Some residents in the Broadlands and Brambleton neighborhoods awoke from a deep slumber at 2 a.m. Sunday to what they described as the loudest airplane they’ve ever heard – "it shook the house" wrote one forum poster on the Brambletonian.

And official answers have been hard to get.

One resident speculated that officials were testing the new runway at Dulles (at 2 a.m.?) and another thought the noise was a low-flying jet joy-riding home from the Andrews Air Force show that occurred earlier in the day -- a USAF F22 Raptor fly-by, perhaps?

We may never know for sure.

According to a spokesman from the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, who has access to flight paths, an unknown plane took off from Dulles Runway 30 at 1:57:29 a.m. Sunday morning. The aircraft flew northwest up Rt. 659 and was at 3,272 feet over Mill Run Elementary. When it got to Rt. 7, the same aircraft was at 4,400 feet, and when approaching the Potomac River it cut east toward Wheaton, Md., and then disappeared from radar.

Would Air Traffic Control at Dulles have a record of the flight, aircraft type or maybe what airline it belonged to?

The WMAA representative told me that Air Traffic Control at Dulles doesn’t keep records like that. Controllers, he said, are only concerned with what is going in the present and five to seven minutes into the future.

But wouldn’t there be a flight plan recorded somewhere with info on who, what and why?

Probably, but WMAA said that information is not released to the public if it is a military flight or sensitive data. It could have been a military or diplomatic mission of some sort involving the Royal Air Force, the German Luftwaffe or an aircraft of our own.

I guess us laypeople must explain away this phenomenon as an Unidentified Flying Object. Cue the Twilight Zone music.