At about 6:20 p.m. ET on Monday, reports started trickling in that a brilliantly bright, green fireball was tracing its way across the night sky.
Over the course of the night, the American Meteor Society (AMS) received more than 250 reports of meteor sightings.
Some of the first tweets that came in about the meteor indicated it was certainly a sight worth seeing:
"Folks in Virginia say it was huge — it looked like a bottle rocket,"Drew Curtis tweeted.
Another twitter user going by @BIONIC_OLE said: "I just saw the biggest "shooting star" meteor ever. It was insane!!"
And NASA's Bill Cooke confirmed with ABC's Good Morning America that the object did indeed appear to be a meteor.
The sightings occurred all over the eastern US — from South Carolina up to Ohio.
Here's a video caught on a Benwood, Virginia, police department dash camera:
The reports came from as far west as Indiana, reaching as far east as the Virginia coast.
Below is a heat map from the AMS showing the expanse of the reports across the Midwest and east coast. Red indicates the highest volume of reports.
Although the event occured this month when the Taurid meteor shower is ongoing, NASA's Bill Cooke said the meteor was not part of the Taurids and was more likely a chunk of an asteroid.
The meteor most likely entered Earth's atmosphere above western West Virginia and then traveled eastward across the sky, eventually impacting between Webster County and Randolph County in West Virginia.
The AMS predicted this path and impact site from the reports it received. The projection is shown below.
According to Sean Sublette, chief meteorologist at a Virginia ABC affiliate, the green coloring is an indication of magnesium molecules in the meteor.
Blue-green color of a meteor suggests the presence of magnesium. http://t.co/0ej227xs5m
— Sean Sublette (@SeanSublette13) November 3, 2014There were other reports Monday night of a bright meteor-like light in the skies over Chicago. At first, AMS and NASA said the object was moving too slow to be a metoer and was likely a piece of space junk.
However, Cooke recently told Business Insider that neither NASA's Orbital Debris Program Office or the Department of Defense's Space Command reported debris entering earth's atmosphere over Chicago at the time of the sighting.
Therefore, Cooke said that it could be a slow-moving meteor.
Check out both events in the video below:
Did you see a meteor last night? Send us a picture or video.
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