Mark Barton has recently mentioned the 'Nocturnal Booms' heard in the mid 1970s, with relation to sightings of delta and triangle craft. It is reassuring to know that someone else does actually recall these mysterious booms, as so many researchers either never heard of them (literally!), or could remember them.

Perhaps we ought to go back and refresh our memories on this phenomena? From my perspective, the phenomena started on Monday 18^th October 1976. Indeed, the 'Monday Factor' would always be a quirk of the booms. At 9.20pm, our home was rattled by a loud, single boom - we all rushed outside, but saw, nor heard anything more - puzzled, we returned indoors. Seven days passed before it occurred again, exactly at 9.20pm the following Monday! We went outside again, and noted other neighbours also looking for the source of the boom, but none could be found. The boom returned the following Monday at the same time - the 1^st November, and again the obligatory rush outside to see anything resulted in nothing being seen or heard.

Well, since the boom seemed to be very regular, on Monday 8^th November, we were outside by 9.15pm, and bang on time (if you'll forgive the pun) the boom occurred at 9.20pm. However, as we were outside, we could ascertain that it was not a general rumble - came from a specific point in the southwestern sky, although again nothing could be seen. The boom was definitely single, and was not a sonic boom.

Other parts of the village, less than a kilometre away, were suffering such a loud boom that windows and parts of the house were rattling, while some parts of the village hardly heard the boom at all - very odd for an airborne phenomena. We also knew that other parts of the local area knew nothing about the whole Monday Boom occurrences, which only served to further mystify whole thing.

The booms had been coming every Monday evening at 9.20pm for seven weeks before I thought logically, and constructed a parabolic dish (out of a dustbin lid) for a microphone, so I could record the boom on my old reel-to-reel tape recorder - needless to say the merest effort to record the boom caused it to miss that night!

By now it was early December, and almost as if in response to my efforts to record it, the boom became unpredictable, and occurred on various evenings, at various times, which of course defied any attempt at recording. The booms became sporadic until late February 1977, and I didn't hear anything similar again until a daylight UFO sighting in 1980 (which also had the earlier characteristic of having a very small ‘footprint‘ where it could be heard, in this case less than 1km!), and then similar nocturnal booms from the mid 1990s, when on skywatches, although the were now accompanied by blue flashes, and were speculatively linked by some to the Flying Triangle reports!

During the height of the 'booms', some UFO journals did mention them, notably Peter Paget's Fountain Journal. It was in its pages that a reference was made to research at Bristol University to establish a cause. In 1993 I managed to make contact with one of the original researchers, but he was disinterested, and was dismissive that it was 'merely Concorde' over the Atlantic. The booms did get one mention in a UFO report in the BUFORA Bulletin, and were featured at least once on News at Ten TV bulletins. As you can see from the two reprints from local papers, clearly not everyone assumed they were Concorde, and one would hope that RAF personnel would know a sonic boom if they had heard one! The obvious point to make is that Concorde still flies today, and the booms are not heard on a remotely regular basis. Also military aircraft regularly go supersonic off our coasts, yet they do not propogate such booms inland.

Mark reminds me of reports of booms and rumbles over America during alleged flights of 'The Aurora' and other such aircraft. Mark also points out that experimental delta-shaped vehicles have been around for many years, right back to the flying-wing designs by Northrop, which eventually inspired the B2-Spirit stealth bomber, although of course many flying-wing designs date back to German designs, such as those of the Horten brothers in the 1930s. One of the largest supersonic delta aircraft of this earlier period was the ill-fated Valkyrie bomber.

Were these booms made by UFOs or experimental aircraft – we still do not know!