Big accidents are usually both spectacular and noisy.

Like the ammonium perchlorate explosion out in the desert when solid rocket fuel accumulated while space shuttles were grounded after Challenger in 1986.

Or the gas plant explosion around Goldsmith about 30 years or so ago.

Then there was this explosion in November 1944 in the middle of a British countryside, that blew a crater out 400 feet deep and a half mile across. There were millions of bombs stored there on their way to the bases that launched the nightly raids on Nazi held facilities in Europe. One afternoon, something happened. No one really knows for sure, according to declassified reports, as any eyewitnesses instantly turned to "strawberry jam" and any physical evidence was launched tens of kilometers across the English farms and hedgerows at about 27x the speed of sound, and broken up into itty bitty pieces.

It was the biggest pre-nuclear age explosion, ever. It even dwarfed the Beruit harbor explosion, and a few other large non-nuclear accidents.

That is huge. Maybe that is where mysterious crop circles come from in fields

Showtalk said:

Maybe that is where mysterious crop circles come from in fields

Too small of a scale, no cratering of the earth. Some of the more convincing ones are actually done by people using lumber and rope.

https://www.livescience.com/26540-crop-circles.html

They should be able to records pranksters.

With phone spying of one's whereabouts all the time these days, combined with all the dash cams and other things, it's a lot harder to do anything secretly unless you take really extraordinary measures.

I've been giving more thought about mysterious sounds. I do recall one time a friend and I were hiking behind an old coal mine property where the thing caught on fire many decades earlier, As far as I know ,it's still burning underground. Pops and snap sounds are what I heard. Like a muzzled campfire made of pine. My friend couldn't hear a thing.I  always just figured he didn't clean the wax out of his ears.  Freshly fracked ground sounds about the same. I imagine people walking around areas without the right information could scare themselves silly.

BWArtist said:

I imagine people walking around areas without the right information could scare themselves silly.

About 50 years ago or so, we helped with a place for a couple of disadvantaged kids to stay when their dad had a heart attack and was going to be in the hospital for a while. Their son was in the same grade as me, but was very superstitious.

So about 2 AM the wind got up. Our phone cable connected to the house right outside that room. And there was this big tree out in the back yard. The wind of course swayed it back and forth, but one branch had grown out to where it would rub on the phone line. This made a squeaking noise that when coupled into the wall could be pretty loud.

Now I was quite accustomed to the squeaking at night. To me it was like a convenient meteorological wind detection device.

To him, it was a "ha'int" or some other supernatural phenomena, and when the squeaking got started up, he was in a total hysterical panic in a couple of minutes.

I finally went and turned on the outside floodlight, then took a flashlight and went outside, found a board next to the fence, and reached up and pushed the moving branch up off of the phone line. The noise abruptly stopped.

But it was disconcerting at 11 to 12 years old to have anyone at that age who still believed there were monsters that lurked in the shadows under a bed or in a closet, and was afraid of the dark, as I'd already become accustomed to utilizing the darkness as excellent cover to wander unobserved at about the age of maybe 7 to 8.

You were resourceful at a young age.  Did your parents get gray hair because of you? Or did they not know?

Showtalk said:

You were resourceful at a young age. Did your parents get gray hair because of you? Or did they not know?

Oh, they got gray hair because of me. And that was only the small fraction of things I actually got caught doing.

Like when I was about 5 years old or so.

We lived in the middle of a remote oil field. Since then they built a segment of I-10 within about a mile of the place but back in the 1960s it was in the middle of nowhere.

Let's see - I climbed the water tower - it wasn't one of the huge municipal ones - it was only about 60 feet high or so, and probably held a couple thousand gallons. We filled it manually every couple of days for the little settlement we lived in, with an old pumpjack and reciprocating rod string that was only drilled down into the aquifer rather than the thousands of feet deeper into the oil-bearing anticline.

It was neat because you could see for miles and miles and miles up there. It didn't occur to me that I might fall off that rickety ladder that went up to the platform, which of course in the pre-OSHA type days, didn't have any kind of a railing or anything like that.

Then there was the morning I wandered down one of the lease roads. I knew that somehow everyone's livelihood came from that dark brown smelly slippery oil that was pumped out of the ground. So I had also seen how they started these oil wells up.

I wasn't strong enough to spin one of those Fairbanks-Morse engines over using the crank, which had this overrunning cam that went into the flywheel keyway so it would only turn one direction, then as the engine started, the crank would just free-wheel as the accelerating shaft spun inside it, and you could just slip the crank off.

Instead, I'd open the compression release valve and climb onto the flywheel spokes, like going up an endless ladder until it was spinning fast enough. I'd jump off and flip the two levers - first one to un-ground the magneto wire so the spark would fire, second one let the exhaust valve actually close during the intake, compression, and power strokes of the engine.

The heavy flywheel would have enough momentum, hopefully, to suck in a fuel / air mixture, then get to the top of the compression stroke so the magneto would fire. If really lucky, this would give it enough of a kick in the power stroke that it could complete the next exhaust, intake, and compression.

So the big engine would go Puff <wheeze> <chuff> <pause> PUFF <chuff> <wheeze> <shorter pause> PUUUFFF and so on until the spokes of the flywheel were a blur, and it was just going huffa chuffa chuffa huffa pop pop chuffa.

And you'd see the valves, which were sticking out the end of the cylinder head, with these levers that opened and closed them in a fast mechanical choreography, each properly fingering their notes to get the engine to play its tune.

At some point, the spinning balls and levers on the governor would start to sling outwards, and that would push a ring up that would then pull on the throttle and slow the engine down.

It was way cool to watch the thing, as these engines barely spun about 360 RPM or so, and were only about 10 to 30 horsepower despite weighing as much as a car.

Once you felt the exhaust blasting out of the muffler getting hot and no longer smelling sweet, you knew the engine had warmed up enough.

Next, you went around behind it, and there was this big lever. You unhooked that, and it let this other spinning ring move, and this engaged the clutch so a pulley would start spinning. That had a bunch of really big, long belts like fan belts on a car, that went to the pumpjack gear box.

The engine would lug down - puffa - chuffa - puff puff puff - then speed up again as the slowing governor opened the throttle to maintain engine RPM. And the "iron rocking horse" pumpjack would start bobbing up and down, the polish rod would go down into the stuffing box and come up, and if you went a ways from the well and put your ear on the pipe, you could hear the oil going through it to the tank battery up the hill.

SO, good. I'd started one of the things up by myself. That was such an empowering feeling. So I walked down the road to the next well. I ended up starting up 4 of the things.

I never noticed the dark brown "beard" that came out over the inspection hatch of the nearest 500 barrel tank, and flowed down the side and started spreading out on the ground, then running down the ditch beside the road like a dark brown babbling brook that stank of raw hydrocarbon compounds.

And it never occurred to me that the tanks up the hill were already full, and the trucks weren't going to be there until later that evening to offload some of it.

The next day everyone was really upset. They came with a big huge dump truck. They dumped a bunch of dirt beside the road. All the crews were shoveling the dirt up and back into the truck. The truck drove away and another one came with more dirt.

They did that all day long.

Hopefully the statute of limitations ran out decades ago.

Either that or that helicopter I hear is carrying the EPA Cold Case SWAT team ...