Mistpouffers

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Mistpouffers are unexplained reports that sound like a cannon or a sonic boom. They have been heard in many waterfront communities around the world such as the banks of the river Ganges in India, the East Coast and inland "Finger Lakes" of the United States, as well as areas of the North Sea, Japan and Italy; and sometimes away from water. Names (according to area) are:-

Around Seneca Lake and Cayuga Lake in the USA: "Guns of the Seneca", "lake farts".
coastal North Carolina: "Seneca Guns"
Netherlands and Belgium: "mistpoeffers"
Italy: "brontidi" or "marinas"
Japan: "uminari"
Philippines: "retumbos"
elsewhere: "fog guns"

They have been reported from Passamaquoddy Bay in southwestern New Brunswick, in Belgium and Scotland, at Cedar Keys, Florida, Lough Neagh in Ireland, Western Australia and Victoria in Australia, on an Adriatic island in 1824, at Franklinville, NY in 1896, and in northern Georgia.

In the USA along the shores of Seneca Lake and nearby Cayuga Lake, the two largest of upstate New York's Finger Lakes, they are called the "Guns of the Seneca". Their sound has been described as being like distant but inordinately loud thunder while no clouds are in the sky large enough to generate lightning. Those familiar with the sound of cannon fire say the sound is nearly identical. The booms occasionally cause shockwaves that rattle plates. Early white settlers were told by the native Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) that the booms were the sound of the Great Spirit continuing his work of shaping the earth. Contemporary residents, less reverent but no less colorful than their forebears, refer to the sounds as lake farts.

One explanation for why they are usually heard near water, is that inland communities are often too noisy to hear these booms.

Their origin is not known for sure. They have been explained as:-

Meteorite impacts.
Gas:-
- Gas escaping from vents in the earth's surface.
- With lakes, natural gas from decaying vegetation trapped beneath the lake bottoms suddenly bursting forth. This is plausible, since Cayuga Lake and Seneca Lake are two of the world's larger and deepest lakes. But see link #1 below for objections.
- Explosive release of less volatile gases generated as limestone decays in underwater caves.
Military aircraft (which is totally untenable, since all these phenomena were long established by the time of supersonic flight).
In some cases, they have been associated with earthquakes.
In North Carolina, that they are the sound of pieces of the continental shelf falling off into the Atlantic abyss (but there is no geological evidence to support this)
A recent explanation is that the noise is very distant thunder which has been focussed anomalously as it travelled through the upper atmosphere: see link #1 below, including for cases of anomalous transmission of sounds of man-made explosions.