Bright Meteor Streaks Through Sky Over East Coast

A bright flash of light streaked across the early evening sky over several northeast and mid-Atlantic cities, which according to the experts is a meteor. The incident occurred Friday evening March 22,2013, close to 8:00 p.m. EDT.

The greenish blue bright light lasted for 7-10 seconds across the sky leaving a long stream behind it. These types of meteors can occur once or twice in a year.

The American Meteor society received more than 500 reports of the meteor sighting ranging from North Carolina to Washington to New York to New England to Canada.

The East Coast residents took to the social media to share their experience. Twitter user Joseph- @Married2TheNite posted on Twitter saying: "I actually heard the #meteor today as well. It was making almost a hissing noise as it flew brightly overhead. I saw it around 7:55pm EDT."

According to Bill Cooke, of NASA's Meteorid Environmental Office, based on the flash it can be said that it was a single meteor event. From the visual reports it appeared like a fireball that moved roughly towards the southeast. Its brightness was comparable to a full moon light.

This meteor fall over the East Coast occurred five weeks after the meteor shower in Russia that hit the Urals region injuring more than 1000 people.

Derrick Pitts, chief astronomer at Philadelphia's Franklin Institute was quoted in Foxnews stating, "Experts can't be 100 percent certain of what it was, unless it actually fell to the ground and we could actually track the trajectory." But he said the descriptions by so many people are "absolutely consistent" with those of a meteor.