Many folks might have heard a large boom just after 2 p.m. Saturday afternoon. With the nor’easter going on, I thought it was actually a tree going down in the backyard.
Once social media started lighting up with everybody hearing it from New York City all the way up into Southern New England obviously it’s not an individual tree.
Just after 6 p.m. Saturday, a NASA spokesperson said the cause was a fireball traveling at 75,000 miles per hour which, at 2:06 p.m., “appears to have fragmented at an altitude of 40 miles above extreme northeast Massachusetts/southeast New Hampshire.”
“This fireball was not associated with any currently active meteor shower, but it was a natural object and not a re-entry of space debris or a satellite,” wrote Allard Beutel, a NASA spokesperson, in an email to GBH News. “The energy released at breakup is estimated to be equivalent to about 300 tons of TNT, which accounts for the loud booms.”
The flash density product really shows this anomalous "flash" which is pretty distinctive of a bolide/meteor reentry. east of Boston. This is the likely source of the loud boom/explosion. pic.twitter.com/ka5b9KfiQ7
— Nick Stewart (@NStewWX) May 30, 2026
Although NASA did not immediately give a likely cause of the fireball, a NASA-affiliated website says that “fireballs are really just big meteors — the result of meteoroids falling into the Earth’s atmosphere and burning up.”
There’s a product from NOAA which is used to measure lightning which also can pick up the energy that a meteor burning up in the atmosphere would produce. A loop of this product right around 2 p.m. shows high levels of energy being picked up in Cape Cod Bay likely as that meteor was burning up at high levels of the atmosphere above us. It’s just a reminder we are just a floating Rock in the middle of the vastness of space and anything can happen.
In a statement shportly after the incident, the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency acknowledged widespread reports of an audible boom and ground tremors.
“Although we do not yet know the cause, there are no known emergency police or fire requests connected to these reports, and we do not believe that there is any public safety threat,” the statement read. “We remain in contact with our local, state, and federal partners to monitor any impact and understand the cause when it becomes available.”
