A resident has described the "strange" moment when he saw a meteorite flying through the night sky.
Lex Adair said that when he woke up, his security camera alerted him to a bright light that had passed near his home in West Rainton, County Durham, England, at around 00:30 a.m.
The keen photographer, 34, said he had seen shooting stars but never something of this "calibre" and was surprised to see what he believed was a "massive meteor flying across the sky".
Roy Alexander, director of learning at the Battlesteads Dark Sky Discovery Observatory in Northumberland, said there had been more than 190 reports of the incident online, which he believed was a "large meteorite".
While both were known as shooting stars, he said meteors were common and burned up in the atmosphere, while meteorites were less frequent and generally large enough to survive the heat and fall to the Earth's surface.
He said he believed the meteor was tracked from near Cardiff to Hull and Grimsby before potentially falling into the North Sea.
Adair said he needed confirmation of the "strange" experience after he had just woken up and asked his partner for a second opinion.
"It's not what you expect to see on security cameras when you wake up early in the morning. It was quite beautiful," he said. /Telegraph/
