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Good grief, people are so easily-panicked these days. In the 1960s I would hear sonic booms frequently, along with dynamite blasts from a nearby limestone quarry. It was just one of those things of life. I now live on Lake Michigan. A while back, an unusually-big fog rolled in and, by the posts on the local FB page, some people seemed to fear that we had been hit by a poison gas attack. You know, if people would just familiarize themselves with the world and the normal things that are likely to happen, they wouldn’t be afraid that death had come a-knockin’ every time something like this occurs.

Below is a comment from a friend who remembers the B-36. It may not have been supersonic, but it was huge. It had a wingspan of 270 feet compared to 185 feet for a B-52. Its range was 10,000 miles and that of a B-52 was 8,800 miles. Yep, six turning and four burning. Besides the Wikipedia reference, which is pretty extensive, is a clip from the Jimmy Stewart movie.

Convair B-36 Peacemaker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convair_B-36_Peacemaker Jimmy Stewart and the B-36

https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=b36+jimmy+stewart+movie&view=detail&mid=A83F4BC6D4C07ED86955A83F4BC6D4C07ED86955&FORM=VIRE

Thanks for sharing this entertaining email.

Brings back memories of when I was a kid in the early 1950's in Southwest Iowa farmland.

We lived about 55 +/-- miles just east of Offutt Airforce base. This when the Military Icon General Curtis Le May was still in charge of the strategic Air Command at that base. Le May was a D. Trump, no-nonsense type of Leader, and even us grade school kids knew who he was.

We often would hear sonic booms, which really was not that long after Yeager broke the barrier.

The aircraft that impressed me more than any other: Those gigantic lumbering B -36's. When the jet fighters from, that base broke the sound barrier, those old double hung house windows would rattle like during a thunder-storm, but you could hear the drone of those eight engines bombers many minutes before they became visible. Yes, there was so much vibration in the air generated from those massive engines (40,0000 horsepower) that those same old windows would vibrate like a tuning fork.

I had to just look the details about them up on Internet: When the B - 52s started flying, they would sometimes be so high in the air, we could sometimes find it hard to see them, but they did leave contrails -- but I don't recall anything like that from those lovely old B-36s.

those planes were spoofed by the number of engines as "six burning and four turning.". I don]t recall ever seeing the jet assist engines operational when they passed so very high overhead, but they were visible adjacent to those big pushe-prop engines. They say the B36 had longer flight range without re-fuel than even the B-52,

When I still worked for the county, I was driving county car on London Road south of Cottage Grove == three jet fighters, (Air Nat Guard came low level over Cottage Grove Res. and did a simulated strafing run parallel over the dam. Neat to see, and boy it did not take them long to do a hit and run simulation.

Merry Christmas to you and yours!