A bright fireball seen Saturday afternoon in the sky of southeast Texas has been confirmed to be a meteor that may have broken up in the Houston area, according to NASA.
Eyewitness accounts in the greater Houston area — including footage from a doorbell camera, a car dashboard camera and video taken during a Little League baseball game — show a ball of fire shining in a clear, blue sky. NASA said the meteor event occurred at 4:40 pm local time, and was first seen in Stagecoach, northwest of Houston.
“It moved southeast at 35,000 mph, splitting 29 miles above Bammel, west of Cypress Station,” the agency wrote in a post to X.
Early estimates suggest the meteor was about 3 feet in diameter and weighed about a ton, according to NASA. As the space rock entered the Earth’s atmosphere, the pressure wave caused sonic booms that could be heard by some people in the area.
Another Houston resident, Sherrie James, said that a piece of meteor may have smashed through the roof of her house on Saturday afternoon. James told NBC News that he was in his bathroom combing his hair when he heard a loud noise and his daughter’s screams.
“I just walked in and looked, I saw a hole, I saw a hole in the ground,” he said.
Next to his daughter’s bed, James found what he described as “a big, black rock.”
“And I’m like: What is this?” he said. “Then I called my grandson, I said: “Look, I said, ‘Is that the sky? That was the first thing that came to my mind, because it was dark.”
The suspected meteorite is about the size of a baseball, but James said it felt heavier than a baseball. He said that no one was injured in his house when the rock broke through his house, although the incident happened in a surprising way.
“It looked like a rock, and there are no useless rocks falling from the sky,” James said.
The American Meteor Society, which tracks fireball events around the world, had more than 140 meteor reports Saturday across south-central and southeast Texas, including in Houston, Katy, College Station, San Antonio and Austin.
NASA said its Doppler weather radar indicates that meteorites may have fallen in parts of the Houston area between Willowbrook and Northgate Crossing.
Saturday’s meteor sighting comes just four days after a separate fireball was seen during the day — and heard — across northeastern Ohio and parts of Pennsylvania. Bill Cooke, who heads NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office, told NBC News at the time that the fireball and sonic booms may have been caused by a small 7-ton asteroid with a diameter of 6 meters. As the meteor broke apart, Cooke said, it likely released a huge amount of energy, the equivalent of 250 tons of TNT.
Initial data suggested the meteor was traveling at 45,000 mph in the upper atmosphere before it broke up over Valley City, Ohio. Cooke said the fireball may have produced meteorites around Medina County.
Large meteors that form bright fireballs are rare but not uncommon. Small space rocks, bits of dust and old rocket parts hit Earth every day, according to NASA, but most burn up harmlessly in space.
