A seven-tonne meteor that sped across the Cleveland sky at 72,420 kilometres per hour (45,000 miles per hour) on Tuesday (March 17, 2026) before breaking apart in a thunderous boom startled residents, who feared an explosion.
People several states away reported seeing the bright fireball even though it was 9 a.m. The American Meteor Society said it received reports from Wisconsin to Maryland. NASA later confirmed that it was a meteor nearly 1.83 meters (6 feet) in diameter.
“This one really does look like it’s a fireball, which means it’s a meteorite — a small asteroid,” said astronomer Carl Hergenrother, the group's executive director.
“So much stuff is being launched that a lot of times what you see burning up is just reentering satellites. But usually those don’t get especially bright,” he said.
The meteor was first seen about 80.4 km (50 miles) above Lake Erie, near Lorain. It travelled more than 55 km (34 miles) through the upper atmosphere before fragmenting over Valley City, north of Medina, NASA said in a statement from Bill Cooke, who leads the agency's Meteoroid Environments Office in Huntsville, Alabama.
