The 7-tonne cosmic projectile caused a massive blast over several states in the US.

10:19, Thu, Mar 19, 2026 Updated: 10:30, Thu, Mar 19, 2026

Moment suspected meteor filmed over Cleveland

A seven-tonne meteor exploded with a boom heard for hundreds of miles across several US states. The huge chunk of space rock was filmed speeding across the Ohio sky at 45,000 miles per hour on St Patrick's Day (March 17) before breaking apart in a thunderous explosion that startled residents who feared another reason for the blast.

People in several American states reported seeing the bright fireball even though it was 9am and daylight. The American Meteor Society said it received reports from Wisconsin to Maryland and NASA later confirmed that it was a meteor measuring nearly six feet across.

Carl Hergenrother, executive director of the American Meteor Society, said: “This one really does look like it’s a fireball, which means it’s a meteorite, a small asteroid.

"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."

Meteor in the sky over the US

Meteor in the sky over Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (Image: AP)

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The meteor was first seen about 50 miles above Lake Erie, near Lorain. It travelled more than 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.

It unleashed an energy of 250 tons of TNT when it broke apart, causing the boom. Staff at the National Weather Service in Cleveland also heard it and felt the vibrations. They had no early reports of any debris being found.

“There could be some small fragments, but a lot of it would have burned up in the atmosphere,” NWS meteorologist Brian Mitchell said.

Meteor in the sky over Olmsted Falls, Ohio.

Meteor in the sky over Olmsted Falls, Ohio, on Tuesday March, 17. (Image: AP)

Meteors typically fall somewhere in the US about once a day, while smaller pieces of space dust might fall ten times an hour, Hergenrother said.

Scientists track meteors through a network of special cameras that help capture the night sky, but more members of the public are catching them on cellphones and security cameras of their own.

“Now we’re seeing them, and there’s dozens of videos popping up all the time,” Hergenrother said.