Fireball Over Boston Detonates With the Force of 300 Tons of TNT. Casual Saturday.

On the afternoon of May 30, a meteor traveling at 75,000 mph entered the atmosphere north of Boston, decided it had gone far enough, and exploded. It fragmented 40 miles above the northeastern Massachusetts and southeastern New Hampshire border, releasing energy equivalent to about 300 tons of TNT. A double sonic boom rolled across the region. People thought it was a gas line. It was not a gas line.

The boom hit at around 2:11 p.m. Eastern Time, rattling windows, startling pets and shaking homes across the region, with dozens of calls flooding into WBZ-TV from as far as Ipswich, Massachusetts, and Johnston, Rhode Island. From Delaware to Montreal, stunned residents feared a localized disaster. The USGS clarified the key distinction: sonic booms propagate along a linear path through the atmosphere, not from a discrete underground point like an earthquake.

NASA later confirmed the object was about 5 feet (1.5 meters) in diameter with a mass of 5.6 metric tons. Follow-up analysis identified it as an iron meteorite: fast-moving, steeply inclined, mechanically strong enough to break up high in the atmosphere and produce very few small fragments. As for what's left: NASA confirmed the bolide produced a meteorite fall into Cape Cod Bay, where the water depth at the fall site is 34 meters. NASA termed the landing site a "fishy squisher."

No injuries or ground damage were reported.

A 5.6-metric-ton iron meteorite came in from space at 75,000 mph, blew up over Boston with the force of 300 tons of TNT, and the only lasting evidence is sitting on the floor of Cape Cod Bay, 34 meters down, completely unreachable, forever.

Read the full story at Eastern Herald, May 31, 2026

Hot Take: Somewhere on the floor of Cape Cod Bay is an iron meteorite that traveled 93 million miles to be here and NASA's official tag for the landing spot is "fishy squisher." That's about as Monty Python as NASA gets.