NASA Tracks a Fireball Over Ontario Seen Across Michigan

A meteor during the 2015 Perseid meteor shower, West Virginia (NASA/Bill Ingalls, public domain). Not the Ontario fireball.

What happened

At 8:47pm Eastern Daylight Time on Sunday 13 September 2026, a bright fireball crossed the sky over northern Ontario. NASA says it was seen and filmed far into Michigan. NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office logged it in its Skyfalls database as event 20260914-004723, the UTC date and time of the event.

NASA’s event page says: “Numerous news outlets and individuals in Michigan have made postings on social media of a bright fireball seen over Ontario at 8:47 PM Eastern Daylight Time on September 13.” Western University’s Southern Ontario Meteor Network (SOMN) captured it on several cameras, and so did “other publicly accessible cameras in the area.”

In Michigan, Hoodline reported that weather camera operators in Macomb Township, in Metro Detroit, and Cheboygan, at the tip of the Lower Peninsula, caught the same flash. The two sites are more than 200 miles apart.

Timeline

• 12 August 2015: NASA photographer Bill Ingalls takes the Perseid meteor photo used on this page.
• 16 January 2018: A fireball over southeast Michigan drops meteorites near Hamburg, Livingston County. It is the best-known modern Michigan fall and sets the local benchmark for “did anything land?”
• 21 October 2024: A bright meteor is filmed over the Lake Erie region. USA Today publishes video the next day.
• March 2026: NASA tracks a roughly 1-pound meteoroid first seen above Hope, Michigan, according to Hoodline.
• 13 September 2026, 8:47pm EDT: The fireball over Ontario. The Macomb Weather camera logs it at 8:47:22 p.m., lasting 4.7 seconds.
• 14 September 2026: NASA posts event 20260914-004723 with its trajectory and size estimate.
• 4 November 2026: This rewrite re-checks the NASA page and the coverage.

What believers claim

Bright fireballs bring the same questions every time: was it a UFO, a re-entering satellite, or a meteorite that landed nearby? Social posts from Michigan described a bright streak that broke apart, and the fact that people 200 miles apart saw it fed the sense that something huge had come down close by.

Neither the NASA record nor the Michigan coverage gives any sign of a craft or a debris field. Nobody has published a claimed recovery.

What the research found

1. NASA has the full trajectory. In its own words, NASA’s analysis shows that “the meteor – produced by a small fragment of an asteroid about 2 inches in diameter and weighing approximately 7 ounces – first became visible 54 miles above the Canadian town of Markstay-Warren, moving to the northwest at 32,000 miles per hour.” It then “disintegrated 31 miles above a point midway between Wanapitei Lake and Raphoe.”