Fireball Reported Over Portland, Oregon Confirmed by AMS

Published 10/08/2026 at 12:55 a.m.
By Andre' Hagestedt, Oregon Coast Beach Connection Staff

(Portland, Oregon) – The American Meteor Society (AMS) appears to have confirmed a giant white and / or green fireball seen over Portland and southwest Washington. Above: another fireball seen on the Oregon coast in recent years.

It was reported by me – Andre' Hagestedt, editor of Oregon Coast Beach Connection – and about two to four others, according to the AMS website. I spotted it at approximately 3:52 a.m., a brief but extremely bright object that showed a massive, green ball and a load of white light around it and behind it.

This qualifies as a fireball rather than a meteor because of its size and the length and duration of the tail.

Check your doorcam footage for Oct 3 at 3:50 a.m. to 3:55 a.m. - if you have a view of the eastern sky

As the AMS puts it: “A fireball is another term for a very bright meteor, generally brighter than magnitude -4, which is about the same magnitude of the planet Venus in the morning or evening sky. A bolide is a special type of fireball which explodes in a bright terminal flash at its end, often with visible fragmentation.”

Other reports of the same incident talk about a bright white and / or yellow look rather than the green I saw.

There are still two hitches with this report by me and others:

Fireball on Oregon coast - Tillamook - seen in early 2026

One: the AMS website was down during all this and not back up until sometime around October 7. They were busy rebuilding it entirely. Their new interface isn't as easy to navigate as the old one, and you can't see details of each report as you used to. Right now, it's a little difficult to tell which report is which on the site.

Hopefully, that will be resolved as their site gets completed.

Two: I only saw a part of this fireball – most of it I saw between branches of trees. I know what I saw: a bright green blob with quite a white glow behind it. I just couldn't see the details: no observations on fragmentation or exactly the shape of the green part.

That was for sure no common meteor, however.

Another report read as having a white color: “This was right over the Kohls store in east Vancouver wa as I was leaving work (Trader joes),” it said [exact wording / spelling].

The AMS site shows a fireball path just like I'd described, however.

Looking for proof of it was kind of an adventure, really. Helping me search for answers were OMSI astronomer Jim Todd and the National Weather Service's Tyler Kranz (Portland office) and Brian Nieuwenhuis (Medford). With the AMS down, Todd searched other report sites and found nothing. Kranz and Nieuwenhuis went to bat for me in an outstanding manner: they both checked radar of the area. Neither found anything at that time – but that's not unusual, either.

It turns out there is a kind of formula for figuring out how far away these are by sight. It's only a ballpark estimate, however. But it's still a kind of amazing little formula.

Nieuwenhuis told me meteor fireballs are about 50 miles up, give or take. So with the angles and estimated height I was able to give, Nieuwenhuis said it was possibly in and around 78 miles away.

The fireball was much more brief than the other two I'd seen. One I had seen in almost exactly the same spot (Gabriel Park) in March of 2023. The one before that I had encountered in 2021 got me on the news and eventually doorcam footage of it surfaced.

See Spectacular Green Fireball Lights Up Oregon Valley Through Washington Coast From bright white to a neon green: astronomers weigh in

Both of those were much longer in duration.

We're at the beginning of the Orionids, which peak in a couple of weeks. They have a habit of shooting off fireballs on top of their meteors, so keep your eyes open. The AMS reports another was a bit before midnight in Washington on the same night as I saw this one.

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