Mystery 'Boom' Strikes San Jose

Home surveillance footage of the explosion. (Image credit: Michael Vincent)

A mysterious flash of light and accompanying boom shook a San Jose, California neighborhood just before midnight last Sunday, March 25th.  

Michael Vincent, a resident of San Jose, captured the phenomenon on home surveillance camera, posting the footage to social media and YouTube.

The video shows a small, illuminated object move across the sky from left to right, before bursting in a bright flash at 1:37.

Other residents in the neighborhood near Branham High School were quick to come forward with their own experiences on the community network platform Nextdoor.  The boom was reportedly so violent that it shook windows and set off car alarms.

“You can see this is coming from way over on this side,” resident Dale Johnson said after viewing the surveillance video.  “Yeah that doesn't do it justice at all."

“I thought at first maybe the transformer blew, but we've had that happen before, and it wasn't that,” commented fellow resident Cynthia Husted.

NBC Bay Area News inquired with the Federal Aviation Administration regarding the source of the explosion, but a spokesperson for the FAA could only say that it did not appear to be part of any aircraft operation.

A similar aerial explosion a few weeks ago that occurred over Washington state was blamed on a bolide meteor bursting in the Earth's atmosphere, but so far the event in San Jose remains unexplained.  

Reports of mysterious booms, sometimes accompanied by flashes of light, have been on the rise since 2017; so far no blanket explanation fits the disparate phenomena, but meteors and other natural causes are often used to explain individual events.

The residents of San Jose simply want an explanation for their particular experience.

"I want to find out what it was, but the fact that we haven't heard is kind of weird," Vincent said.