Several locals across Georgia, including Atlanta, and South Carolina, reported seeing a fireball in the sky on Thursday. Its last sighting, as per reports, was in Lexington.
According to WYFF TV in South Carolina, the National Weather Service in Greenville-Spartanburg noted that the object appears to be a meteorite.
Between noon and 12:30 p.m. ET more than 140 reports of a fireball were submitted to the American Meteor Society website from Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Tennessee.
NOAA’s GOES East satellite Geostationary Lightning Mapper captured the bright flash of the meteor near the North Carolina-Virginia border.
There have been many reports of a #fireball streaking across the southeastern U.S. this afternoon! The Geostationary Lightning Mapper (#GLM) on @NOAA‘s #GOES satellites can occasionally detect these bright meteors (aka #bolides) when they pass through the atmosphere.
See the… pic.twitter.com/SeODhBdYiK
— NOAA Satellites (@NOAASatellites) June 26, 2025
What Locals Saw
Another video of the apparent fireball in Lexington, South Carolina.
— AZ Intel (@AZ_Intel_) June 26, 2025
Metro Atlanta, Georgia: Residents from Riverdale to Suwanee, Covington to Calhoun, reported a “streak of fire” or “glowing object” falling from the sky. In Rockdale County, witnesses heard a “loud boom” and felt houses shake, prompting initial fears of an earthquake, ruled out by the US Geological Survey (USGS).
South Carolina: Sightings poured in from Greenville, Spartanburg, and Anderson counties, with videos from White Horse Road and Lexington showing a “giant ball of fire” fading above the tree line.
Other States: Tennessee and North Carolina reported similar sightings, with a firefighter in East Tennessee describing it as a “mini sun with a tail of fire” around 12:20 PM local time.
What Makes Fireballs Visible?
A fireball is a meteor brighter than magnitude -4 (brighter than Venus), caused by a space rock (meteoroid) entering Earth’s atmosphere at high speed.
Meteoroids, typically 1–20 meters in size, travel at 11–72 kilometers per second (25,000–160,000 mph). Friction with the atmosphere heats them to thousands of degrees Celsius, vaporizing material and creating a glowing plasma trail. Larger meteoroids produce brighter fireballs.
