The American Meteor Society Says
Fireballs Have Surged.
What do the Sensors Actually Say?

The Claim

In March 2026 the American Meteor Society — the volunteer organization that aggregates eyewitness fireball reports — published a quarterly summary stating that early-2026 bright-meteor witness counts were running roughly 3.9 standard deviations above the historical norm. News outlets ran with it: ZME Science published "Inside 2026's Massive Fireball Surge"; EarthSky described "a flurry of fireballs"; aggregators quoted "nobody can explain what changed."

The catch is that AMS counts are eyewitness reports. They depend on how many cameras are pointed at the sky, how widely unusual sky events spread on social media, and how many people know AMS exists. All three have risen steeply on multi-year timescales — smartphone penetration, dashcam adoption, security-camera saturation, TikTok and Instagram amplification. Any of those can inflate witness counts without changing the rate at which rocks actually hit the atmosphere.

The Independent Check

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory maintains a separate catalog: the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) Fireballs and Bolides Database. It doesn't ask people; it gets its data from government sensors — mainly Department of Defense satellites that watch for the heat signature of explosions in the upper atmosphere, plus infrasound arrays that hear the boom from far away. CNEOS only catches a fraction of all impacts (estimates run 10–20% of kiloton-scale events), but the fraction it catches is selected by physics, not by whoever happens to be holding a phone.

If the AMS surge reflected an actual change in the impactor population, the same anomaly should show up in CNEOS. If it's a reporting-infrastructure artifact, CNEOS should look normal. That's the test.

Step One — Cleaning the Catalog

The raw CNEOS data in our database has 1,861 rows, but most are duplicates from how the fetcher polls the catalog every few hours. After deduplicating on timestamp and rounded location, we get 357 unique events spanning January 1998 through May 2026. That 5.2× shrinkage is consistent with prior CNEOS workspaces in this lab.

Step Two — How Many Fireballs in 2026?

January through May of 2026, CNEOS logged 11 events. Is that a lot? It depends entirely on what baseline you compare against:

The "anomaly" appears only when you use a baseline that includes the pre-2014 years, when CNEOS sensor coverage was weaker and was catching fewer events than the same flux would produce today. Against any baseline drawn from the modern-sensor era — 2013, 2014, or 2015 onward — 11 events is statistically unremarkable. The 2.14× ratio is a baseline artifact, not a physical signal.

One more thing worth noting: in February 2026, CNEOS recorded zero events. The 11 events break down as Jan = 1, Feb = 0, Mar = 3, Apr = 3, May = 4. A real surge isn't normally that bumpy.

Step Three — Can We Detect the AMS Claim at All?

A reasonable question at this point: maybe our sample is just too small to find anything? Eleven events isn't much. So we asked a sharper question: if the AMS 3.9σ effect were physically real and reflected in the impactor population, what would CNEOS look like?

Against the post-2014 baseline of 8.99 expected events, a 3.9σ effect would imply about 20.7 events in our window. We observed 11. Eleven is 2.13 standard deviations below what the AMS claim implies. The one-sided Poisson probability of observing 11 or fewer events under that AMS-implied rate is p = 0.015.

That's the substantive answer to the public's question. We are not weakly failing to detect a possible surge. We are statistically rejecting the AMS-equivalent claim in the sensor data, at the standard 5% threshold, across every modern-sensor baseline we tried.

Step Four — The Energy Distribution Tells the Same Story Backwards

Beyond just counting events, we can ask: are the 2026 events bigger than usual? A real flux increase from a swarm of debris or a comet shedding might mean more kiloton-scale events specifically. We compared the energy distributions:

The 2026 distribution is statistically different from the prior — but it's smaller, not larger. The Cohen's d effect size is moderate and negative, with a bootstrap confidence interval that comfortably excludes zero. None of the 11 events exceed the prior 90th percentile. If a swarm of bigger rocks were hitting Earth, the distribution should shift right; it shifted left.

Why? CNEOS's detection floor has been improving for two decades. The per-year 10th percentile of energy fell from around 50 (×10¹⁰ J) in 2003–2010 to a stable 2–3 since 2015. The 2026 P10 is 2.8, exactly on the modern plateau. We're catching smaller events now than we used to, which pulls the median down — even as the rate of big events stays flat.

Step Five — The Famous Events from the News

Three 2026 fireballs got particular press coverage: a March 8 European event that AMS logged 3,229 witness reports for; a March 17 Ohio fireball that recovered an actual meteorite; and a March 21 Houston airburst estimated at 26 kilotons. We checked whether each appears in CNEOS:

Two of the three most-reported 2026 fireballs are absent from the sensor catalog. With a sample size of three, this is illustration rather than statistical evidence — but it shows in plain view what the witness-versus-sensor coverage gap actually looks like. AMS records many bright meteors that CNEOS sensors miss, either because the event fell below the sensor energy threshold or because no sensor was looking the right way.

Figure: Twenty-Eight Years of Sensor Counts

What This Result Does and Does Not Say

It says: the rate of kiloton-scale impacts measured by independent government sensors is not elevated in 2026. The AMS-equivalent 3.9σ effect is statistically rejected in the sensor data at p = 0.015 across all modern-sensor baselines we tried. The energy distribution shifts the wrong direction for a "more big rocks" hypothesis, with a confidence interval that excludes zero. Per-year detection-floor trends fully explain the lower 2026 median as a sensor-improvement artifact rather than a real population change.

It does not say: that fireballs aren't happening, or that AMS is wrong about people seeing more fireballs. People are almost certainly reporting more bright meteors than they used to — what we're saying is that the underlying flux of rocks hitting the atmosphere hasn't changed to match. The simplest explanation is the obvious one: more cameras, more sharing, more reports. The sky has not changed; the audience for it has.

Reproducibility

All extraction scripts, analysis code, deduplicated catalog, and the full results.json live in the cneos-fireball-2026-surge workspace. Every number on this page comes from that JSON. Pipeline: PostgreSQL extraction of the CNEOS neo_fireball metric, deduplication on (timestamp, ±0.01° lat/lon), Poisson rate test across five baseline windows with bootstrap overdispersion CIs, AMS-equivalent power statement, two-sample Kolmogorov–Smirnov and Mann–Whitney on log-energy, Cohen's d with bootstrap CI on 10⁴ resamples, and per-year P10 detection-floor measurement.