NBC4 New York reported that officials with the Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland said they were conducting testing of F-35C fighter jet over the Atlantic Ocean Thursday afternoon and that some of the aircraft performed maneuvers that could have caused sonic booms.

The shaking New Jersey residents experienced Thursday afternoon was caused by a sonic boom generated during U.S. Navy aircraft testing over the Atlantic Ocean, according to several reports.

The United States Geological Survey said the sonic boom was recorded near Hammonton, N.J. - about a half-hour south of Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst.

The booms caused rattling and shaking felt from southern New Jersey all the way to Long Island and southern Connecticut, prompting hundreds of residents to call 9-1-1 and thousands of tweets on Twitter about what people believed was an earthquake.

"What we saw was something that was not consistent with an earthquake," said William Yeck, a geophysicist with the USGS.

The Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst said the base did not hold exercises Thursday.

"We've also received reports of ground shaking here in South Jersey. We do not have any aircraft capable of producing a sonic boom and our training ranges are currently clear of operations," according to a statement from the joint base on Facebook.

The Federal Aviation Administration and the North American Aerospace Defense Command said there were no planes, commercial or military, operating in the area that could have caused a sonic boom.

The USGS, however, says that sonic booms can be felt hundreds of miles away, so it's possible that planes flying from as far away as Maryland could have caused it -- which the Navy later confirmed.

John Bellini, geophysicist with the USGS, initially said the shaking could have been from an earthquake or a sonic boom from a jet but "I don't know."