NASA Confirms Meteor Fragments May Have Hit North Harris County Homes

A one-ton meteor traveling at 35,000 miles per hour broke apart over north Harris County on Saturday afternoon, releasing energy equivalent to 26 tons of TNT and sending sonic booms rattling through homes from Cypress to Katy to Cinco Ranch. NASA confirmed the event and its own Doppler radar analysis pointed to a corridor between Willowbrook and Northgate Crossing as the zone where fragments may have reached the ground.

Sherrie James, a Spring-area resident, says one of those fragments found her home. Her grandson went to investigate after the boom and discovered a hole in the ceiling. "My grandson went to check and said there was a hole in the ceiling… then I saw the rock, and I thought, 'that looks like a meteor,'" James told KHOU. The object, photographed in a plastic bag, appeared roughly the size of her palm. James called the fire department, which initially suspected the projectile might have fallen from a plane. Minutes later, crews informed her that reports of a meteor breaking apart over north Houston had begun coming in. No one was injured. "I'm very excited to get this, but a little scared," James said. "I think this is what it is, and I'm definitely going to keep it." No laboratory has confirmed the rock is extraterrestrial, and officials continue to describe it as a possible meteorite.

NASA tracked the fireball's full path. The meteor became visible at 49 miles above Stagecoach, northwest of Houston, at approximately 4:40 p.m. CDT on Saturday, March 21. It moved southeast before fragmenting 29 miles above Bammel, just west of Cypress Station. The pre-breakup object measured roughly three feet across. NASA's Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science group published a map estimating where meteorite fragments may have landed, and GOES satellite data from the Geostationary Lightning Mapper independently detected the fireball. The American Meteor Society logged more than 100 eyewitness reports.

The pressure wave produced by the fragmentation shook buildings across a wide swath of northwest Houston's suburbs. Kiyan Badkoubeh, a KPRC weekday morning producer, described the sensation from inside his home: "We felt the house shake for a couple of seconds. It was a vibration. It was silent, but the house was definitely moving." Reports of booms and shaking came in from Waller County as well, prompting Waller County Judge Trey Duhon to post on Facebook: "Waller County is booming apparently.. and I'm not talking about growth." The Brenham Fire Department responded to explosion reports near Highway 50 but found nothing on arrival. The National Weather Service confirmed one of its satellite products detected what could have been a meteor or meteorite.

The Houston event came just four days after a larger fireball crossed Ohio skies on March 17. That meteor measured nearly six feet across and weighed approximately seven tons, originating from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, with recovered meteorites suspected to be Eucrites. Saturday's Houston meteor was smaller at three feet and one ton, but its fragmentation directly over a densely populated corridor made it one of the more locally consequential fireball events the region has seen in recent memory.

Whether James recovered an authentic space rock, and whether additional fragments lie in backyards or on rooftops between Willowbrook and Northgate Crossing, remains an open question awaiting scientific analysis.