Shivery Shakes : It Wasn’t Quakes That Rattled Coast

Strange vibrations.

Neither the United States’ vaunted military forces, nor Caltech’s vigilant seismologists, nor police departments up and down the coast seem able--or willing--to identify them, but strange vibes rattled and shook the coast twice more this week, renewing speculation that super-secret military spy planes must be streaking somewhere overhead.

Whatever they are, or were, Tuesday’s mysterious tremors had part of the federal government literally all shaken up.

“Our people felt it. The vertical Levelors of (U.S. Rep.) Ron Packard’s office were shaking, really swaying back and forth,” said Dana Point City Councilman Mike Eggers, who runs Packard’s San Clemente office.

The latest of the more than a half-dozen recent strikes came Wednesday morning, sharply rattling windows and shaking some late-sleeping residents of Fountain Valley and Seal Beach at 8:25 a.m.

That followed the more earthquake-like tremor that rolled up and down the coast and through Packard’s office at about 5:15 p.m. Tuesday, startling residents from Los Angeles County’s South Bay to San Clemente, where one person wound up with a broken window.

Seismologists say they are not earthquakes, but sonic booms, which are explosive sounds caused by pressure waves from aircraft traveling near the speed of sound, about 700 m.p.h.

The shock waves from sonic booms, indeed, shake the earth and are therefore picked up on seismographs which record any ground movement, said Jim Mori, a seismologist for the United States Geological Survey in Pasadena.

“Wednesday morning’s occurrence looked like a sonic boom,” Mori said. He had not yet researched the stronger Tuesday shake.

Steve Bryant, a spokesman for Caltech, said the Tuesday shake was definitely not an earthquake.

“We have 300 sites around Southern California,” he said. “If it had been an earthquake, we would have known about it.”

That leaves wide open the ever-present speculation that the source of the vibrations is an exotic spy plane that streaks over the Southland as fast as 4,000 m.p.h. Some people say the secret plane is called the Aurora.

Sources have told The Times that the Air Force is using a secret base called S-4 near the dry Groom Lake, 120 miles north of Las Vegas, to test the aircraft. The Air Force will say only that the Groom Lake base is somewhere north of Ellis AFB, near a nuclear testing range and that it is so secret it has no telephone number that can be made public.

Visitors to the remote area have told The Times of seeing flying saucer-type aircraft parked on the desert in what appeared to be an Air Force attempt to duplicate flying saucer aerodynamics.

Although the Air Force denies the existence of any such aircraft, evidence of the mysterious Aurora first surfaced in 1984 when a Pentagon budget request accidentally listed it next to the SR-71 Blackbird and the U-2, two other Air Force spy planes. That was the last official reference to the Aurora, which has since disappeared from any lists, according to aircraft technology experts.

Mori, who spends time tracking the different readings picked up on seismographs, says he often finds evidence of unknown aircraft on his seismographs. For several months earlier this year, sonic booms became a regular Thursday morning occurrence, he said.

Mori added that sonic booms and earthquakes are easily distinguishable on a seismograph.

“Earthquakes show up as waves radiating out from the source in concentric circles. They are easily identifiable,” he said. “In a sonic boom, the source is moving so the pattern of the waves actually forms a hyperbola.”