July 5, 2006
We seem to have a bit of a "Northern Mystery" on our hands...
Last night in my conversations with Scott and Christina, they mentioned that they had heard an extremely loud "boom" right around 2:00 pm on July 4. It was so loud that it shook the windows in camp and they could feel the concussion.
Considering the remoteness of the area and the fact that there is a lot of mining in the McDame Creek valley, it's not all that unusual to hear the occasional 'bang' or 'boom', perhaps from dynamite or even a large rifle being fired close by. But, this one was unusual in that it was extraordinarily loud.
Shortly after hearing the boom, Scott decided to give his upstream neighbours a phone call (using Skype and our satellite Internet connection) to see if they'd heard or seen anything. Northerners often check on their neighbours to make sure things are alright - in this case, they thought maybe they'd fired a gun to scare away a bear or something.
But, the upstream neighbours didn't hear or see anything out of the ordinary. We looked back at the Skype outgoing call records and this call was made at 2:14 pm.
When Scott told me the story, I jokingly suggested it might be a "sonic boom" from a passing UFO. But, I said I'd have a look through the webcam archives around that time to see if anything was captured in a webcam picture.
I found the following picture, with a time stamp of 2:26 pm - about a half-hour after the noise was heard. But, we can't identify what this is in the picture - we thought it might be a bug in front of the lens, but we've seen other bugs and they don't look like this. We thought it might be a helicopter or airplane, but nothing was heard and it doesn't look quite right to be that.
So, you be the judge. What do you think? If you have a theory, join the Message Forums in the Cassiar Mountains section (you'll have to register and have your free account activated before posting). Here's the picture (unaltered except for our logo...) - click on it for a larger version...
