( CNN ) -- A dazzling meteor lit up skies Thursday night in at least 10 states , from Ohio to Maryland and all the way down to South Carolina . `` It was a huge yellow burning tail streaking what seemed right over the city , '' one poster on the American Meteor Society 's reporting page wrote from Virginia Beach , Virginia . `` It was angled in a way that it looked like it was going to crash into the city . '' Others on Twitter described the meteor , which appeared a little after 7 p.m. , as white , blue or green . In Silver Spring , Maryland , another poster to the Meteor Society page wrote that it `` looked like a plane on fire close by . '' It was n't , of course . It was almost certainly an unusually bright meteor classified by the American Meteor Society as a fireball -- a bit of rock , metal or ice from space that shines brighter than Venus as it burns up in Earth 's atmosphere . The object had generated at least 155 reports to the meteor tracking group as of Friday morning . A similar event happened late Monday , viewed by at least 100 people from Maryland north to Connecticut . The organization says `` several thousand '' meteors that could be classified as fireballs enter the atmosphere every day , but most go unseen because they burn up over oceans or uninhabited areas . NASA 's All Sky Fireball Network .
A fireball was seen in at least 10 homes a little after 7 p.m. Thursday . ` ` It was a huge yellow comet tail , '' a viewer wrote to a meteor tracking station . He said it was green , white or blue . Such events are common , but often previously unseen , American Meteor Society reports .