heard of "video evidence" of ball lightning, but also the first time iv heard of it being compared to science fiction considering many mainstream physicists and atmospheric scientists say the science is sound for it to be possible to happen.

Ball Lightening is thought to be real by many scientists, but they don't have an explanation for it. They have been able to recreate it in a few liquids but not in air, a team at the Max Planck Institute has replicated Ball Lightening in the lab by discharging a high powered capacitor in a tank of water.

The way Simon says Newfoundland it’s sounds more like newfinland😂😂😂 and as someone who was born and raised in Newfoundland, it’s kind of funny yet also slightly annoying

Ball lightning is more likely to be a real, yet extremely rare phenomenon. A few years ago a research team managed to get a spectrogram of ball lightning in China, and it revealed that the sphere was made of ionized elements commonly found in soil.

Ummmm ball lightning is a genuine, real and exceptionally rare phenomenon that does occur and has been replicated in labs (specifically University of Alabama’s electrical engineering department). Just thought someone should know

4:30 - Chapter 1 - The story of harbingers 18:25 - Chapter 2 - A mild case of doomsday 33:50 - Chapter 3 - The much bigger picture 43:15 - Chapter 4 - It wasn't aliens

"...a strict no-chicken-left-behind policy" 🤣 Deniz is fitting into the Blazement well 👌

I don't know man.... I feel like any of the lightning theories holds a lot more credit than Deniz or Simon are giving it. I know empirical evidence is not worth a lot, but bright flash, electrical damage, eye witness reports, air cracking sound, and no lasting damage to the landscape besides the trees. And, I'd be interested in hearing the kid's updated testimony later in life.

My family and I live by an army base in the US. It’s known as the home of field artillery. Yesterday they were practicing using normal artillery and a C-RAM. The neighbor kids came to me and asked about the noises. One was convinced that the army only uses “nukes” and was wondering if they were the cause of all the noise. While another was convinced they only use tanks 😂😂. It was so difficult convincing them otherwise.

Ball lightning has been reproduced in a lab. It'’s a ball of supercharged ionized particles. I imagine if they did a lot of mining on this island there would be a lot of ore dust scattered about. Combine that with the steady offshore winds blowing over the island and you have a giant electrostatic charge generator. This seems like the perfect conditions for ball lighting to form.

The shockwave from a supersonic travel is continuous with the object in motion, not just when it initially breaks the sound barrier. It’s constantly breaking the sound barrier. The boom goes on until the velocity decreases sufficiently.

I am glad I made productive decisions about my finances that changed my life forever. I am a single mother living in Vancouver Canada, bought my second house in September and hoping to retire next year at 50 if things keep going smoothly for me

I live across the bay from this island, grew up looking across at it I can see it from my house, when the mines were open there were 20K odd people, but after the mines closed they never fully recovered economically. There's still a few thousand left it's not abandoned by any means, but definitely many in poverty nowadays. I used to work at the hospital a few years ago (yes there's a hospital on the island) and I took the ferry back and forth every day, my brother in law still does to work in one of their 2 schools. After crossing a 20 minute ferry they're only 10 minutes from the capital city of the province. If it wasn't for the ferry they are not nearly as isolated as the description here implies. Although it may seem really isolated to many, by Newfoundland standards it is not. Beautiful place and kind people, I loved my time there if it wasn't for having to rely on an unreliable ferry. Can say I've never seen a wandering chicken besides one small homestead there, handful of free range cows have crossed the road 😂. Lots of cats but they are taken care of as a TNR colony. I have heard some of the locals talk about this occurrence though!

By the way, ball lightning is a bit more plausible than you make it out to be, just never scientifically observed. It's theoretical, and sometimes used as an explanation for UFO sightings (vs aliens, which is more likely? Though it could always be secret experimental aircraft).

I love that Vessi is a sponsor of Decoding the Unknown. I want this channel to thrive, definitely one of my favorite fact boy channels.

Yesss....I love when long vids hit this channel. Thanks Simon and Co. for your dedication to our entertainment and your capitalism.(Allegedly)🍻💯

Wow, I can't believe you're doing a video on Bell Island. I actually live in Newfoundland. First you do a video on one of my suggestions and now you're doing one on my home province!

