Reports of an explosion reverberated across New England in the United States on Saturday afternoon, prompting authorities to investigate the cause of a double boom that rattled structures in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. The American Meteor Society attributed the booms to a meteor nearly one meter wide entering the atmosphere near the New Hampshire-Massachusetts border, north of Boston.
NASA officials confirmed the meteor was natural material and not debris from a satellite, entering the atmosphere at 2:06 p.m. American Meteor Society program monitor Robert Lunsford stated that reports of the event spanned from Delaware to Montreal, with witnesses hearing the double boom, feeling ground tremors, or observing the fireball resembling a daytime shooting star.
Lunsford described the fireball as larger than usual, approximately a yard wide, but suggested it was improbable that the meteor made impact with the ground. He emphasized the need for additional data on its trajectory and speed to determine if it landed, noting that if it had not disintegrated, it would likely have fallen into the ocean.
NASA spokesperson Allard Beutel disclosed that the meteor was traveling at approximately 120,700 km/h and likely disintegrated about 60 kilometers above the surface. The agency estimated that the energy released during its fragmentation was equivalent to about 300 tonnes of TNT, explaining the accompanying booms.
Several individuals in different states took to social media reporting buildings shaking, while videos on various platforms captured the rapid succession of booms without visible signs of fire or smoke. Some individuals lodged reports with the U.S. Geological Survey, registering their felt tremors with the National Earthquake Information Center, as confirmed by agency spokesperson Steve Sobie.
Although the agency established an event page due to numerous “Did you feel it?” submissions on its website, Sobie clarified that no seismic event was recorded on the agency’s seismographs, dismissing the idea of an earthquake as the cause of the reported shaking.