AMMAN — Some residents of Amman on Thursday said they felt tremors and heard booming noises, but authorities said that no earthquakes or explosions took place.

Several people said that they experienced what felt like earthquakes shaking their windows and doors, while others claimed to have heard the sounds of repeated explosions on Thursday morning.

“The noises started between 8:30am and 9:00am. The sounds were like faraway explosions and were around 10 minutes apart, then the intervals became shorter to a few seconds between every boom,” Lana Izzeddine, who lives in the Bayader neighbourhood in west Amman, told The Jordan Times yesterday.

The housewife said the sounds continued until around 11:00am.

“I don’t know if it was an earthquake or not, but the doors and windows of my house shook slightly,” Izzeddine said.

Ali Issa Farhat, an accountant, said he also heard the sounds yesterday morning at his workplace in Amman’s Abdali area.

“I heard booming sounds around seven times this morning. At first, I thought there were explosions nearby,” he said.

Farhat noted that the sounds on Thursday morning were similar to the booming sounds heard in several parts of Jordan in February this year, but “weaker”.

At the time, authorities said that the thunder-like sounds came from the Palestinian territories, and attributed them to explosions carried out by the Israeli occupation authorities, the reasons for which were unknown.

Natural Resources Authority (NRA) Director General Mousa Zyoud said that no earthquakes were recorded yesterday morning.

“The authority’s seismic monitoring devices didn’t register any earthquakes, and we don’t know the reason behind the reported sounds,” he said.

The Public Security Department (PSD) also said that no explosions occurred yesterday.

“No explosions took place Thursday morning and we don’t know the source of the alleged booming sounds,” a source at PSD’s media office told The Jordan Times.