Mystery Boom Shakes Buildings in Daytona Beach, Florida and Surrounding Area
A sonic boom rattled buildings up and down the Daytona Beach area Friday afternoon and its source may have been fighter jets flying in the area.
Messages left with the Naval Air Station in Jacksonville were not returned Friday, but Kaylee LaRocque told WESH-TV that the boom was probably caused by the Air National Guard flying F-15s in the area.
People reported hearing it from Ormond Beach to Port Orange. The boom was heard around 4:30 p.m.
Soon after the sound reverberated across the area, people speculated that NASA was conducting tests.
A dispatch supervisor with the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office said the communications center was deluged with 9-1-1 calls moments after the boom.
Amanda Griffin, a NASA spokeswoman out of Cape Canaveral, said she could not confirm whether her agency caused the boom.
Lyda Longa, a Daytona Beach police spokeswoman, said her agency looked at the “real time crime center” and discovered it was NASA that was conducting tests.
An official with the Federal Aviation Administration’s operations center said her agency had no knowledge of it and spokeswoman Kathleen Bergen said she has no information about whether a military jet was flying at supersonic speed off the coast Friday.
The U.S. Geological Survey did not report any earthquakes in the region.
It was announced in July that NASA was preparing supersonic flight tests at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, but they were only expected to last a week and were scheduled for late August.
A similar phenomenon took place Aug. 15, 2016 in the Daytona area when a sonic boom was heard across the U.S. 1 corridor. Officials surmised then it was a supersonic flight that caused the boom, but it was never verified.
Tony Holt
The Daytona Beach News-Journal
