SCIENTISTS BAFFLED: Unprecedented meteor superstorm batters the US!
Is it the End of Times? Is it an alien invasion? Or was it just a familiar sociological phenomenon?
Remember when drones terrorized New Jersey for a month in 2024?
Remember the “migrant crime wave” of 2023 following the death of Laken Riley?
Remember the rash of Creepy Clowns frightening people all over the country in 2016?
If you do remember those things, it means you were following the news. If you don’t remember them, that’s OK, because none of them ever happened.
Something else that never happened was a massive, inexplicable surge in the number of meteors streaking through the skies in March 2026. Oh, there was a huge surge in reports, all right; but no evidence that any significant numbers of meteors more than usual actually happened.
The American Meteor Society is where people go to report fireballs, and the below chart shows that more people have been taking an interest in doing this since they began keeping records. It’s largely in line with the growth in popularity of smartphones and Internet access outside of cities:
Note that’s the number of reports. Any given meteor event is typically reported by multiple people. The AMS can then filter them down to see how many events there actually were:
In Q1 2026, there were 2,046 events in the US. We’re all going to die!
In Q1 2022, three were 2,037. Almost the same number! And we didn’t all die.
In Q1 2021, there were 1,947. So basically we’re seeing about the same number as we see every first quarter. Imagine that.
One interesting thing is that a higher percentage of these were characterized by (1) sonic booms, and (2) recovered fragments. That’s physical evidence that can’t be explained by reporting effects. These events were also reported by more people than usual.
So, in short, although we had the expected number of meteors, more of them were big. So was something going on?
Yes — sort of. Research this and you’ll read that more meteors than usual came from two specific directions:
A sporadic source opposite the sun
A high-declination cluster (>70º)
All meteor showers are characterized by meteors than all come from a specific direction; e.g., the Lyrid meteor shower all come from the direction of the constellation Lyra the harp. It’s a random cloud of asteroid debris that the Earth goes through once a year. These two new little events were basically two tiny little meteor showers. This is expected; there are many more meteors that are part of clusters of debris than are solo.
Interestingly, there is one (and only one) explanation that the AMS says1 they cannot rule out: AI-driven reporting amplification.
However, if explaining the slight uptick in actual numbers is difficult, explaining the massive uptick in news reporting is much easier. It explains the three events I mentioned at the very top, and it explains almost of the entirety of the “meteor superstorm” non-event: attentional bias (also called observational bias, and probably some other names). When the media frames something as a “trend” — drones, attacks by violent migrants, or crazy clowns — people notice them far more often. They also misidentify stuff as whatever they expect they see, based on what they’ve been primed for.
Recall what the typical “drone photo” from New Jersey looked like:
They were planes. Every one of the “drone photos” was cluster of lights in an absolutely typical airplane landing light pattern; and in many of them you could even see the whole plane.
It was remarkable in that case that people could so badly misidentify a plane, but what was additionally remarkable is that they were reporting these — things which one would normally not report.
I have seen any number of fireballs in the sky in my time. I’ve never reported one. But if I believed there was some terrifying, unexplained rash of them which may represent a danger, well then yes, I probably would have.
Once again, we can say “Thank you, pop media.”
https://amsmeteors.org/ams-q1-2026-fireball-analysis.html