A resident has told of the "bizarre" moment he watched a suspected meteorite fly through the night sky.
Lex Adair said when he woke up, his CCTV alerted him to a bright light that had crossed near his home in West Rainton, County Durham, at about 00:30 BST.
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 through the sky".
Roy Alexander, director of learning at 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 burnt up in the atmosphere, whereas meteorites were less frequent and generally big enough to survive the heat and land on the Earth's surface.
He said he believed the meteorite was tracked from near Cardiff across to Hull and Grimsby before potentially landing in the North Sea.
Adair said he needed confirmation of the "bizarre" experience having just woken up and asked his partner for a second opinion.
"It's not really what you expect to kind of see on your CCTV when you wake up first thing in the morning," he said.
"It was pretty cool."
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