House-Shaking Boom Heard Around Bakersfield, California

It seems that some officials tried to dismiss this as Sheriff’s Department training but as one of the comments noted: it is highly doubtful that they would be conducting the training at 5:00 am.

via: KGET TV 17

This is a strange one.

At around 5AM this morning, something startled Holly Olsen as she lay in bed in her east Bakersfield home.

Not a gunshot, nor a firework.

“It was more like a ‘krplow’ noise,” Olsen explained.

Calls and messages flooded into our newsroom.

“It sounded like a bomb going off, but not nearby,” Olsen continued.

First responders heard the same around 5:09 or so.

“Can you confirm in the area you’re in if the loud boom just now was the recycling center crushing cars or an explosion?” went over the scanner.

A battalion chief checked out a recycling center on Mt. Vernon and Brundage, but didn’t appear to find anything wrong.

We called SA Recycling on that corner, but a regional manager who would not provide his name said he would not discuss the business with us, saying he had no information about a boom.

So we hit the phones.

We called the Sheriff’s Department, the police, Bakersfield Fire, Bakersfield Wastewater Treatment Plant, PG&E, Meadows Field and Chevron.

Not one said it had any record of a boom or an explosion from a training or a transformer or a pump jack.

Rocky Reyes lives on Niles and Fairfax, and was frightened when he heard the boom.

“Something’s going on and nobody knows what it is and it’s gonna be exposed soon because it’s happening everywhere.

But until then, the mystery continues.

We reached out to Edwards Air Force Base to see about the possibility of an aircraft creating sonic booms.

We have not yet heard back.

When we received reports Thursday of loud explosions heard in Oildale and the Rosedale area, we quickly learned the Sheriff’s Department was conducting bomb squad training.

Daniel Freeman
KGET TV 17