Windfall, Ohio, USA

Windfall, Ohio, USA – Tuesday, March 17, 2026, 12:56 UTC, A very large daytime meteor was observed heading SSE at 18 km/s, and ending at a height of 30 km. Loud sonic booms were heard over a large area. Meteorites have been recovered from this event.

News and Video

One of the largest fireballs to enter on the USA in quite awhile and in daytime at that, this event was widely reported in the media.

Meteorites Found

Meteorite hunters arrived on the ground the day after the event and quickly started finding stones. Initial analysis of the recovered stones has identified the material as an achondrite, specifically eucrite. The falling meteorites were picked up by two separate Doppler radar station, as reported by Marc Fries on the NASA ARES site. The eucrite classification has led to a refined strewn field model, as eucrites are less dense than common chondrites, meaning fragments likely drifted further than originally estimated.

• Roberto Vargas has been highly successful, recovering a “100% fusion-crusted” museum-quality specimen near Sharon Center. He also found a distinctively “spiky” oriented meteorite that has garnered significant attention from the community.
• Mike Farmer arrived on-site March 19th to join the search, bringing veteran expertise to a field that is currently a mix of professional hunters and local residents. He quickly found 2 fragments and commented on the unmistakable eucrite material.
• Until further notice, the Sharon Golf Club Property is closed to meteorite hunters
• The “Main Mass”: Reports started coming in on Friday afternoon (March 20th) that a large 620 gram speciman was recovered from a field at an undisclosed location.

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StrewnLAB Maps & Data

2026/03/21 04:09 UTC – V8 – Finally have a decent strewn field map for this Ohio fall! The wind was tricky for this event, because the weather was rapidly changing at the time of the fall, and I had a lot of trouble finding good video with locations.

2026/03/22 14:56 UTC – V10 – I learned the main mass location last night, and was able to calibrate the map and I’m very satisfied with the match on trajectory and wind data, with the information we have. I now believe the ~617g mass found by Mark Sokol and team is the true main mass. I would not recommend searching south of the city of Rittman, probably limit searches to the north side of Eastern Road. There are likely many 1 to 20 gram fragments left to find, between Young’s Corner and Reimer Road, but also at least one or two larger fragments unaccounted for, in the 50 to 200 gram range, from the Doppler data, maybe in the vicinity of Greenich Rd and Seville Rd.

Weather Data

The weather data below is sourced from weather balloons, and publicly available via NOAA’s Integrated Global Radiosonde Archive (IGRA). This data is downloaded and post-processed by the StrewnLAB algorithm, to account for changing weather patterns and weather balloon drift. The plots have altitude on the y-axis, in kilometers above sea level. The wind speed below 10km has large effect onthe drift of meteorites.

Jim Goodall

The author and founder of Strewnify.com, an automotive controls engineer, with a passion for physics.
Hancock, Michigan, USA | james.a.goodall@gmail.com | +1 586 709 5888

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