After a boom shortly before 2:20 p.m. Saturday that shook three states but led to no reports of disaster or danger, online conjecture turned to the natural and discussion of the cause being “a rather significant bolide/meteor entering the atmosphere.”
The Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency gave what amounts to an all-clear shortly before 4 p.m. via public information officer Robert Burgess:
This afternoon, Massachusetts public safety officials received reports of an audible boom and ground tremors in Eastern Massachusetts. Although we do not yet know the cause, there are no known emergency police or fire requests connected to these reports, and we do not believe that there is any public safety threat. We remain in contact with our local, state, and federal partners to monitor any impact and understand the cause when it becomes available.
A Nasa spokesperson told GBH News that a 75,000 mph fireball “appears to have fragmented at an altitude of 40 miles above extreme northeast Massachusetts/Southeast New Hampshire [and] the energy released at breakup is estimated to be equivalent to about 300 tons of TNT, which accounts for the loud booms.”
Calls had flooded into 911 lines about an explosion. “The shockwave and boom were so big it felt like a car hit my house. Knocked over a picture frame on my desk, knock mounted frames askew, and rattled windows,” said one Somerville resident on the social media app Bluesky. “Zero out of 10, did not enjoy.”
First responders also exchanged confused reports about the cause.
“It’s not just Cambridge. It’s the whole region,” one officer said, overhead on a police scanner as the noise and impact was reported as far away as Lynn, Sherborn and Norwood and social media came alive with discussion. Eventually it was reported that people in neighboring states had felt something too. “We’re getting multiple calls from multiple communities,” said one police scanner report.
“We’re calling any surrounding community or town that may have found the source of the explosion,” Metro Fire on a Massachusetts State Police scanner channel said at 2:33 p.m. “As of now, [we] have found nothing.”
The notion that it was an “atmospheric event” – such as thunder – was discussed and at first discarded by first responders, according to scanner reports, but an hour passed with no other answers forthcoming.
The noise was “not anything that originated in Cambridge,” police spokesperson Frederick Cabral said.
A Somerville spokesperson, Denise Taylor, gave a similar statement. “It appears people heard it from Rhode Island to New Hampshire, so it is not local. Our police and public safety are looking for information as well,” Taylor said. At around 3:35 p.m., city social media lent credence to an atmospheric cause for the boom, such as a meteor.
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