A mysterious explosion in the sky over New York earlier this week was most likely a meteor falling from space, experts have claimed.
One onlooker in Waterloo described a "bright, fast streak" crossing the sky and a "sparkling with a flash of rainbow colours".
Another in Alexandria Bay said they saw a "fireball" surrounded by "iridescent" colours.
"So many shades, fire colour in the centre with blues, purple, pink around the outside and the streak was super bright white light," she told the American Meteor Society . "It was beautiful!"
Some also said they heard a giant boom that was "loud enough to make the ground shake slightly".
"I felt it in my chest and had to stand still for a moment in panic," one witness said.
"I got ready to load my children up with our emergency bags because I thought the power plant 12 miles away from me blew up."
Mike Hankey, operations manager of the American Meteor Society, told CNN that they "got a lot of emails from people about the boom," and that "it seemed significant".
"What they were seeing was the light produced by the object colliding with the atmosphere," Hankey explained.
He added that there was typically a delay between the sound and the visual reports, because sound travels slower than light.
Most accounts from the New York event state that the light streak and noise lasted from between 1.5 to 3.5 seconds.
So far there have been no reports of any damage caused by the fireball.
Several thousand meteors hit the Earth's atmosphere each day, but the vast majority occur over the oceans and uninhabited regions, and a good many are masked by daylight.
A meteor is generally only classified as a "fireball" if it is brighter than magnitude -4, which is about the same magnitude of the planet Venus in the morning or evening sky.
The majority of fireballs are only visible for a few seconds and are rare "once in a lifetime" events, according to the AMS.
