The Bell Island Boom of 1978

That Sunday Morning at Lance Cove

The strangest part of the Bell Island Boom is not how loud it was. It is who came to ask about it, and how fast.

It happened around eleven o'clock in the morning on Sunday, April 2, 1978, at Lance Cove on the southern edge of Bell Island. Jim Bickford was at home when the air seemed to come apart. The accounts agree on the violence of it. A fuse was thrown roughly twenty feet out of his fuse box, chased by a streak of blue flame. A small shed attached to his barn was lifted clean off its foundation. Several of his chickens were killed where they stood.

Neighbours reported their own damage in the days that followed. Television sets failed. One was said to have been left melted inside a house, though that detail comes from local recollection rather than any official record, and it is best held at arm's length. What is not in dispute is that whatever passed over Lance Cove that morning hit hard enough to rearrange a man's property in a single instant.

A Bang Heard Across the Bay

Bell Island is a small place, a few square miles of farmland and old iron-ore country sitting in Conception Bay, just across the water from St. John's. It is the kind of island where everyone hears the same weather and tells the same stories. On that Sunday, everyone heard the same bang.

The sound carried far beyond the island. Residents across the bay in St. John's, some twenty kilometres away, said their houses shuddered. The boom was reported dozens of kilometres off, in communities as far apart as Harbour Grace and Cape Broyle. For a single event to register across that much of the Avalon Peninsula, it had to release a great deal of energy in a very short time.

At first the explanations were the ordinary ones. A gas line. A transformer. A meteorite, maybe. None of them quite fit a fuse flung twenty feet through the air or a shed knocked off its blocks. And none of the islanders yet knew that the event had already been recorded by something far above them.

The Satellite That Was Watching

The reason two American physicists ended up on a Newfoundland ferry begins fifteen years earlier and twenty thousand miles overhead.

In 1963 the United States, the Soviet Union and Britain signed the Partial Test Ban Treaty, which prohibited nuclear tests in the atmosphere, in space and underwater. To verify that the agreement was being kept, the United States launched the Vela satellites. Built and operated with Los Alamos and Sandia, the Vela network carried instruments to catch the signatures of a nuclear detonation: the gamma rays, the X-rays, the optical double-flash, the burst of energy that only a bomb was thought to produce. For years the Velas were the silent referees of the Cold War, circling the planet and waiting for a flash that would mean the worst.

On April 2, 1978, a Vela instrument registered an energetic event over the western Atlantic. The signal was strong enough, and unusual enough, that it could not simply be filed away. Something had released a great pulse of energy over a populated stretch of Canadian coast, and the people whose job was to tell a bomb from everything else needed to know which it was.

The Men From Los Alamos

The next day, two physicists from Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory arrived on Bell Island. Their names were John Warren and Robert Freyman. They came not as tourists and not by accident, but because their satellite had flagged the spot on the map, and they had been sent to walk the ground beneath it.

What followed was not a one-day visit. Over the following months the two men returned to the island, interviewed Jim Bickford and his neighbours, examined the damage at Lance Cove and took their own measurements. They were methodical. They were looking, as their instruments had taught them to look, for the fingerprint of a nuclear event or a man-made weapon. They did not find one.

The Answer Was the Weather

Their conclusion was strange precisely because it was so ordinary.

The boom on Bell Island, they decided, was a single bolt of lightning. Not an ordinary one. A superbolt, an exceptionally rare and powerful discharge perhaps a hundred times more energetic than the strongest normal strike. A superbolt releases its enormous load of energy in around a millisecond. By one common estimate, fewer than one in a hundred thousand lightning strikes is this strong, which is to say well under a thousandth of one percent of them. And they almost never happen where anyone is standing. The vast majority occur far out over the open ocean, where no fuse box waits to be blown apart and no shed sits on its blocks.

A superbolt at Lance Cove could account for what people described. The colossal current could throw a fuse and burn a streak of blue across the air. The shockwave of superheated, instantly expanding air could carry across the bay and shudder houses in St. John's. To the Vela satellite watching from orbit, the brief, brilliant pulse could look, for an instant, like something far more dangerous.

Why the Island Never Quite Believed It

The official answer arrived, and the island shrugged.

To many of the people who lived through that morning, a single lightning bolt was a hard thing to credit. There had been no great storm overhead. A fuse thrown twenty feet from a wall did not feel like weather to the man whose wall it was. And there was the matter of who had come to investigate. Ordinary lightning does not, as a rule, bring physicists from the laboratory that built the atomic bomb to your door the following morning.

So the other theories took root and stayed. Some wondered whether the boom had been a secret Soviet weapons test gone astray. Others suspected an American atmospheric experiment that no one would admit to. A few connected it to the so-called Soviet Woodpecker, the powerful over-the-horizon radio transmitter whose strange signal was jamming shortwave bands around the world in those same years. None of these has ever been confirmed. None has ever been entirely ruled out in the minds of those who were there.

That uncertainty is the honest end of the story. The superbolt explanation fits the physical evidence better than any rival. It is also extraordinary enough that doubting it is not unreasonable.

The Quiet Twist

Step back and the whole episode folds into a single, strange sentence.

The most advanced surveillance instrument of its age, a satellite designed to catch the first flash of a nuclear war, was pointed at the Earth and waiting. On April 2, 1978, it caught something. The most dangerous machinery of the Cold War turned its attention to a few square miles of Newfoundland farmland, and two of the men who knew nuclear fire best in all the world boarded a small ferry to go and look.

What they found was not a bomb, or a test, or a weapon. It was a bolt of lightning. A satellite built to watch for the end of the world had, in the end, caught the weather.