UPDATE: Russian rocket booster probably caused night light show

The fireball in the sky last night could have been caused by a Russian booster rocket falling toward earth, a U.S. Naval Observatory official says.

"It's perfectly consistent with what everybody's been describing," said Geoff Chester, a public relations officer with the observatory.

The booster - basically a big steel cylinder - was part of the Soyuz spacecraft that launched Thursday on a mission to the International Space Station, Chester said.

The booster was expected to fall toward earth on a path, headed east, across the Chesapeake Bay region, Chester said. Streaks of light were reported from North Carolina to Maryland.

Stefan Bocchino, a spokesman for the Joint Space Operations Center in Southern California, part of the U.S. Air Force, said experts there were trying to determine if the lights were caused by part of the Russian craft or some other manmade object.

Other experts have suggested the light and an explosion-like sound were caused by a meteor burning up and breaking apart in the atmosphere.

A source at the National Weather Service also said the likely cause was a rocket booster returning to Earth that exploded over Cape Hatteras last night.

The Manassas News & Messenger reports that the weather service source said the Russian space program is to blame for the lights and sounds that prompted calls to law enforcement offices just before 10 p.m.

Two sheriff’s deputies in Dorchester County, Md., on the Eastern Shore reported seeing the sky light up about 9:45 p.m., according to the National Weather Service office in Sterling.

Earlier today, experts said the lights in the sky and sounds that many people heard could have been caused by a big meteor burning up in the Earth’s atmosphere.

"Some very bright ones are known to explode," said Phillip Ianna, a professor emeritus of astronomy at the University of Virginia.

Thousands of small meteors, the size of sand grains or dust, enter the atmopshere each day, but bigger ones — the size of a house, perhaps — are "fairly rare," hitting our atmosphere every other year or so, Ianna said.

Meteorologist Sonia Mark at the National Weather Service's Wakefield station said the phone was "ringing off the hook." Suffolk police were looking into "reports of great balls of fire landing on the ground."

One motorist who saw the lights while driving east of the Staples Mill Road exit of Interstate 64 described it as similar to "what falls away from big fireworks" but "much bigger" and "from much higher up."

Richmond resident Jay McNamara, who was returning home with his wife on River Road when they saw an object in the southeastern sky, described it as "very, very bright" and lasting less than a second.

At the Portsmouth police dispatch center, dispatcher Keith Freas said he felt the building shake and a thunderlike rumble. But he said he saw no lights.

(Richmond Times-Dispatch staff writers Rex Springston and Bill McKelway contributed to this report.)