March was a doozy when it came to daytime fireballs

It all started on March 8th with the massive daytime fireball over Germany. News quickly got out that a piece of that fall had crashed through a woman’s roof. As many of you know, I was on a plane on March 9th and made it to the strewn field on the morning of March 10th. Unfortunately, no additional meteorites were found from that fall. I was able to purchase a few micros of the hammer stone, that were collected shortly after the fall by a local who heard the stone hit the house. Other than that, the hunt was a bust.

I did not stay long as it was an expensive trip. I made it home from Germany on March 13th. I relaxed for a few days. Then, on March 17th, another daytime fireball occurred over Ohio. Ohio is only an 8-hour drive from my house and it looked good, so I got in my car and was there at sunrise on the 18th. This was a great hunt. I found a piece on my first day and every day after that for 3 or 4 days, but then the finds dried up. Like Koblenz, the Ohio fall looked to be an achondrite of some kind, likely a eucrite. This was a well-attended hunt and the media coverage was pretty insane.

It was so well attended that when a daytime fireball happened over Houston, TX on March 21st, all the meteorite hunters that would have hunted it stayed in Ohio, myself included. Like Koblenz, the Texas event was a hammer event with a stone crashing through another woman’s roof. I spent 10 days in Ohio and made 12 finds, totaling around 25g. I got home on March 29th with a minor cold that I got over pretty quickly. However, Texas was still on my mind. I am a U.S. witnessed fall collector and I could not get any of the finders to sell me a piece for my personal collection. It bugged me so much that on April 7th, two and a half weeks after the fall, I decided to fly down to Texas and see if I could find my own. I figured it was a long shot. Houston is a major metropolitan area and they love all things outer-space related. I knew that even though the majority of the meteorite hunting community was focused on Ohio, Texas had still been hunted extensively. I went anyway. I needed a piece for my personal collection and it looked like going down there and finding my own was going to be my best option. I got to Houston on the morning of April 7th and I hit the ground running. 45 minutes off the plane and I was in the strewn field. I had gotten a map of the find locations and KMZs with the projected strewn field based on dark flight modeling with wind corrections. When I looked at the find locations I noticed something interesting. Something like 13 of the 15 finds made up to that point had come from Collins Park and the road right in front of Collins Park. The 14th find was rumored to have dubious/conflicting coordinates, and the 15th find was the hammer stone. There was a huge empty space between Collins Park and the hammer stone and there was no “little end” of the strewn field. This didn’t make sense to me. Daytime fireballs don’t just target a single park and drop all their rocks there. Also, if there are 15 finds, there are probably 1,500 stones out there, so I was hopeful. Although, I didn’t find squat on the 7th. On the 8th, I reached out to one of the finders, David Gonzales from San Antonio, who was an absolute legend and told me exactly where one of his finds happened. Someone told me Dr. Marc Fries called this stone “The Blasphemy Stone” because it struck a church that borders the park. I went to that exact spot and made my first find of the Houston meteorite there. 4 fragments totaling about 1.45g. Steve Arnold (Meteorite Men) talked the assistant pastor into letting us search their roof, which was cool, but fruitless. I thought it only fitting that I gift the assistant pastor a ~0.15g fragment. I wanted the church to have a piece of the rock that fell out of the sky and hit it.

Anyway, nothing else was found on the 8th. Steve and I looked at the map and there was a spot in what should’ve been the small end of the strewn field that would be a good place for us to start the next day. I decided to get an early start the next day. I parked my car and within a half hour, I found my first independent find, a 1.9g crusted fragment. This fragment, this find, made me break out in sweats as it extended the strewn field. It was the furthest west any stone from the fall had been found. It was also unbelievably frustrating, as I have an unnecessarily inflexible 2g limit on personal collection pieces. If I can’t own 2g, whether because it’s unobtainium or I just can’t afford it, then I just won’t own that meteorite. This rule goes back to a Meteorite Times Magazine article from the early 2000s that I read in my first few months of collecting. When I first started collecting, I was going through MTM’s past issues and I came across an article (that I’ve never been able to find again) that was geared at educating people just getting into meteorites. One of the author’s recommendations was to have parameters when collecting meteorites. Anyway, that’s where the 2g thing comes from.

An hour later, I found my second independent find, a 2.8g crusted half stone. It has primary and secondary fusion crust along with a little road rash from impact. It also has good brecciation on its broken face. It is the westernmost piece found to date, and… IT’S OVER 2g!!!! I could’ve gone home then. However, Meredith Howse, a hunter/finder (El Sauz, Black Silver Mine, and Houston) from Katy, TX had come down for the day. I wanted to hunt with her because I had heard a lot about her and briefly met her in Tucson but had not ever run across her on a hunt. Together, we checked the rest of the area where I had made my finds earlier that morning and we found nothing. Then we decided to move back towards the big end. The area between Collins Park and the hammer stone, where no stones had been found but stones definitely fell there. The problem with this area is that it’s basically wilderness.

When I told a local rock shop owner, his response was, “The problem is, Texans know that is snake country.” Snakes aren’t the problem, though. I can get a pair of snake gaiters and I have some experience with venomous snakes. Two and a half weeks of rains and springtime Texas growth are the problem. I must say, the diversity of wildlife down there is kind of insane. I caught an anole, I saw a mole, big birds, snakes, possums, roaches, squirrels. Steve saw rabbits, Dave saw a copperhead. The parts that weren’t covered in foot-or-more-tall grass, densely forested, or knee-deep mud were residential. Gated, in most cases. Needless to say, not ideal. The isolated park finds began to make a little more sense. No other stones were found that day. I was scheduled to fly out the next day at around 3pm. I woke up early on the 10th, partly because I like to ship meteorites from strewn fields, but also because I decided I wanted to get at least an hour or two in the strewn field. My time in the Houston area was filled with beautiful weather. Ideal hunting weather, not too hot, with plenty of hours of daylight. I was averaging 10–11 hour days. The day I made my finds, I walked 43,500 steps. The day I was supposed to leave, the rains were supposed to start rolling in, but the morning was clear so I got a couple of hours in but made no additional finds. March 2026 was a good time for fireballs that resulted in meteorites. All three were daytime fireballs. Two of the three meteorites that fell in March of 2026 were achondrites, likely eucrites. Two of the three resulted in documented hammer stones. But each one was VERY different. Looking back, I think Ohio stole the show. I think River Styx (provisionally), with its spiky crust, the amount of finds, the news coverage, the deluge of hunters from all over the world, the fact that it fell on a holiday, made it so that the Houston fall didn’t get the attention it probably should have. I heard it, and I probably said it myself while I was in Ohio, “meh, it’s just an ordinary chondrite.” But if it hadn’t fallen after two back-to-back eucrite falls (provisionally), I think people would’ve gotten really excited about Houston. The fact that it’s Texas, that it was a daytime fireball, that it’s a major metropolitan area with space-related history, makes this a really cool fall.

I had fun at all three falls and I’m glad I went. I met some cool people I hadn’t met in person before, got to hang out with some friends, and I recovered some meteorites. I am also glad to be home now. Until something else falls out of the sky.