A Friday night flash of light in the skies over the East Coast sparked a rash of meteor sighting reports, followed by a mad dash to track down photos and videos of the event.

The American Meteor Society [1] logged more than 300 report [2]s from a region ranging from  North Carolina to Washington to New York to New England to Canada. Hundreds more registered their observations [3] on Twitter.  One Twitter user, known as @Married2TheNite, reported [4] from New Jersey that he saw — and heard — the object pass by. "It was making almost a hissing noise as it flew brightly overhead," he wrote. "I saw it around 7:55 p.m. EDT."

That time frame meshed with the many other reports. Some witnesses said they saw flashes of green, red and blue as the object streaked past.

The reports were consistent with a fireball — similar to the one that flashed over Russia on Feb. 15 [5], but much, much smaller.

"It's not an incredibly rare event, but it is very unusual to have that many people observe it, and also it was unusually bright," Ron Dantowitz, director of the Clay Center Observatory, told NBC station WHDH-TV [6] in Boston. "These types of meteors happen once or twice a year. The unusual thing is that it was so well observed not so long after sunset."

http://news.ca.msn.com/top-stories/reports-about-east-coast-meteor-flood... [7]

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