CLEVELAND, Ohio – Residents from Cleveland to Pittsburgh were jolted Tuesday morning by a thunderous boom that rattled windows, shook homes, and flooded 911 lines with calls — and officials say the culprit wasn’t an earthquake or an explosion, but a fireball meteor screaming through Earth’s atmosphere.
The meteor entered the atmosphere around 9 a.m. Tuesday, March 17, producing a sonic boom that was felt across a wide swath of northern Ohio. Reports poured in from Cleveland, Avon, Sandusky, Mentor, and as far east as Pittsburgh and into New York state.
The National Weather Service offices in both Cleveland and Pittsburgh confirmed the meteor as the source of the blast, pointing to evidence captured by GOES satellite imagery and the Geostationary Lightning Mapper, which detected the flash of the fireball as it broke apart in the atmosphere.
Witnesses described a boom that lasted several seconds — enough to send many scrambling outside or reaching for their phones to report what felt like a seismic event.
Astronomers offered reassurances, noting that meteors strike Earth’s atmosphere daily but rarely descend low enough to break the sound barrier and produce a boom of this magnitude.
No injuries or serious structural damage have been reported.