HANOVER — The wave of fake bomb threats this summer directed at colleges and universities around the country appeared to arrive in New Hampshire on Tuesday as authorities said multiple institutions in the state, including Dartmouth College, received what preliminary investigations indicated were non-credible bomb threats.
Hanover police received a bomb threat at 1:35 p.m. Tuesday “directed at a nonexistent room” in the Vail Basic Sciences Building at the Geisel School of Medicine but after Dartmouth Safety and Security and the Hanover Fire Department conducted a search of the building they found no evidence the threat was real, the college said in a Tuesday afternoon post on its Facebook page.
The Geisel bomb threat appeared to be similar to “multiple recent false alarms called in to schools across the country,” the college said.
New Hampshire Department of Safety also announced Tuesday that a “preliminary investigation” found that at least 10 institutions of higher learning in the state received bomb threats from what appeared to be the same telephone number.
“The caller, who may be from overseas, appears to be using a spoofed number,” the Department of Safety said in a news release.
Fake bomb threats have been an increasingly common occurrence at U.S. colleges and universities this summer, with institutions in Alabama, Florida, Maryland, Texas and Ohio among the places reporting them.