VIDEO: Meteor view from Cedar Rapids

Stewart Ollila was driving south on Interstate 380, just below Center Point, when the meteor passed to his left.

“The sky to the east gets all bright, and I looked over there, and the meteor itself was almost pure white,” Ollila said. “It had a tail, just like you'd see on TV.”

Ollila, 53, said the meteor broke into three pieces, each with its own orange tail, and dimmed to yellow as it disappeared from sight. “You could see the fields underneath it, the trees,” he said.

Add him to the list of eye witnesses, including a pilot en route from Toronto to Winnipeg, teenagers making out in a car near Waterloo, and many, many others from Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois and Iowa.

Rachel Glasgow was driving on a road in Coralville. The meteor flashed overhead in a blast of bright green, she said.

“It looked like it was right in front of you,” she said. “We stopped the car and just pulled over for a second.”

Glasgow, 27, and her boyfriend were so sure the meteor had landed just outside Iowa City that they hopped on Interstate 80 to search for ground zero. They found nothing, but they weren't the only ones who thought the meteor was closer than it was.

“I think people thought it was close, because it was inconceivable to them that it would be hundreds of miles away,” said Steven Spangler, who teaches astronomy and physics at the University of Iowa.

Most meteors are the size of a grain of sand and burn up in the atmosphere, Spangler said. But because of this one's exceptional brightness and eyewitness reports of an explosion, Spangler speculates Wednesday night's meteor was between a basketball and a Volkswagen in size, and fragments of it - meteorites - probably hit the ground.

“My expectation is they're probably going to find pieces of this up in Wisconsin in the next few days,” he said.

Spangler said it's possible what people saw was a piece of space junk bursting through the atmosphere, but it was more likely a meteoroid from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Video from Cedar Rapids

Real-time video of the meteor flying by last night, as seen from a security camera at Electronic Engineering, 1900 6

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St. SW in Cedar Rapids.

This camera was looking northeast from the business.

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