A fireball exploded over Maryland and could be seen from Connecticut to Virginia.
Almost 100 people reported seeing the bright object in the sky 8:25 p.m on Labor Day, the American Meteor Society reported
The meteor flew over New Jersey and continued east before giving off a brilliant explosion somewhere over Lancaster County in Maryland.
"Most meteors are only the size of tiny pebbles. A meteor the size of a softball can produce light equivalent to the full moon for a short instant," the group's website says.
"The reason for this is the extreme velocity at which these objects strike the atmosphere. Even the slowest meteors are still traveling at 10 miles per second, which is much faster than a speeding bullet. Fireballs occur every day over all parts of the Earth," the society stated on their site, NJ.com reported.
Onlookers were excited to report what they had seen.
"Last night about 8:30 - 9:00 PM I was in my tomato garden looking up north towards Dulles Airport when I saw a flash...then flaming fire ball streak in a falling arc...was it a plane?...no sound...It lasted [three to five] seconds. I live surrounded by woods so there was little other light. Very exciting!" a woman from Gainesville, Va. wrote on the Meteor Society's site.
"Not even bright stars would be noticeable from the road under these conditions. It was moving very fast and was very bright, green in color - not a point of light but clearly an object with some mass - and with a long white tail (I couldn't tell if the trail persisted because I was driving). It seemed to be shooting downward at a steep angle, left to right, south to southwest, almost as if it was going to strike the lower tip of Manhattan or NY harbor," a commenter from N.Y. wrote.
On Sept. 9, a fireball zipped across Georgia and Alabama creating a sonic boom that startled those near the site of the explosion.
"We tracked it down to the altitude of 25 miles, which is very low for a meteor," Bill Cooke, head of the Meteoroid Environments Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center, told AL.com.
Last February a bus-sized meteor exploded over Russian city, inflicting injury on over 1,000 people, Space.com reported.
