A lot of North Texans had their eyes on the sky Tuesday night, March 17, 2026 — and their phones out. Videos flooded X (Twitter) and Facebook showing a glowing, orange object drifting over Red Oak, Texas, just south of Dallas. It left a brilliant tail, rose and fell, changed direction, and eventually burned out. Social media immediately called it a meteor, a comet, even a UFO.
WFAA chief meteorologist Pete Delkus shared one of the clips on X with the caption “Hmmm. What is this?!? Did anyone else see this???”. Knowing him he could be joking or just simply getting peoples opinions. Normally we only trust a few sources from X or Facebook when it comes to these sightings so we wanted to look into this further. Did Texas just witness something from space?
There is just one problem: no official agency has confirmed that.
First — The Ohio Meteor Was Real. Don’t Confuse the Two.
To understand why Texas went viral, you have to start in Ohio.
At approximately 9:01 AM EDT on March 17, 2026, a genuine, fully verified meteor exploded over northeastern Ohio. NASA’s All Sky Fireball Network documented the event in detail: a small asteroid roughly 6 feet in diameter and weighing approximately 7 tons, traveling at 40,000 miles per hour, which fragmented 30 miles above Valley City in Medina County — releasing energy equivalent to 250 tons of TNT. The NWS offices in Cleveland and Pittsburgh both confirmed it via satellite data. The GOES satellite’s Geostationary Lightning Mapper captured the optical flash. Seismographs registered the pressure wave. A sonic boom rattled homes across Ohio and western Pennsylvania. Multiple dashcam and security camera videos confirmed the daylight fireball. This was the real deal — a thoroughly verified space rock…