NASA Confirms Five-Foot Meteor Exploded over Massachusetts, Fell into Cape Cod Bay

A meteor roughly five feet wide and weighing 5.6 metric tons entered the atmosphere over New England at 42,000 mph on Saturday afternoon, breaking apart 31 miles above the ground with the force of 230 tons of TNT. The double boom and ground shaking it produced rattled buildings across eastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island, generating dozens of reports from Delaware to Montreal and prompting confused responses from local police, the USGS, and state public safety officials before NASA confirmed the cause on Monday.

The bolide traveled 26 miles northwest to southeast before fragmenting, with remnants landing in Cape Cod Bay under 100 feet of water. Recovery is considered unlikely given storm-driven wave heights of 5 to 10 feet, rapid saltwater degradation, and the Coast Guard’s decision not to attempt retrieval. The USGS seismographs registered no earthquake, confirming the shaking was a sonic boom from the meteor’s breakup.

Planetary protection researchers note such events are not rare in themselves, only rare to hear so dramatically. The last meteor to cause ground damage was the 2013 Chelyabinsk event in Russia. Space agencies coordinate to track and potentially deflect objects large enough to pose a real threat, a category this one did not approach.