Reports of an explosion were reported by individuals throughout New England, USA, on Saturday afternoon, leading law enforcement agencies and others to investigate a mysterious double boom that rattled structures in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. The American Meteor Society disclosed that the loud noises were the result of a meteor, nearly one meter wide, entering the Earth’s atmosphere near the New Hampshire-Massachusetts border, north of Boston.
NASA officials verified that the meteor was composed of natural materials, ruling out the possibility of it being a satellite or space debris. The meteor descended into the atmosphere at 2:06 p.m. Robert Lunsford, a program monitor at the American Meteor Society, mentioned that the organization received numerous reports from Delaware to Montreal, with witnesses hearing the double boom, feeling tremors, or sighting the fireball, resembling a daytime shooting star.
Lunsford described the meteor as larger than a typical fireball, estimating it to be about a yard wide. However, he expressed doubts about the meteor making contact with the ground. He stated, “We would require additional details regarding its trajectory, velocity, and other factors to ascertain if it hit the ground. If it did not disintegrate completely, it would have landed in the ocean.”
NASA’s spokesperson, Allard Beutel, stated that the meteor was traveling at approximately 120,700 km/h and probably disintegrated about 60 kilometers above ground level. The agency calculated that the energy released during the breakup equated to around 300 tons of TNT, which explained the booms heard.
Numerous individuals in various states took to social media to report feeling the structures they were in shaking. Several videos shared on the X platform captured the sounds of two rapid booms without any visible signs of fire or smoke. Some individuals lodged reports with the U.S. Geological Survey, recording the tremors felt with the National Earthquake Information Center, as confirmed by agency spokesperson Steve Sobie.
In response to the reports, the agency initiated an event page due to the volume of “Did you feel it?” submissions on its website. However, Sobie clarified that no seismic event was recorded on the agency’s seismographs, indicating that the shaking was not caused by an earthquake.