A bright flash in the sky and an accompanying sonic boom created quite the buzz around the Pacific Northwest on Tuesday night.
Social media started to blow up shortly after 9 pm as people reported the “bright fireball,” later determined to be courtesy of a meteor, and shared security camera footage of the event.
Deep cove pic.twitter.com/o4CSAkzdlR
— Chris Wells (@ChrisWe56184750) March 4, 2026
The Skunk Bay Weather cam caught the sky flashing with light as the #meteor entered the atmosphere! pic.twitter.com/TuS1qsR7zd
— Jonathan Pulley (@WhidbeyWXGuy) March 4, 2026
While it felt like the talk of the town, a NASA-published report on the incident says there are actually “quite few observations of the event” due to extensive cloud cover in the region.
However, eyewitness reports to the American Meteor Society and a detection by the Geostationary Lightning Mapper on the GOES 18 satellite have provided some information on the meteor.
According to NASA, it became visible 98 kilometres over Coquitlam and was moving “a bit east of north” at 120,000 km/h, which is 33 km/s.
To put that in perspective, it’s 100 times the speed of sound.
“It traversed 71 km through the upper atmosphere before disintegrating at an altitude of 65 km above Greenmantle Mountain,” the report explained.
“The energy measured by the space-based lightning mapper was of the order of 10 tons of TNT, suggesting that the object producing the fireball had a mass of approximately 75 kilograms (166 lbs) and a diameter of 38 centimetres.
Reports of the meteor came in from all over southwestern BC, stretching from Vancouver Island to the Interior, and as far south as Seattle.
