Booms Rock Tennessee, Bizarre Radio Station Explosion

Last week a small town in Tennessee felt three big booms, several days apart, that has left them rattled. At about 10:45 a.m. last Friday, radio station WJKM in Hartsville, Tennessee was knocked off the air by a very powerful energy blast. The weather was clear, with no rain or lightning. The radio station?s computers went down and their phone lines were knocked out. Several power transformers were blown several blocks away from the studio, with smoke billowing out of one of them. All nearby phone lines were also down.

WJKM secretary Jennifer and sales manager Steve found a small bird still alive hopping around with its wings and tail feathers burned off. They saw many birds that were badly burned but still alive.

Phone lines at the nearby newspaper office of The Hartsville Vidette were knocked out as well. A Vidette employee said she was sitting with her back to the window when she heard a loud roaring sound and something came through the window and a flash of light went through the entire building. The Vidette is next door to the radio station. The local power companies, Tri County Electric and Bell South, are unable to explain the situation

Then Saturday night just after 10 o’clock, a huge boom brought families out of their homes. ?It kinda shook the house. You could hear things rattling and [the baby] woke up from her nap crying. I?m not sure what it is,? said David Massey.

Monday morning, it happened again. ?It shook the whole house?and it feels like it?s getting closer and closer,? said Jon Burks. ?I thought after Saturday we wouldn?t have anymore. Then this morning it kinda scared everyone in the neighborhood again.?

Officials at TEMA say Saturday?s tremor was definitely not an earthquake, but other than that, exactly what happened there is still a mystery. ?And it may be a mystery we never solve. It may go down in history as the night the earth shook,? said Tennessee Emergency Management official, Cecil Whaley, Jr. Possible theories include a sonic boom from a passing aircraft or the collapse of an underground cave.

Monday’s explosion has been attributed to a rock quarry just down the road where employees say blasting is a regular part of doing business. ?They’ve been blasting here twice a week usually, and the blasts last a couple of seconds,? said Vulcan Materials VP Mike Clark. The quarry was closed Saturday night, so workers there say they are not to blame for the first big bang.

Clues about the cause of the booms were suggested by radio listeners. Many of the callers to the radio station seemed to think that there was some sort of activity at the old Hartsville nuclear power plant site, which looks like an abandoned ghost town. The nuclear power plant is a site that cost taxpayers millions of dollars and was supposedly never finished. The construction of the plant came to a halt some years back, and now it is supposedly being used as a storage area only. Yet people claim to hear strange humming sounds coming from the location. Comments like ?you can feel it? and ?It makes the hair stand up on your neck? are common. At night the entire area has a strange chemical smell to it somewhat like ozone. Some people have seen strange triangular shaped craft overhead. Silent black helicopters fly at all hours of the night. These are huge military C-130’s, heading in as if to land or leaving the area nose up as if they have just taken off.

A rural elderly man said he lost several beagle puppies in the area. A friend of his told him that he thought that he had seen the pups in the area near the cooling tower. He drove his truck to the plant and thought he heard the beagles out in the wooded area, so he climbed over the fence and started calling to them. He told us he was greeted with an overhead helicopter and a ground force of about 30 people. They allegedly escorted him off the property in a very rough manner. He said they were some kind of police, although some of them wore plain clothes.

A tech worker who lives on a hill near the plant has had fluorescent bulbs light in his hand on various spots on his property. He discovered this by accident but has witnesses to the phenomenon. He works with surveillance cameras, thermal imaging and a lot of high tech stuff. He reports that there is operational radar being used at the nuclear site at different times.

A Hartsville resident whose ex-husband worked at the site says that there is a reactor there and says that her husband was told ?don’t eat the fish from the river or eat any deer shot in the area.? A man who is related to the owner of a local grocery store claims to have seen a Bigfoot near the nuclear plant.

To read more about the booms, click here.

For WJKM’s story, go to their website, www.1090wjkm.com

NOTE: This news story, previously published on our old site, will have any links removed.