These totally unexplained boomings occur over bodies of water all over the world, and have been noted and puzzled over for hundreds of years. Patty and I used to hear them over Barnegat Bay, on days when the water was calm and there wasn’t much of anything to hear… except a few gulls and the lake gun.
They don’t occur over every body of water and they don’t occur every day.
Some of us have heard “lake guns” and some of us haven’t. You might not know you’ve heard them: they might easily be mistaken for thunder or something else.
You don’t hear them at every body of water and you don’t hear them all the time. We simply don’t know what makes these sounds. Patty and I used to hear them occasionally on Barnegat Bay–always on extremely calm days.
Photo by Lukas Kondraciuk on his blog, “Through Open Lens”
Patty and I used to catch these little sharks by the dozen in Barnegat Bay. If you caught them at night, their eyes would reflect the moonlight in a golden glow. We got to be quite fond of them, and would always release them uninjured.
I couldn’t find a video that quite captures what I want to write about. So imagine these horseshoe crabs, only now it’s night-time, under a glorious full moon with no other light for miles around. And the horseshoe crabs are coming into the shallow water to mate and lay their eggs.
Years and years ago, Patty and I used to go to Long Beach Island in the spring, for weekends. We liked to fish by night, along the rim of a shallow cove in Barnegat Bay. On a few of those nights, the horseshoe crabs came in, silent and graceful, with only the faintest ripple of the water in the faintest breeze. We felt as if we were seeing something God ordained before He shaped Adam out of the dust of the earth. Something, maybe, that was old in Heaven before it was ever known on earth.
It’s all gone now. They filled in the little cove and built three-story condos on top of it, and the whole place is lit by floodlights all night long. There’s no hint that the little cove ever existed. And you can’t see the starlight on the water anymore. The floodlights drown it out. Maybe there never was any starlight, either. Maybe we dreamed it.
But if we did, the dream beats the stuffing out of condos and floodlights.
“Lake guns” have been around for hundreds of years and we still haven’t figured out what causes them.
These are booming noises heard over bodies of water. In 1850 James Fenimore Cooper wrote a story, “The Lake Gun,” about the mysterious boomings heard over Seneca Lake in upstate New York. But the lake guns are known from all over the world, under a variety of names.
Among the causes proposed are mini-earthquakes, sonic booms, methane gas, ghosts, UFOs, meteorites… and none of them stands up to investigation. The simple fact is, nobody knows what causes lake guns.
My wife and I used to hear them occasionally, over Barnegat Bay. The water always seemed to be unusually calm when the lake guns spoke. Elsewhere, they can be loud enough to move alarmed residents to call police.
We don’t know what they are. They’re cool, they’re a little bit scary, and we don’t know what makes them go boom.
Unraveling all the mysteries of God’s physical creation is a task that will keep us occupied for as long as human beings are on earth. We don’t know–apart from what the Bible teaches us–how non-living matter can acquire life. We don’t know how many species of insects there are.
But we do know that Jesus Christ is Lord–Lord over all we know, and Lord over all we don’t know. As we inquire into the mysteries of creation, let us remember whose creation it is.
