Fireball meteorite seen shooting across Dutch skies; houses in Germany damaged

A dazzling fireball blazed across the skies of the Netherlands on Sunday evening, sparking a wave of gobsmacked social media posts.

At 6:50 PM, a brilliantly bright object streaked across the horizon for around seven to eight seconds, long enough to be unmistakeable, but short enough that many people missed it entirely.

Sightings poured in from across the country, including Rotterdam, Utrecht, Almere, Breda, Haarlem, and dozens of other cities and towns.

Reactions ranged from wonder to alarm. One witness in Haarlem described it to NH Nieuws as looking like “a burning plane crashing.”

Others assumed something had exploded, with some convinced they’d just witnessed a bombing.

What exactly was it?

It was almost certainly a meteor: a chunk of space rock that enters the Earth’s atmosphere at high speed and burns up, producing an intense streak of light.

Marco Langbroek, a lecturer in aerospace engineering at TU Delft, was quick to pour cold water on social media theories that it was artificial space debris, writing on X that the evidence points to a natural object.

Dutch air traffic control confirmed to NOS that the object didn’t show up on radar, most likely because it was travelling at too high an altitude.

Translation: Stunning fireball over the Netherlands this evening! It’s likely a #meteor: a piece of space debris that burns up in the atmosphere at around 100 km altitude. So it’s NOT a meteorite: that would actually hit our Earth’s surface…

Landed in Germany

While the Netherlands and Belgium got the light show without the consequences, Germany was less lucky.

Police in the southwestern state of Rhineland-Palatinate confirmed that meteorite fragments damaged roofs and houses in several areas, including the Hunsrück and Eifel regions, and near Koblenz. No injuries have been reported.

The Werkgroep Meteoren (the Dutch Meteor Society), which has been tracking meteor sightings for around 80 years, compiled trajectory data from nearly 1,500 witness reports across five countries.

The data suggests the fireball travelled from France toward Germany, consistent with where the damage landed. The group is asking anyone who saw it to submit their observations.

Did you catch the fireball on Sunday evening? Share what you saw and where you were in the comments below.