Meteors heat up considerably due to friction, and rapid heating causes the boom of thunder so could also cause meteors to make a noise on a smaller scale. Turbulance in the air around the meteor could also be responsible. 

Paul, I don't know.

I agree with your line of thought, but it seems a bit fierce for them to be producing an EM signal powerful enough for your body to detect them. Do you know whether microwave detectors register their passage? If so, then I just mention that one of my sons, who hates phones, and cell phones in particular, can largely detect when a colleague's phone is receiving a call, even before it rings. This suggests that some of us can register MW signals. There might be a connection.

FWIW!!!

Thanks Pete. I think I got mixed up by reading his first reply rather than his original question.

Paul, yeesss... The idea may or may not be right of course, but it is definitely not ridiculous. You will no doubt be aware that in passing through the upper atmosphere they leave ionised trails sufficiently persistent and intense to be used as reflectors of computer short-wave signals in remote regions?

Worth following up, I should think. Logical enough to have merit and creative enough to deserve respect.  It should make a good student physics/ engineering/ astronomic project. Have you tried the idea on anyone else?

Then again, either alternatively or (better yet) in combination, the question of microwave sensitivity is not yet eliminated either, whether relevantly to the meteors or independently.

Consider Synesthesia, the mixing of the senses.

Perhaps you have a tendency toward this condition and under certain circumstances, you experience it.

Exposed to "the darkest accessible place", very quiet I imagine, for hours, almost like a sensory deprivation experiment, perhaps then, when your visual sense is stimulated you have an audio experience as well.

After the persied shower, perhaps you can locate a sensory deprivation tank and pursue the topic.

I'm afraid if you get a group together and have more stimuli around you during the shower you may not be able to duplicate the experience. 

I can now answer my own question at some length, although incompletely. Apologies for asking the question before exhausting the research I could have done myself. I will follow up my ideas, then reveal some external sites.

Tiny (sand-grain) meteors don't do much, big (boulder) ones are very rare. The median size seems to be pebbles - maybe 20mm diameter. That would be a 4cc stone and would weight about 12 grams. Meteors orbit the Sun, so their speed is nothing to do with Earth's gravity - it's the Sun's escape velocity that counts. Meteors are doing about 42 km/sec when they intersect Earth orbit.

The kinetic energy comes out (in MKS units) at about 10 megajoules. Assuming all the energy is released during a half-second transit, a meteor runs at 20 megawatts. That is about 400 times the power of the largest licenced AM radio transmitter in the USA. So an ionisation/magnetic field mechanism that converted 0.25% of a pebble meteor's energy to RF (and the rest to heat and light) would product as much power as the largest radio transmitter.

Actually, you might expect a known meteor shower, in a particularly good year such as I chose to observe, to have a high proportion of larger pebbles. A 50mm diameter stone would still not reach surface, but would be worth 300 megawatts.

I looked at radio antennae, but I couldn't find any guide to how much RF energy an aerial picks up at 60 km distance from a source. (I want the antenna to collect enough power that the induced electrostatic forces bend it physically.) However, I ran across the Yagi-Uda antenna design. This uses evenly-spaced passive wire elements in line with the source to maximise signal pickup, and benefits from an earthed reflector behind it. And here am I with an eight-strand wire fence staring straight up into the sky where the meteors are, with the whole earth surface to act as a reflector, and with elements hundreds of yards long. Just the perfect design!

These links seem to be to reputable articles:

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2001/ast26nov_1/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteoroid#Sound

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/321596.stm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_burst_communications

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yagi-Uda_antenna