A rare daytime fireball was seen over the Houston area on March 21, producing a sonic boom and scattering debris across parts of northwest Harris County.
Lucero Marquez de Rivera
It’s not just your imagination. Fireballs have been lighting up the skies across the U.S.
In the span of a week, multiple bright meteors streaked across the country. One exploded over the Houston area in broad daylight. Another roared across the Midwest late at night. A third crossed parts of the Southwest.
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The latest came on March 23, when a fireball tore through the skies over Michigan and surrounding states. NASA analysis shows the object entered the atmosphere about 42 miles above the town of Hope, traveling roughly 29,000 miles per hour before breaking apart over Saginaw Bay. At its peak, it burned about 40 times brighter than Venus.
Just two days earlier, on March 21, a much larger object passed over the Houston area. That meteor, estimated at 3 feet wide and weighing roughly a ton, became visible nearly 50 miles above Stagecoach and streaked southeast at 35,000 miles per hour before breaking apart over northwest Harris County.
The explosion released energy equivalent to about 26 tons of TNT, producing a pressure wave that rattled homes and startled residents. Radar data suggests fragments may have fallen between Willowbrook and Northgate Crossing.
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And those are just two of several recent events.
A nearly 6-foot-wide meteor was spotted over Ohio on March 17, traveling about 45,000 miles per hour. Another fireball crossed California, Arizona and Nevada days later. Hundreds of eyewitness reports have poured into the American Meteor Society.
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“You know, this usually happens every spring,” Robert Lunsford of the American Meteor Society told Chron. “Especially during the evening hours.”
Scientists have long observed a seasonal bump in fireballs around the spring equinox. NASA says rates can increase between 10 percent and 30 percent during this period, though no one fully understands why.
One theory points to a subtle increase in debris along Earth’s orbit between February and June. Another involves a weak, broad meteor shower that becomes more visible in the Northern Hemisphere during spring evenings.
But that doesn’t fully explain what people have been seeing lately.
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“To have daylight fireballs, and especially ones that have left meteorites on the ground, that’s unprecedented,” Lunsford said. “So I really can’t explain why, but yes, it’s very unusual.”
The Houston event stands out in particular. Most meteors are far too small to survive their plunge through Earth’s atmosphere. This one was large enough to produce a sonic boom and scatter debris across a populated area.
“It only takes a meteor the size of a softball to produce a flash as bright as the full moon,” Lunsford said. “So when you’re getting something as large as 3 or 4 feet across, that’s huge.”
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That size also explains why it was visible in daylight, something even seasoned observers rarely witness.
Still, experts say the recent cluster doesn’t mean Earth is passing through a single stream of debris or a newly formed meteor shower.
“As far as I can tell, these recent fireballs are not coming from the same part of the sky,” Lunsford said. “They totally seem unrelated.”
That matches what scientists are seeing in the data.
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“They’re different in composition. Their paths in space traced back are different,” said Patricia Reiff, a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University. “So it’s not like we’re going to have a brand new meteor shower.”
Instead, the spike may be as much about visibility as it is about activity.
“Tons of material hit the Earth every single day,” Reiff said. “But most of them land in the water, or places where people are not there.”
What’s changed is how often people are able to see and record them.
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“We all have security cameras, and we’re out more,” she said. “Having these hit overpopulated areas means so many more people are aware of them.”
That awareness has turned recent fireballs into viral moments, with videos captured from doorbell cameras, dashcams and smartphones helping scientists trace their paths and narrow down where fragments might land.
NASA map shows where meteorites may have fallen in Houston area on March 21, 2026.
NASA
Recoveries like the one in the Houston area are especially valuable.
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“If there’s a recovery, which we now have in Houston, that’s exciting,” Reiff said. “We can now know more about the parent body that way.”
Even so, events like this remain rare.
“There’s kind of one a year worldwide of these really big ones,” she said. “So it is unusual to have this many and this many together.”
For now, scientists say the recent streak is likely a mix of seasonal patterns, coincidence and better detection.
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And while the odds of seeing one remain low, they’re not zero.
“For most of it, it’s about luck,” Lunsford said.