On Thursday night, Dan Perjar, a 24-year-old software developer at North Carolina State University, recorded a fireball that was actually a meteor through the dash cam of his car.

Soon after the meteor passed by, the American Meteor Society's "Fireball Page" exploded with people reporting of a huge fireball that they sighted in Virginia, North Carolina, Delaware, Maryland and Pennsylvania. All these reports came faster than any other sightings in the past few months.

Most of the reporting suggests that the phenomenon was the brightest that they have ever seen so far and most of them even stated that they also heard a boom along.

Dan Perjar said, "Just a normal nighttime drive and I saw this, looked like a firework initially, shooting really kind of flat. It wasn't really coming down. It looked like it was going across".

Further, Michael Hankey, of the American Meteor Society, explains that the meteor was surrounded in a lot of light, which made witnesses feel as if it was happening in their backyard whereas in reality, the object was extremely far away.

Explaining what a meteoroid is the American Meteor Society stated that a "small" chunk of rock or ice that floats around space until it collides with the Earth's atmosphere. On entering our atmosphere, a light effect takes place, and the rock/ice is pulled by the planet's gravitational force. On receiving the pull, around 99.9% of meteors evaporate or vaporize in the atmosphere but there is a small fraction of some of them that manage to penetrate the atmosphere and collide with the Earth, resulting in a bright fireball.