This is an archived article and the information in the article may be outdated. Please look at the time stamp on the story to see when it was last updated.


EL DORADO COUNTY —

Neighbors in the El Dorado County community in Swansboro are constantly hearing booms.

“And my dog gets crazy, and then a little later there’ll be another kaboom, you know?” Ethel Behymer said.

It makes for a lot to chew on at the one eatery in town.

“Always the same thing – ‘Did you hear that?’ ‘Yeah I heard it. What is it?’ ‘I don’t know,'” Dawn Moore, owner of the Mosquito Market and Kitchen, told FOX40 Wednesday.

Inside Moore’s business you can hear refrigerators humming and other machines running, but if you step outside you can hear….

“Almost nothing except sometimes you hear booms. It’s like loud booms. And they sound like they’re coming from below you, above you and around you. Like, it’s loud,” said Moore.

The Mosquito Market and Kitchen has lots of items on the shelves and on the menu.

The off the item menu? The theories about the booms.

“We’ve heard everything from bird cannons,” said Moore.

“There could be miners. There could be a mine,” mused Behymer.

Noise from fighter jets breaking the sound barrier could be behind what’s being heard in Swansboro.

That’s according to a statement from the El Dorado County Sheriff’s department – one prompted by a new round of concerned calls to deputies.

Representatives 160 miles away at Naval Air Station Fallon Nevada have confirmed aircraft there are breaking the sound barrier during live bomb training.

Just 40 miles farther from Swansboro, ordinance disposal is underway at Hawthorne Army Depot in Hawthorne, Nev.

The unique geography of El Dorado county could also be helping to carry those sounds into Swansboro. But many in Swansboro aren’t buying that bundle of circumstances as the cause.

“The stories we hear from the old-timers go back generations. I don’t know,” Moore said, laughing about the long history of the booms. “It’s like a mystery. None of us know.”