Simon: "Canada is weird" Me: "No. we're not." Proceeds to go to an ad for a Canadian company selling waterproof sneakers Me: "Ok, maybe we're a bit weird. But also quite brilliant!"

My impression is that the Boom could easily be explained by a meteor exploding in the atmosphere. The damage on the ground including the holes in buildings is fragments from the exploded meteor striking. If there was a lot of upper atmosphere static the ionizing trail from the burning meteor could initiate a huge lightning strike, which could have struck a power grid cable injecting millions of volts into the power system of the island, causing widespread electrical damage. If the meteor had a large ice or dry ice content, its possible fragments from the explosion would have reached the ground as a pulse of vapour, or quickly evaporating ice leaving damage but no recognisable debris. Even iron meteors leave tiny fragments that can be very hard to find. The only real mystery is why this doesn't seem to have been offered as an explanation that is more credible than ball lightning.

I know I'm a little late to the party, but I regularly hear loud booms in the smallish South Texas town where I live. They sound like large artillery firing and seem to come from different directions and distances relative to where I'm at. Occasionally I'll hear people around town talk about them, but it usually devolves quickly from a genuine discussion into "mUsT bE aLiEnS, LOL!" A bit of context- there are quite a few petrochemical plants in the area and an air force base about 15 miles away, so I've just kind of always assumed it's related to one or both of those, though the booms don't really sound like a sonic boom and seems way too loud and close to be industrial. Fast forward to about 3 months ago, I was driving to work during a thunderstorm and as I turned onto the road where I work, I saw a basketball-sized spherical explosion. Then I heard it, the EXACT same boom that I've been hearing occasionally for years. It wasn't a low grumble or even a crack like thunder, it was a loud, deep, short "pop" like a cannon firing. I thought maybe a transformer blew, but when I drove by the next day there was nothing there. No wires, no transformer, nothing. It was just an explosion in thin air. Was it ball lighting? I suppose it could've just been a regular lightning strike, but if it was, it was unlike any I've ever seen or heard before.

Canada isn't weird, it's full of some of the nicest people on the planet. Well, at least until you have them put on skates, hand them a stick, and drop a puck on the ice. Then they turn into vicious and bloodthirsty savages. It's ok though, we all have something...

In the late 1980s my son and I had an encounter with ball lightning and it was terrifying. We were driving home on a farm road at 50 MPH when the lightining formed in front of the car. It didn't look like a regular lightning strike and lasted 30 - 45 seconds. I almost left the road stopping the car. It finally let out a flash and a boom then disappeared. We had never heard of ball lightning and had to research what we had seen. I never want to do that again, and I'm the girl who likes to sit out and watch lightning storms!

It sounds like a meteorite air burst. Similar to, but much smaller than, the Chelyabinsk event in Russia 2013. No crater, a loud boom, and detected by the Vela satellite. Was disappointed Deniz didn't includes this as a possible explanation.

I absolutely love this channel. Simon’s humor and personality really shine.

I live relatively nearby. I had a friend who was obsessed with this place. Became convinced he had found the holy grail. Also, Newfoundland is a big rum drinking place exactly because of Caribbean trade! Fact boy knows things he doesn't even know! "The ol black rum's got a hold on me like a dog wrapped around my leg.."

Ball lightening exists. Our cottage was hit by it when I was young. Loud bang, electrics go out, then this ball of electrical light floated in through the window. It moved across the lounge and hit the wall a couple of times. Each time there was a loud bang like a gunshot. It then left again. In the daylight the wall had two large holes where the ball had hit. I lived in Jersey, (the ORIGINAL you might say) and just after 9pm every night we'd get the sonic boom from Concorde. And yes, it shaked the house.

Lots of foggy/misty movies are filmed in Louisiana because in fall we have very foggy, warm and humid days that look super cold but are 75 to 80 outside. Movies from the Twilight series and The Mist by Stephen King are some examples.

