Strange Lights in the Night Sky a Meteor or Debris?

Green and blue objects are darting through the night sky over Southern California, residents are reporting.

Residents from the L.A. area and communities of Glendora, Murrieta, Perris, Irvine, Ontario, Riverside, Lake Forest, Corona and San Clemente have sent emails to or called CBS Los Angeles, the news station is reporting.

The reports of the sightings began about 7:30 p.m., according to an official at the Federal Aviation Administration's Los Angeles operations office.

The lights have also been reported in Nevada and Arizona, according to CBS Los Angeles.

Curt Kaplan of the National Weather Service told the news station the object “was probably a meteor."

Ed Krupp, director of the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, agreed. It was likely “a piece of interplanetary debris that passed through the Earth’s atmosphere and burned up," Krupp told CBS Los Angeles.

NASA announced earlier this week that a dead satellite would fall to Earth by September's end. Still, people were clearly mystified, thrilled or fascinated by the unexplained lights as they shared their homemade videos and even sone crayon drawings by children immediately afterward.

The public ``saw something that was at a very high altitude, just a piece of rock or maybe a grain of sand as it hit the atmosphere,' Krupp told KCAL9, which is a sister station to KCBS and shares content. ``What people are really seeing is superheated air.... You're seeing the luminous trail of its passing.''

City News Service contributed to this report.