Was that an explosion? A plane crash? No, it was a meteor over Georgia.

Then came Bill Henry’s call: “What just happened here? I’m off Salem Road. It felt like an earthquake or a big bomb going off.”

As the calls were finally starting to slow down, Karen Habig told dispatchers, “I heard a huge explosion … it shook my whole house.”

What they didn’t know at the time was that a meteor had been spotted in their county shortly after noon about 48 miles above Oxford. It was traveling southwest toward Henry County at 30,000 mph.

It eventually disintegrated 27 miles above West Forest, which is about a 25-minute drive from Oxford, and unleashed “an energy of about 20 tons of TNT,” according to Bill Cooke, the lead of NASA’s Meteoroid Environments Office. Dylan Lusk, a senior meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Peachtree City, said the object created a fireball and sonic boom as it entered the Earth’s atmosphere.

Between 12:29 and 12:54 p.m., about a dozen people in Newton called 911, confused about what they had heard and felt. Most weren’t panicked — just puzzled. The boom had clearly startled them.

When Rooks Alexander called, dispatchers still weren’t sure what had caused the loud noise and tremors, according to 911 calls obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. In the initial moments, they simply gathered details and assured callers that first responders were on their way.

As more calls flooded in, dispatchers began mistakenly telling residents there was an earthquake in the area.

“It looks like it was a small one,” a dispatcher said. “We got reports from all over the county.”

Henry, 69, heard the story about the earthquake around 12:50 p.m., a 911 call showed.

“It’s more exciting when you find out it was a meteor that blew up over your county,” Henry told the AJC during a phone call Tuesday.

He said he was watching TV when he heard a rumbling that lasted for about 15 to 20 seconds. He described it like thunder, but then his mind jumped to possible explosions being set off in the area. The shaking lasted just as long, he said, but it didn’t knock over any items.

“Who would think in broad daylight that big boom and everything that just flew through the sky was a meteor. That doesn’t happen every day,” Henry said.

After getting off the phone with dispatch, Rooks Alexander said she began driving around the Covington airport, thinking she’d find flames and smoke.

“I thought maybe it had been one of the larger (planes) that crashed and hit the ground and jolted the ground so hard and then made my mobile home kind of vibrate. So, I just thought it was a plane crash,” she said.

Habig, 73, was sitting on her porch at her home on Elks Club Road near Hayston when she felt the ground rumble. She also said it sounded like thunder at first, but then it evolved into a massive blast. She described hearing several smaller booms in the following moments.

“I’m looking up to see if my roof is going to fall in,” Habig said. “The ceiling was waving — like a wave.”

She thought a nearby house had blown up, and that’s when she said she decided to call 911.

Others in Newton reported similar experiences to 911 dispatchers.

“I just wanted to call and report that there had been possibly a small tremor near where I live, because I heard like a huge noise outside, and it just sounds like it was an earthquake,” an unidentified caller said.

“I’m in my home and I felt this strange, like this shake. It was just, I heard some noise, but it was like uncontrollable. Like something might have exploded somewhere,” another caller said.

“Well, what happened is it’s 12:28 (p.m.), I’m sitting quietly in my barn, and it started rumbling and then stuff started rattling in the back of the garage and I thought, ‘That’s odd.’ I thought it might be thunder, but it never stopped. It lasted probably around 15 seconds,” another caller described.

A piece of meteorite ripped through one house in Henry. That homeowner called 911 and said what looked like a piece of asphalt had sliced through their roof and created a dent in their floor.

“We think that a meteor came through the roof of our house. My husband was home, I wasn’t home,” the caller, who identified herself as Sarah, told a dispatcher. “He said it seemed like a bullet came through the house and he went in the living room and there was a whole bunch of insulation and like debris and stuff on the floor. And he went on the roof and there’s a hole on the roof, too, and it dented the floor.”

The AJC could not locate contact information for the caller.

The woman said her husband picked up the meteorite with a glove and placed it in a bucket.

Lusk, the Weather Service meteorologist, said the chances of meteorites — smaller rocks from a meteor — making it to the ground are “usually pretty low,” adding that as they move through the atmosphere they usually burn up. But NASA officials confirmed that this time multiple Doppler weather radars detected the signatures of meteorites falling to the ground.

The American Meteor Society received more than 200 reports of fireball sightings across Georgia, Tennessee and the Carolinas. Most were from Georgia, according to its website.

The fireball was produced by “an asteroidal fragment” that measured 3 feet in diameter and weighed more than a ton, NASA’s Cooke said.

According to the meteor society, a fireball is just a term for a bright meteor. Several thousand occur in the atmosphere every day, but they often go unnoticed as they travel over oceans and uninhabited areas. Vivid colors are also often reported by observers and may be influenced by the composition of the meteoroid, the group said.

Habig didn’t witness the fireball streak across the sky, but she said she hopes she never has to hear one again.

“I thought it was something much worse,” she said.