A flurry of fireballs has people wondering what’s happening
We’ve seen a flurry of fireballs lighting up the skies over the past few weeks. On March 3, 2026, a meteor entered Earth’s atmosphere over Vancouver and Washington, breaking the sound barrier and causing a sonic boom. Then, western Europe saw fireballs on March 8 and again on March 11. And on March 17, another meteor with its associated sonic boom rocked residents of Ohio. Two days later came two fireballs over California, and a day after that were fireballs over Michigan and Georgia. And on March 21, a fireball over Texas dropped a rock through the roof of a house in Houston.
What’s going on?
Enough people have been asking this question that the American Meteor Society (AMS) said:
The first quarter of 2026 has produced what appears to be a significant surge in large fireball events. The data, drawn from the AMS database going back to 2011, shows a pattern that warrants serious investigation.
The organization reported the findings of that investigation on March 24, 2026. Its main findings were that there is no evidence of an impact threat. The objects were in the normal size range of those that regularly impact Earth. But what has changed is the volume of reports it has received across several categories, including witness counts, sonic boom rates, long-duration sighting volume and the distribution of event sizes. The AMS said:
Whether this reflects a genuine change in the near-Earth meteoroid environment, an amplification of reporting through AI and social media, or some combination of both—we cannot yet say definitively. What we can say is that the question deserves both public awareness and scientific attention.
An uptick in fireballs, or reports?
First, what are fireballs? They are especially bright meteors that light up the night sky as they streak across the atmosphere. They can even glow brightly enough to be seen in the daytime. Astronomers call bright meteors like this bolides.
And now it seems people are reporting fireballs like never before. The AMS has had a reporting system in place since 2005. It looked back through the data to see if it could pinpoint anything that has changed, and why.
In the first quarter of 2026, the AMS found 2,046 total events. There were 38 events that had more than 50 reports each. The average per quarter is 18 events with greater than 50 reports. And 14 of those events had more than 100 reports each, compared to the average of 7 events.
But while the AMS found the number of events (2,046) is the highest on record, it’s only slightly above the other highs of 2,037 events in 2022 and 1,947 events in 2021. It said:
The signal is still at the top of the distribution.
What it did find is there are a larger number of reports. Again, from the AMS:
What has changed is that a large fraction of events that would normally draw 25–49 witnesses instead drew 50, 100, or even 200+ witnesses. The distribution didn’t broaden—it shifted upward. Almost half of all March 2026 events with 10+ reports were seen by 50 or more people.
Dana Jason Wood captured the St. Patrick’s Day fireball from Munhall, Pennsylvania, and submitted it to the American Meteor Society.
More sonic booms
But the AMS noted that the change cannot only be attributed to more people reporting fireballs. Because that doesn’t explain for the increase in sonic booms. When a meteor enters Earth’s atmosphere, it burns up due to friction. Meteors can zip through the air at 25,000 to 160,000 miles per hour (11 to 72 km per second). Usually, these small space rocks, the size of pebbles, burn up completely and never reach the ground.
But larger space rocks can survive longer in the atmosphere, penetrating deep enough to produce pressure waves and, thus, sonic booms. They can even be large enough to deposit meteorites onto the landscape below, as we’ve seen in Ohio and Texas.
And the recent meteors have been remarkable in that 30 of the 38 events that had more than 50 witness reports included sonic booms. As the AMS said:
Thirty large fireball events producing audible booms in a single quarter means roughly one every three days.
Where are these meteors coming from?
Meteors that come from regular showers, such as the Lyrids, all emanate from a single source. That is, if you trace the path of the meteor backward, they all appear to come from the same general area, which astronomers call the radiant. The radiant for the Lyrid meteor shower is in the constellation Lyra. The meteors aren’t actually coming from that constellation, of course. They are bits of rock, usually left behind by comets that release debris in their orbits as they round the sun. Then Earth plows into those trails of debris, and we see the result as meteors.
So are these recent fireballs related? Do they come from the same region of sky? Could it be a new meteor shower?
The AMS found that the recent events did have enhanced activity from two directions. One is the direction opposite the sun, which astronomers call the anthelion. The other is meteors that came in at a steep angle, not in alignment with the plane of our solar system. And astronomers call this a high-declination radiant. Referring to the high-declination meteors, the AMS said:
An enhancement in this population is unusual and warrants further study.
Interestingly, two of the meteorite falls in March were of a rare type of meteorite. These were achondrites, specifically in the subgroup of eucrites. It is thought that eucrites come from the asteroid Vesta. And yet these two meteorite falls, in Ohio and Germany, entered at near opposite angles from each other.
What the increase isn’t
The AMS concluded with a long list of possibilities for the uptick that it said it has ruled out. These include:
- Increased reporting or smartphone adoption
- A new meteor shower
- The February fireballs seasonal effect
- Time-of-day or geographic bias
The AMS also said these fireballs are not of alien origin. Also, the meteorites recovered in Ohio and Germany show they are consistent with extraterrestrial rocks and are not “artificial”.
Something the AMS is still unsure of is if AI is helping to drive the reporting numbers. It said:
When someone witnesses a fireball today, they may ask ChatGPT, Siri, or Google’s AI “I just saw a fireball—where do I report it?” and be directed to the AMS. This would inflate witness counts per event without changing the actual number of fireballs—which is, notably, the exact pattern we observe: normal total event counts but elevated reports per event at the high end. We cannot quantify this effect with the data currently available, but it is a plausible partial explanation for the upward shift in the witness-count distribution. It would not, however, account for the elevated sonic boom rates or the recovered meteorite falls.
Meanwhile, the AMS will continue to track fireballs and look for patterns and explanations.
Will the flurry of fireballs continue? No one knows. Keep your eyes, and your ears, open! And if you see a fireball, report it to the AMS here.
Plus, if you capture a photo of a fireball, submit it to us!
Bottom line: We’ve seen a flurry of fireballs, particularly in March, with reports from Europe to Canada and the U.S. Is there a reason for the uptick? The American Meteor Society investigates.
Via AMS