NASA has verified that the weekend sonic boom heard and felt across a large part of the northeastern U.S. was indeed a bolide and provide some facts and stats on what happened. While this bolide is confirmed, the unusual explosion heard over South Carolina days ago remains a mystery with no government entity coming up with a rationale for what happened there.
NASA confirmed a fireball, also known as a bolide, zoomed over New England at 2:06 pm local time on Saturday, May 30, 2026. The meteor was about 5 feet in diameter with a mass of 5.6 metric tons and entered Earth’s atmosphere at roughly 42,000 mph. The meteor traveled through the atmosphere from northwest to southeast for 26 miles before breaking up at an altitude of 31 miles and producing a meteorite fall into Cape Cod Bay. NASA says that based on the latest data, the energy released at breakup is estimated to be equivalent to about 230 tons of TNT, which accounts for the sonic boom.
Ahead of this new confirmation from NASA, citizen scientists reported what they experienced to a variety of online outlets. Shortly after 2pm on Saturday, people across the northeast reported seeing, hearing, or feeling a streaking meteor and/or sonic boom. As of press time, the American Meteor Society reports that 36 observers from New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, and nearby areas in Canada observed a fireball.
On the ground, more than 500 people used the Volcano Discovery website to report the ground shaking from an explosion across a large part of southeastern New England this afternoon.
While USGS didn’t report an earthquake, they did log a sonic boom event. USGS released a statement saying, “This event is a widely felt sonic boom from a suspected bolide. Unlike earthquakes which occur at discrete location in the earth, sonic boom events occur along a linear path in the atmosphere. Therefore, the location provided is an approximation. While recorded on seismic sensors, traditional earthquake magnitudes are not appropriate for measuring atmospheric events. No magnitude is assigned.”…