In Rough Edges, Mike Rothschild writes about fringe groups, conspiracy theories and how the Internet broke our brains. This column is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
Americans love when things explode. We love fireworks, action movies, and cannons shooting off. Americans also love weird science stuff we don’t really understand, like UFOs, the physics of airplane flight, and miracle cures. Combining these two interests can easily take an explainable event that’s got both loud booms and technical jargon and turn it into a conspiracy theory about what “they” are “really” doing in the skies over our heads.
Over the last week of May and into early June, Americans were puzzled by a series of loud explosions in the sky. They took place over western New York on May 27; Columbia, South Carolina on the 28; and Boston on the 30.
Immediately after each one, confused residents took to social media to express their puzzlement and concern over hearing what appeared to be loud explosions during a time of international tension and a government that often looks like it’s on a war footing with its own people. Thousands of people over the three locations called 911, believing their city had been attacked or that their neighborhood had been hit by a falling airplane. Some thought it was an earthquake. A few even went outside expecting to see carnage all around them.
They did not, because two of the booms were just a coincidental occurrence of something that happens multiple times a year: a meteor hitting the atmosphere and disintegrating. The Boston boom was caused by a space rock about three feet wide traveling 75,000 miles per hour — roughly 100 times the speed of sound. When the meteor slowed down, it created pressure waves that mimicked the sound of an explosion. The meteor over Western New York was slower, but still around 56,000 miles per hour, fast enough to create a loud boom when it broke up.
But the boom heard in South Carolina was different from the other two. It left little photographic evidence, and no obvious signs of a meteor breakup. And when several things happen at the same time that don’t all have the same explanation, conspiracy theories follow.
NASA didn’t report a meteor over the Columbia area, and a trail in the sky seen around the same time as the boom was too low and slow to be from a meteor. The local Air Force base denied any of its planes were in the air, and there were no signs of an earthquake or terror attack.
Could it have been a commercial airplane breaking the sound barrier? According to federal law, supersonic commercial planes can’t fly over populated areas, precisely because they make huge booms when they go fast. Not to mention there are no currently operational supersonic transport planes. An experimental military plane? Maybe, but if it was, we’d never know.
As of early June, the exact cause hadn’t been determined, with some locals and experts believing it was a meteor, and others that it was a secret military project. That’s when the speculation really kicked into high gear.
It had mostly died down for the other two, because there were numerous videos and other pieces of evidence showing the meteors exploding over the area. One popular thread on r/conspiracy speculated that the booms were from missiles being intercepted as part of an attack on the United States by…someone. Another claimed that everyone involved in the South Carolina mystery was lying, and that it was part of a larger cluster of mysterious booms in the southeast that nobody would talk about. And, of course, aliens. It could always be aliens using “sky trumpets” to announce their arrival.
Many of the social media threads about the booms filled up with people claiming that similar booms were being heard “all over” various parts of the country, or that they happened alongside earthquakes that were magically never recorded. Some people even decided that the ground explosion of a Blue Origin rocket in Florida on the 28 was the actual source of the booms, even though they didn’t take place at the same time or near each other.
So with no explanation for what happened in South Carolina and a lot of theories that don’t quite fit, maybe the question to ask isn’t “what actually happened” but “why do we automatically assume it was bad and we’re being lied to?” That’s a question that has a much easier answer.
We know conspiracy theories emerge from events that aren’t supposed to happen and don’t have an easy explanation. What could be more unexpected than an explosion in the sky of unknown origin? Everyone in the area heard it, but nobody knows what it is. And when we all have cameras in our pockets and audiences around the world that we can share our speculation with, everyone becomes an expert in their own version of the story. If you have your intuition and a few videos you can take out of context, anyone can be an expert on anything.
If all of this is starting to become depressingly familiar, that’s because we tend to do this a lot now. Weird stuff happening that’s “not supposed” to happen can quickly grab people’s imaginations. And it feels like a lot of weird stuff is happening, both faster and more visibly than ever.
It’s happened before with sonic booms, such as the 2023 booms heard over Washington, D.C. when fighter jets had to scramble to intercept a light plane that had wandered into restricted airspace. Speculation immediately flew as to what was really going on, only for it to fizzle out when it became clear that what was going on wasn’t actually that interesting.
A much larger science-based panic happened less than a year ago, and unlike the few instances of the sonic booms, really did seem to be everywhere, and inescapable on social media.
Remember the drone panic of late 2024? Starting just after the election and going until the end of the year, the country became absolutely obsessed by the idea of massive drones swarming airports and cities, captured on camera and meticulously documented, only to be waved away by the authorities.
It started in New Jersey in mid-November, and soon was happening everywhere. There were thousands of reports, countless videos, and numerous totally unprovable claims of drones the size of cars darting around secret installations in tight formations. Some were spraying mist on people, others stalking people, and many were endangering flights. They seemed to be everywhere, and nobody knew why — though many believed they actually did know why, and “knew what a drone looked like.”
Making matters worse was that none of the explanations given by the outgoing Biden administration or local authorities made any sense. Commercial drones? Planets? Airplanes that seemed to be slowing down because of the parallax effect? That didn’t mesh with what people were feeling about the drones. What if that’s what they just wanted us to believe so we’d shut up about it? There were congressional hearings about what they were, president-elect Donald Trump claimed he would shoot them down, and politicians in New Jersey were calling for a state of emergency to be declared.
Were they covert attacks by a hostile country? Secret weapons? A desperate search for stolen nuclear material? Psychological experiments to make us insane? Obviously, many people thought they were aliens or UFOs, which seemed to make at least some amount of sense. Because while some of them could easily be explained, and other videos were obvious fakes, many of the sightings simply had no reason or logic behind them. The drone panic of 2024 seemed to be teetering into some kind of mass hysteria that might never end.
Until it ended.
When 2025 started, the public’s imagination was suddenly gripped by new catastrophes. First came the LA wildfires, then the new Trump administration. And while Trump vowed to shoot down the drones, no matter what they were, his staff threw cold water on the conspiracy theories. They were a mix of hobbyist drones and incorrectly-identified aircraft. Social media videos about the drones mostly fizzled out, search traffic and chatter died down, subsequent hearings drew little attention, and everyone just moved on.
Even r/conspiracy mostly only talks about the drone panic in the guise of everyone having forgotten about the drone panic. We still don’t know exactly what they all were, but we all collectively decided it wasn’t a big deal.
The sonic boom mini-panic of May 2026 never reached the heights of the drone panic of 2024. Nor did it achieve the wide coverage of other explosion-related hysterias, like the 2020 fireworks panic. It was a mostly harmless way to have a little fun with a genuinely interesting scientific phenomenon.
But in it we can see all the hallmarks of how a conspiracy theory can instantly grip a public’s imagination based on little more than a few videos and some speculation. It will happen again, maybe this time with something bigger and more long-lasting, that defies explanation and makes us all very afraid. Until it doesn’t.