Concorde did boom over land, I heard it in my childhood but also again shortly before she was taken out of service, over Reading, UK, during the WOMAD festival I was at with 10,000 + other party goers. It was quite exciting PS I forgot about hearing a controlled detonation in March this year, on holiday with friends on the South Coast. We were woken by a loud boom, followed by a vibration. I went back to sleep, thinking it was a vivid dream. Turned out they'd found an unexploded WW2 bomb on the beach, about 3 miles away. They did a controlled detonation early morning before news crews and tourists could flock to the area.

As for the chickens it's not only shock, spooked birds quite often fly/jump and in the dark quite likely to crash into things breaking their own necks.

This is the first time I have heard anyone question or dismiss the existence of ball lightening. It is a rare, but well known weather phenomenon acknowledged by meteorogists. There's a ton of scientific evidence of its existence, and lots of theories about what it consists of and causes it. I saw one of those fly across my neighbor's kitchen floor once. Back then I didn't know what it was, so it scared me silly. But all three of us who were in the kitchen at the time saw it. We smelled it, too. It was a stingy, unpleasant smell, and it left marks on the kitchen floor. Science is real, guys.

I spent a bunch of time on bell island as a kid with my family...I had no idea!

Simon: Nuclear weapons aren't beyond my comprehension! Also Simon: Spends an hour demonstrating absolutely no grasp of how large and damaging a nuclear blast is. And WOW was this episode poorly researched.

Everything up to the big Boom reminds me of my time living in Santa Cruz, CA. I moved away in the past year, but I lived there for 5 years before. While I was there, we would hear very loud explosion sounds on a nightly basis. Sometimes multiple times in a night. It was infuriating, because it made it hard to get a proper night's sleep. I thought it was just some kids blowing off some kind of M80, but with a lot more bass. Eventually, the city put out an announcement informing people that they are aware of the explosion sounds and are unaware of the cause. They asked anyone with information to report it to the local police. I have no idea if they ever figured out what the cause was. In my experience, they did sound like explosions, not really fireworks (there were no whistling sounds and it wasn't a popping sound). The direction was never the same, and there were never people screaming in terror or anything like that. They were very loud.

I really want to see Simon going nuts over any TLC or History style documentary they try to pass off. Like a solid 20 minutes of him losing his shit. It would be a fantastic BB episode

I would totally watch Simon doing a History Channel pastiche for an hour. Common, well-understood concepts being attributed to ghosts and aliens? Sign me up, Fact Boy! Maybe an April 1st special?

As a Canadian, it’s such a relief to finally be stereotyped for producing celebrities like Ryan Reynolds instead of Celine Dion and Bryan Adams lol 😖

About halfway through, I'm thoroughly enjoying this mystery! Thanks again, Deniz and Simon and Co!!

One word - Tunguska! (Has this happened before?) No boys or chickens, (or crater!) but lots of similarities. Things I'd like to know about Bell Isle - were other birds damaged? I suspect there is "something out there" we don't know about yet. As to foreshadowing "pops", well there seem to have been no witnesses at Tunguska to say one way or the other.

Thats where my grandmother's family comes from and we tend to go there every so often. Beautiful place, really worth a visit. My great grandfather worked in the mine there.

