Residents across the Cleveland area reported a bright fireball and a loud boom shortly after 9 a.m. Tuesday, with some describing the sound as an explosion. The incident prompted calls and messages from people in surrounding states who said they saw the meteor streak across the morning sky even though it was daytime.

The American Meteor Society said it received reports from across a wide region, from Wisconsin to Maryland, after the fireball appeared. Carl Hergenrother, the group’s executive director, said the event looked like a fireball and indicated it was a meteorite, meaning a small asteroid that survives atmospheric entry and breaks up near the ground.

NASA later confirmed that the object was a meteor nearly 6 feet (1.83 meters) in diameter, according to a statement attributed to Bill Cooke, who leads the agency’s Meteoroid Environments Office in Huntsville, Alabama. The agency said the meteor was first seen about 50 miles above Lake Erie near Lorain, then moved through the upper atmosphere for more than 34 miles (55 kilometers) before fragmenting over Valley City, north of Medina.

The breakup produced an energy release estimated by NASA as the equivalent of 250 tons of TNT, which Hergenrother said explains why residents heard a boom. Staff at the National Weather Service in Cleveland also heard the disturbance and felt vibrations, and the weather service said it had no early reports of any debris being found.

Meteor events are typically frequent in the United States, Hergenrother said, noting that meteors fall about once a day on average and smaller particles may hit as often as 10 times an hour. Scientists track many of those entries using camera networks designed for night-sky observation, but Hergenrother said more members of the public are catching bright events on cellphones and security cameras, contributing additional reports.

In response to the Cleveland-region event, National Weather Service meteorologist Brian Mitchell said there could be some small fragments, but much of the material would likely have burned up in the atmosphere.