A dazzling fireball that cut a fiery path in the night sky over Japan was from a type of meteor known as a bolide, astronomers say.
Observatories in several western Japanese prefectures including Hiroshima, Fukuoka and Ehime reported receiving calls about a bright light speeding through the sky early Monday evening.
A bolide is generally defined as a meteor that as it burns up in the Earth's atmosphere creates a fireball of apparent magnitude of -14 or brighter, more intense than the full moon.
A number of video cameras caught the bolide streaking through the dark skies over Japan.
"Since it was early evening and fine weather, favorable conditions were there for many to witness it," said Hidehiko Agata of Japan's National Astronomical Observatory.
Any fragments of the bolide that survived the meteor's plummet into the Earth's atmosphere probably fell into the sea, experts said.
Monday night turned out to be a busy evening for bright cosmic phenomena.
In the Unites States, two objects were spotted making light trails in the sky.
One, considered to be a meteor, was visible from 11 states, from Georgia and North Caroline north to Maryland and as far west as Ohio.
A number of witnesses described it as displaying a bright green color.
The American Meteor Society reported receiving more than more than 300 eyewitness reports of the intense fireball.
A second object, reported by witnesses in Chicago as moving more slowly, turned out not to be anything cosmic at all, but rather part of a flashy nighttime publicity stunt.
A bright white and yellow object slowly crossing the sky in the early evening turned out to be three skydivers, members of the Red Bull Air Force, drifting toward the city's North Avenue Beach with bright flares attached to their boots.
"I looked up and I just saw this bright light," witness Steve Sobel said. "With the naked eye you could see fragments coming off the back of it like it was something burning up."
The skydiving display was part of a promotion for the "Red Bull Art of Can" exhibit in Millennium Park, the company said.
American Meteor Society operations manager Mike Hankey said his organization first believed the object might be a piece of "space junk" of debris burning as it fell through in the atmosphere but finally determined it was something man-made -- and much closer to the ground.
