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Drew Weisholtz
A meteor falling from the sky was responsible for a loud boom heard on March 17 heard throughout multiple states in the eastern part of the United States, reports the National Weather Service.
“It shook my whole house,” Andrea Witt, who lives in Lorain county in Ohio, tells TODAY.com. Witt was filming when the meteor flew over her house and captures her shock on camera.
Jess Adamini, who is based in Cleveland, was sitting on the couch with her husband when the boom startled them.
“It really did sound like it came from the sky directly over my home,” she says. “It was extremely loud. It shook the ground. It’s kind of remarkable.”
Adamini took to social media to gather information. Online, multiple videos showed what appeared to be an object tumbling from the sky and hurtling toward the Earth.
In one video taken from a school bus parking lot by the Olmsted Falls City School District, in Olmsted Falls, Ohio, between 8:56 a.m. and 8:57 a.m., a shiny streak appears at the top of the screen, disappearing into the clouds as it headed to the ground below.
There were no reports of injuries, and NASA confirmed it was a meteor.
“An analysis of currently available data places first visibility of the meteor above Lake Erie,” it wrote on X.
“The fireball — caused by a small asteroid nearly 6 feet in diameter and weighing about 7 tons — moved southeast at 45,000 mph before fragmenting over Valley City. The fragments continued on to the south, producing meteorites in the vicinity of Medina County, Ohio.”
“We heard this boom and big boom and a vibration in the building,” Cleveland business owner Terry Peterson told Cleveland NBC affiliate WKYC.
Ralph Harvey, professor of planetary materials at Cleveland’s Case Western Reserve University, said this fireball was actually not that big.
“In asteroid terms, it’s small,” he told TODAY in an interview that aired March 18. “There’s almost no likelihood they would have seen it ahead of time and been able to predict anything about it.”
Still, he noted that it was moving fast.
“Rocks hitting the atmosphere, even the tenuous upper atmosphere, at that speed, it’s like slamming into a brick wall,” he said.
A National Weather Service employee also recorded the meteor in Pittsburgh.
“One of our employees, Jared Rackley, caught this morning’s meteor on camera from the Pittsburgh area,” the service captioned the clip.
A user on X noted the loud noise and reached out to the National Weather Service Cleveland to get to the bottom of things.
“The latest GLM imagery (1301Z) does suggest that the boom was a result of a meteor,” the agency replied, referencing a Geostationary Lightning Mapper that is used for lightning detection. The National Weather Association also says it can track meteors.
A TikTok user also shared a clip of the moment the meteor appeared to have hit land, generating the sound of a loud drum.
Another clip posted on X recorded a dog reacting by trying to get inside its home after the boom.
“The house shook, it was scary,” the caption read, in part.
The American Meteor Society says it received over 150 reports of a fireball in the sky on March 17 from Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Washington, D.C. and Ontario, Canada.
Despite the sight and sound, there hasn’t been confirmation about the meteor landing.
“We have not heard of anything actually hitting the ground,” National Weather Service meteorologist Brian Mitchell told the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
Meteoritic activity is not totally unusual.
“Scientists estimate that about 48.5 tons (44,000 kilograms) of meteoritic material falls on Earth each day,” NASA says on its website.
Seeing meteors is not necessarily altogether rare, either. In July 2025, people throughout the Southeast reported seeing a fireball in the sky that was visible from outer space. That meteor was reportedly traveling 30,000 miles per hour.
“This was a rock barreling through the atmosphere, coming straight out of outer space,” cosmologist Paul Sutter told TODAY.
In 2018, a meteor exploded over Michigan, shaking the ground and causing the U.S. Geological Survey to register it as a 2.0 magnitude earthquake.
Drew Weisholtz is a reporter for TODAY Digital, focusing on pop culture, nostalgia and trending stories. He has seen every episode of “Saved by the Bell” at least 50 times, longs to perfect the crane kick from “The Karate Kid” and performs stand-up comedy, while also cheering on the New York Yankees and New York Giants. A graduate of Rutgers University, he is the married father of two kids who believe he is ridiculous.
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