White County residents wondering about boom

Officials are working to determine what caused a loud boom Sunday night that shook windows and rattled neighbors in White County.

Maeve Harvey, who owns Legacy Tattoos and Piercing in Beebe, said she and her husband heard the noise at about 8:45 p.m.

“We have no idea what it was,” she said, noting that the couple at first thought it might have been thunder, or perhaps a sonic boom. “My husband and I went out after it happened to make sure everything around town was good. We didn’t see anything. We didn’t even hear sirens.”

The sound could be heard outside Beebe, “from Cabot to Greers Ferry,” said Capt. Steve Hall, a spokesman for Beebe police. People in South Bend and Austin reported hearing it as well, though there were no reports of any damage.

Police on the campus of Arkansas State University at Beebe began receiving reports of the boom at about 9 p.m., said Keith Moore, spokesman for the college. Moore said the source of the sound did not come from the university.

The Beebe Police Department released a statement on Facebook at around 10 p.m. stating police were aware of the “loud explosion sound” that was heard across the area. The statement said police had not received word of any damage and did not know “what the explosion was or where it happened.”

City officials still had still not confirmed the source of the noise Monday morning, according to the mayor’s office.

Residents floated several ideas on social media about what caused the sound. Several suggested it might have come from Camp Robinson, which is known to fire loud weapons.

Maj. William Phillips, a spokesman for Camp Robinson, said the sound did not come from there. Phillips said it would be “kind of extreme” for sounds from the base to be heard that far away, a distance of about 30 miles.

Others suggested the noise could have been a sonic boom, but a spokesman for the Little Rock Air Force Base, Lt. Hunter Rininger, said that is unlikely because there aren’t any aircraft capable of producing that sort of sound on the base.

Pat Alford said he heard the noise in Austin — about 8 miles from Beebe — and saw a large light in the sky for three or four seconds near the town of Scott. He said he saw the light about 7 p.m., about 90 minutes before others reported hearing the sound, and described it as looking like a “very close shooting star.”

Dr. John Kennefick, an associate professor in the physics department at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, said asteroids or meteorites can cause a loud boom as they enter the planet’s atmosphere. Though many burn up in the upper atmosphere and some survive long enough to crash into the earth’s surface, there are some that “essentially explode or disrupt” upon experiencing greater air resistance in the lower atmosphere.

Such air bursts are often associated with bright lights.

“Then, of course, there’s this mystery because you’re not aware of anything having reached the ground,” Kennefick said. “There won’t be a crater, but at the same time people will report that they saw something.”

Nothing Kennefick had heard suggested extraterrestrial beings — another possibility raised by some online — were behind the noise.