Comparing ball lightning to teleportation and describing it as science fiction just baffles me. We have videos (and even a recording of one natural occurrence's emission spectrum ) of ball lighting. We don't know the nature of the phenomena that cause it (likely it comprises multiple phenomena lumped together by their glowing orb-ness) but scientists accept that such phenomena exist. Pretty sure the same can't be said for teleportation.... As for the birds dying and not humans... that's actually not surprising at all. Birds are extremely sensitive animals, and impacted by any changes in their environment. I can think of multiple possibilities that could cause bird deaths in absence of human ones. Canaries are used in coal mines for a reason. Birds have extremely efficient respiratory systems as part of their adaptation for flight (including birds we've bred away from flight like chickens). That also makes them extremely sensitive to toxic gases, VOCs, and other air pollutants. The farm was described as stinking from burned rubber. Smoke of any kind can kill birds very quickly, let alone the toxic fumes from burnt rubber, plastic, and electronics. Beyond that, the chicken coop was described as *destroyed*. So really not surprising they didn't survive, even absent of horrific deadly fumes. Another possibility that comes to mind is barotrauma. Though I am far less knowledgeable on this subject, some researchers have theorized that flight-adapted animals may be more susceptible to barotrauma (as a theoretical cause of wind turbine deaths, although the vast majority of those are caused by collision). Lightning strikes often cause barotraumatic injuries in humans. Another factor is simply that chickens are much smaller and more delicate. Humans got concussions from this, they lost consciousness, they were thrown across rooms. The chickens were described as having no injuries, but who was describing them that way? Pathologists who had actually examined them, or just people seeing them on the lying there and not seeing any obvious external wounds? At another point some were described as bleeding from their mouths. Internal injuries from the physical trauma that the humans also experienced could easily have killed them. At any rate, it didn't kill all the chickens on the island, as this script seems to suggest. It killed some chickens in some places, and most survived. As the video went on, a superbolt seems a likely explanation for the destruction. Since at least some phenomena under the ball lightning umbrella occur in conjunction with lightning, perhaps ball lightning could've been observed by witnesses as a result of the lightning which caused the damage. Eyewitness testimony is extremely unreliable and many of the descriptions came later, but the descriptions did immediately sound like ball lightning. I feel like the research for this episode used some really outdated or iffy sources. I also think it's unlikely the earlier night time disturbances and the big boom were related. They were noticed in Bell Island, yes, but that was not the main source of the reports, nor the reason the NRL got involved. Charleston, NC was one of the worst affected and residents worried it was a sign of an impending earthquake. They were reported up and down the East Coast, but especially in NC and NJ. The Bell Island Boom just makes them seems significant to the story. None of the rest of the places bothered by them, including the ones experiencing worse disturbances, exploded. Specifically they found that the cause of these East Coast booms were secondary sonic booms -- they were refracted by the atmosphere. They hadn't factored that phenomenon originally and so had to further alter the Concorde flight paths to account for it. Sometimes, things really are just a coincidence.

Simon manages to maintain a low effort, unprepared content cranking style that is yet very likeable

I wonder if this was a case of Upper-atmospheric lightning, UAL generally only happens at extreme high altitude, but hypothetically it can happen closer to the ground. Google the term for a quick shock because it has been photographed and is very much real. It can also release the energy equivalent to small nukes when it goes off, and as others below have mentioned lighting superbolts are another possible explanation.

Maybe an idea for a future episode, based on an interest in stories from the Cold War. It may be totally BS but the legend I grew up with included a story about SALT agreements that ended pretargeted missiles, which included a disclosure of the targeted cities. The small Texas panhandle town I grew up in was supposedly more highly targeted than any other location in the US

I saw a segment on this on a series called The Extraordinary and what the scientist think killed the chickens was electrical discharge. Their coop they were kept in was wire mesh and apparently chickens are more susceptable to electric shocks than people. Also in the program powerful electical discharges were thought to be the culprit. The boy was knocked off his bike by the boom and found himself staring up a a bright orb that vanished over a time. He rushed home. Electrical items in the house were fried and there were photos shown of how the fuses in the consumer unit in the house had been fired across the hall where they were embedded in the plaster. The cause of all this mayhem. I am definitely with the vast majority of people who believe the military were dicking about. I mean, if you ask thee military if they were conducting experiments that were causing mayhem with people on an island they would hardly say, 'Yes, we fried your electronics, killed your chickens and scared the living shit out of you.' Definitely a case of 'No, no, not us. We did not cause this problem. It's all a case of mass hysteria caused by he locals eating too many berries.'

I like the ball lightning theory...I'm pretty certain it exists. There is one case where a orb passed through the fuselage of airliner. It was seen floating inside the aircraft. Photos of the grapefruit size hole in the planes side are online.

A few times when Simon said "booms" it totally sounded like "boobs". This had me dying. Loved it.

I had never heard of this, and I like to think I'm fairly well read on unexplained phenomena. Thanks for teaching me something new! Love this channel.

I live in Newfoundland, I can see Bell Island from my window. Bell island is a beautiful place but such a waste of money. Their ferry system sucks and breaks down all the time. People are then flown back and forth on a helicopter. Costing taxes payers thousands upon thousands of dollars and just over 2000 people live there.

