What Was The Bell Island Boom?

NatureHistory

Apr 1

Sunday, April 2, 1978, began as quietly and ordinarily as any other day on Bell Island, NL.

It was cold, with a light freezing drizzle, but the waters of Conception Bay lay still. Across the island, families were preparing for church. Then, at around 11 a.m., without warning, a tremendous boom shattered the morning calm. The explosion was so powerful that houses in St. John’s shuddered from the shock waves, and the thunderclap was clearly heard as far away as Harbour Grace and Cape Broyle.

The epicentre of the mysterious blast seemed to be Lance Cove, on the southern edge of the island—where the ‘boom’ was more than just heard. It left behind plenty of physical evidence.

At the home of Jim Bickford, the strange explosion caused a fuse to shoot 20 feet out of the fuse box, chased by a streak of blue flame. Outside, a shed attached to his barn was blown from its foundation, killing several of his chickens. A short distance away, large holes—two feet deep and three feet wide—were blasted into the ground. “It was as though you’d thrown a bomb in there,” reported one investigating RCMP officer.

Other homes experienced strange electrical disturbances—lights flickered on by themselves, wiring was scorched, and appliances were destroyed. “The whole place lit up,” said Wabana Town Manager Edward Kent. “And this, combined with the tremendous noise, frightened and upset a lot of people.”

As bizarre as the destruction was, it was the visual reports that truly caught everyone’s attention.

“I heard a rumbling noise, and then I saw a big ball of fire,” recalled Carol O’Brien. Another witness, watching from across Conception Bay, described seeing a beam of light shooting toward the sky.

These accounts paled in comparison to that of 12-year-old Darin Bickford.

Bickford was outdoors on his bicycle at the time of the blast. His vivid eyewitness account captivated everyone. Years later, he recalled the event for the TV program Weird or What:

“All the birds stopped chirping, all the dogs stopped barking. It just went so still. And then it was boom. It’s like a shotgun blast, followed by a ball of light, and then immediately after, a second ball. The ground shook underneath me.”

He continued:

“It was hovering off the ground when it appeared out of thin air, and beautiful colours of blue made up most of the center of the ball. Outside of the blue, there was orange and yellow, mixing together. And then—just like that!—the ball of light disappeared into thin air. I was terrified of what it was, but I was transfixed by it.”

Searching for Answers

Almost immediately, the official explanation was lightning. Given Darin Bickford’s description, many speculated that it must have been ball lightning—a rare atmospheric phenomenon in which a glowing sphere appears close to the ground during a thunderstorm. However, ball lightning is not well understood.

Not everyone was convinced. If it had been a lightning strike, as one newspaper noted, “it could be regarded as a freak one, since weather conditions at the time were not those normally associated with lightning. No other thunderstorms were reported anywhere across the province that day.”

This led some to look for other explanations.

Meteor strikes and satellite crashes were quickly ruled out. Then, rumors began to swirl that the event was not natural at all, but human-caused. Speculation intensified when two scientists from the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in New Mexico—John Warren and Robert Freyman—arrived to investigate. They had detected the event via the Vela satellite system.

Because the Vela satellites were designed to detect nuclear detonations and monitor the Soviet Union, people wondered if Bell Island had been inadvertently caught in some Cold War experiment.

One theory suggested that Bell Island’s rich iron ore deposits had attracted some kind of atmospheric energy wave—possibly related to the mysterious Soviet “Woodpecker” signal, a powerful radio transmission detected worldwide in the late 1970s.

The rumours weren’t just confined to conspiracy theorists. The Western Star even ran a front-page headline:

Bell Island Boom Was Soviet Radio Wave, *Western Star,* June 15, 1978

This theory came from the Planetary Association for Clean Energy in Ottawa. Its director, Andrew Michrowski, proposed that the explosion was caused by an Extremely Low Frequency (ELF) radio wave that “probably interacted with an iron-ore body on Bell Island.”

Michrowski claimed that since 1976, the Soviet Union had been experimenting with ELF waves of up to 40 million watts. He suggested that a Soviet station in Gomel (in what is now Belarus) was transmitting these waves, possibly with cooperation from a station in Havana, Cuba. He argued that Bell Island lay directly between the two, making it a possible target.

According to Michrowski, one property of ELF waves is that they can cause electrical breakdowns in areas with smooth reflective surfaces—such as a dense iron-ore deposit. Some witnesses had reported a loud hum preceding the explosion, a characteristic of such a breakdown.

However, the scientists from Los Alamos arrived at a different conclusion. Freyman and Warren decided that the boom had been caused by a superbolt—an extremely powerful lightning strike.

The Superbolt Theory

At the time, superbolts were still an emerging field of scientific study. In fact, the Vela satellites had played a key role in their discovery.

Superbolts are extraordinarily intense lightning strikes, 100 times more powerful than regular lightning and lasting twice as long (about one millisecond). They are exceedingly rare, making up only one-thousandth of one percent of all lightning strikes, and are more common over water than land.

History

Bell Island News Clipping, 1896 — *Daily News*, November 11, 1896

Perhaps supporting the lightning theory, Bell Island had experienced at least one other strange lightning event in the past. On November 11, 1896, at around 9:30 p.m., residents witnessed a flash of lightning that reportedly lasted an impossible five seconds. The Daily News described it as the “most powerful ever experienced” and speculated that Bell Island’s immense iron ore deposits might have been responsible.

There were no reports of damage from the 1896 strike, but it must have been a spectacular sight.

Loud as a Legend

Whether sparked by lightning or something more mysterious, the Bell Island Boom remains one of Newfoundland’s most intriguing strange truths—a phenomenon so loud, it’s become a legend in itself.

The Bell Island Boom is one of those mysteries that’s too good to let go.