A fiery object moving at roughly 30,000 mph smashed through the atmosphere over the southeastern U.S. today, with some of the debris crashing through a person’s house in Georgia. At 12:21 pm , people across Georgia and North and South Carolina saw the fireball drop out of the sky; technically, it’s considered a bolide.
A bolide is a very bright meteor that can be seen over a wide area. It’s typically used to describe meteors that are exceptionally bright, sometimes even brighter than the planet Venus in the night sky. A defining characteristic of a bolide is its tendency to explode or fragment in the atmosphere, often resulting in a bright flash and sometimes a sonic boom.
According to Bill Cooke, lead, NASA’s Meteoroid Environments Office at the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Cooke said the meteor disintegrated approximately 27 miles above West Forest, Georgia, unleashing an energy of about 20 tons of TNT.
According to NASA, one fragment of the bolide landed near Blacksville, Georgia, which is in Henry County.
Video like these were captured throughout the southeast while the GOES-East weather satellite also captured the bolide from above: https://t.co/bA06uCZlti
— the Weatherboy (@theWeatherboy) June 26, 2025
Keith Stellman, Meteorologist-in-Charge at the NWS office in Atlanta, said it appears that a small piece of the meteorite fell through the roof of a home in Henry County, located roughly 30 miles southeast of Atlanta. In a post on Facebook, Stellman wrote, “It appears a small piece of it fell through a roof of a home In Henry County. We are speculating that is the case based on the time it occurred and the result of the hole in the roof.”
The American Meteor Society, which logs sightings of fireballs, received more than 160 reports across the southeast from people who said they saw and/or heard the bolide.
The American Meteor Society is not to be confused with the American Meteorology Society which is an organization for professional meteorologists that track the weather. Meteorology is named after the Greek word “meteoron” which, in ancient times, referred to anything observed in the sky, including weather phenomena.
While today we associate “meteor” with rocks from space, in ancient Greece, it encompassed a broader range of atmospheric occurrences like rain, snow, and even rainbows. Aristotle’s book “Meteorologica” covered topics we now call weather and climate, thus giving the name to the field of meteorology.
