The Norwegian newspaper website Aftenposten is reporting that a large meteorite struck a remote region early in the morning.

“I saw a brilliant flash of light in the sky, and this became a light with a tail of smoke,” Peter Bruvold told the publication. “I heard the bang seven minutes later. It sounded like when you set off a solid charge of dynamite a kilometer (0.62 miles) away,” Bruvold said.

A Norwegian astronomer said it could be the largest space rock to hit the country in modern times and sought more eyewitnesses. [Story]

Reports like these sometimes turn out to be frighteningly true and other times turn out to be something else. Others remain sheer mysteries. Among the most interesting stories in that of a huge incoming object that exploded above Siberia in 1908. A handful of researchers still claim it was an alien space ship.

UPDATE 6/16, 6:40 pm ET: This thing is turning out to be much less than the initial reports indicated—a mere 300 tons of TNT instead of 12,000, says Peter Brown [at SpaceWeather.com] NASA’s Bill Cooke says “An object like this hits Earth about once a month.”