I have actually seen something that I would call ball lightning, over a frozen Canadian lake, it was New Year’s Eve, we had been out snowmobiling and headed to my cabin for a celebration, note I was sober that night and had been for 8 years, I remember after a day long trail ride and speed running over the lake , when we went back to the cabin we noticed a bit of static electricity when taking off our outerwear. Anyway sometime after midnight I noticed the lights maybe about the size of large beach balls. Moving across the ice .. they made a cracking noise. I went in to get my snow gear on and to run out and. Heck to make sure it wasn’t people with lights ( you always investigate on cold nights in the lake ) but before I could go out I heard the hat sounded like close by shotgun shots and the lights were gone.

as a canadian I can say were very weird compared to our neibours mainly due to our small population vs our dense wilderness and A LOT of serial killers, many yet to be caught. edit: strange that bell island doesnt use a fog horn though, I live in vancouver and we recently had some intense fog for days and I enjoyed the calm humming as two ships anchored in the harbour blew their fog horns one after the other alternating at two different tones. it was really quite lovely

Having watched Simon for awhile now has somewhat changed what I expect from a video named "Bell Island"

Yet another video about something to do with my country, that I either have long forgotten about or never heard of. Thank you.

Simon as a Brit not knowing about Grog is kinda wild. Despite knowing how little he knows in general it always blows my mind. Always refreshing to know he's just a regular person.

Ball lightning does exist. I've seen it once, decades ago, while driving through a storm in Cleveland. I doubt, however, that it could cause the extensive damage in this case.

This reminds me of the phenomena we experience occasionally in North Carolina. I've personally experienced a very huge boom once or twice. No damage was reported as far as I know, just rattled nerves. I know good and well that they weren't sonic booms. I'm a former Air Force brat and have heard sonic booms many times. Plus North Carolina has several military bases and artilery ranges so we know what those sound like. The booming phenomenon doesn't happen often, maybe once every several years or so. It tends to be more concentrated at the coast especially around the Cape Fear region, though there have been instances much further inland closer to Raleigh. There have also been reports of these booms from places like New York state, India, Bangladesh, etc. A common name for it is Seneca gun(s) from Lake Seneca in NY. Some of these reports go back to at least the 1800s which definitely eliminates the explanation of sonic booms. A couple of possible explanations have been gas pockets rupturing and air bursts from meteors. Would be cool if y'all could do an episode on it.

Agree with Simon's initial assessment. This has all the hallmarks of a high altitude EMP detonation. The birds were killed by infrasonic shockwaves, a phenomenon which has been observed a lot. Infrasound would also explain the hallucinations.

In Operation Desert Storm the US used tomahawk missiles, some of which had warheads that held carbon filament strips that would be dropped on power transformers and switching stations and these would then be released into those targets, causing said targets to short out and spark before bursting into flames... That's pretty wild...

Hello The Original Og Whistle! It's really awesome to watch and listen to this story! Thank you so much for all you do! I am from here in Nova Scotia and many, many stories were told and talked about over the years of this "Bell Island Boom ' even here. We're South of NFL. I live about 30 minutes from Halifax inland and when we moved up here into the country from the city; folks talked of the Boom. Word had spread widely back in the day. I was around 7 or 8 back (currently 39) when I remember the older people saying, "Do You Remember?" Thank You again Simon

my grandma (one of the most trustful and honest people I’ve ever met) she saw ball lightning it went onto her stove and then fizzled around and then went out. I do believe ball lightning is an extremely rare phenomenon that hasn’t been observed yet, it cannot cause a gigantic ‘emp’ and kill dozens of chickens. This is something else

the introduction for this one is almost poetry. like the writer deserves applause. holy cow!

I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure we know ball lightning is real, it's just very rare- I saw ball lightning in like, idk, 2003-4? While on the way home from school with my mother in the evening. We didn't have phones with strong cameras like we do now, but I know what we saw was real.

Wonderful to see a local story. As a Newfie I'm eager to learn more about this mystery

For your information yes Newfoundland is a very big rum drinking place... We have the most bars per capita in Canada, and probably the biggest Saint Patrick's Day celebration west of Ireland.... However we do drink cocoa as well... With rum in it