Morgan County Sheriff Chief Deputy Mike Corley said the reports came from southern Morgan County and Cullman County. Firefighters and various police agencies searched the area but found no crash site.

"(We found) no fires, no explosions or anything to explain it," said Corley. "It was like a falling star."

Decatur astronomer Loren Ball said the bolide likely came from "space junk." He said the North American Aerospace Defense Command is tracking 9,000 pieces of man-made junk including nuts, bolts, gloves and pieces of expired satellites that, because of friction with the upper atmosphere, are gradually approaching Earth.

The lime-green color, Ball said, is consistent with the color that would come from burning aluminum as it entered Earth's atmosphere.

The fact that the object broke into pieces is no surprise, whether the object was natural or man-made. Moving at 10 to 40 miles per second, it would generate tremendous energy, much of it in the form of light. He said a bolide the size of a golf ball generates enough light to trigger calls to the media.

"Something like this happens every day, but there are not always people around to see it," Ball said.

Space junk

According to some studies, there are 4 million pounds of space junk - as many as 110,000 objects larger than 1 centimeter - in low-Earth orbit. They provide a brilliant display on Earth, but can be hazardous to astronauts.

A small speck of paint from a satellite shooting around the Earth once dug a quarter-inch pit in a space shuttle window.

Earth's atmosphere extends 250 miles above its surface, Ball said, a fact that forces the International Space Station and the Hubble Space Telescope to periodically correct their orbit so they won't be pulled into a downward spiral.

Gene Byrd, professor of astronomy at The University of Alabama, said the sightings were too late to be explained by a meteor shower that took place last week.

Bolide explanation

He said the composition of the bolide could explain its greenish color, but the human eye might also explain it. The eye has greater sensitivity to blue and green colors, he said.

Byrd's guess was that it was "a large, sporadic meteor." He said such meteors occasionally emit a sonic boom, and usually are rock fragments from the asteroid belt.

In the 1950s, he said, a small meteor actually struck a woman in Sylacauga, sending her to the hospital with a severe bruise. Astronomers believe a 10-mile-wide meteor that hit Mexico caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, Byrd said.

Corley said he saw the event from his home.

"It did have an unusual color. It had a bright, glowing, lime-green color to it," Corley said.

The Alabama sightings came a day after a similar green fireball was seen in the skies above Australia.

Meteorologists there identified the object as a meteor, likely produced as the Earth passed through the tail of the comet Tempel-Tuttle according to news reports.

Last week, a Russian cosmonaut hit a golf ball into orbit from the International Space Station as part of a publicity campaign to raise money for the Russian space program.

The golf ball joined the other pieces of space junk that will eventually burn up in the upper atmosphere.

The object hovered for more than one minute. But one resident said it could have been a model helicopter.

"A lot of guys fly night choppers here and they have the LCD lights around the blades and they have lights all down the boom and tail rotor," the man, identified only as Ian, told Southern Cross Broadcasting.

"These models can hover and they can go from zero to about 100 kph in a few seconds."

On Monday night, people in South Australia and western Victoria deluged police and media with reports of a spectacular meteor sighting.

Police in SA said they took calls from just after 8pm (CST) on Monday from Renmark and Loxton in the Riverland, most Adelaide suburbs and then from people living south of the city, with reports of something looking like a fireball in the sky.

In Victoria, callers to ABC Radio from Bendigo to Horsham in the state's north-west down to Colac in the south-west, reported seeing a bright green coloured object shooting westward in the sky.

A South Australia Police spokesman said later that the Bureau of Meteorology confirmed the object seen on Monday night was a meteor.

What's fascinating about this story is the collision between the ordinary and the extraordinary.

American universities are crammed with scientists who nightly abandon their families to search the skies for heavenly bodies. Like pond-dwelling creatures looking up through murky waters at the strange shapes of fishermen standing on dry land, these astronomers yearn to see with certainty the universe beyond the foggy stratosphere.

Kindly gods might have made their day and directed a meteorite to their front door, but instead one plummeted into the abode of snoozing Ms Hodges.

How did this change her life? Did she feel incredibly lucky that out of all our species she was the one "chosen" to so dramatically encounter a celestial rock? Or did she spend her subsequent years with sensations of victimhood, disturbed that the movement of planets had conspired to direct a meteorite on a centuries- long journey to wreck her living room?

Magazines which detail the lives of celebrities sell more than those chronicling the movements of monarchs because they throb with the tantalising myth of stardom: that individuals are periodically plucked from obscurity.

We love to read of the moment when the dog of Hollywood super-agent Joyce Selznick sunk its teeth into the leg of David Hasselhoff and inadvertently dragged the ambitious waiter onto fame's runway.

Such seemingly random incidents are laced with destiny: If you or I had been bitten by the dog, would we one day be filmed saving Californians from choppy waters with Pamela Anderson - or was there something intangibly special about the man who would one day thrill Germans with his passionate range of self-expression?

Of course, as Ms Hodges herself might feel inclined to tell us with a wag of a figure, our entire species could be heading for a decidedly disastrous date with destiny.

According to some calculations, on St Patrick's Day 2880 there is a one in 300 chance that the cheerfully named asteroid 1950 DA will strike our planet. An ocean hit would send waves of up to 400 ft soaring towards cities in an Armageddon-style day of destruction.

The notion is horrendous, but such a prospect triggers an equal and opposite pulse of excitement. If humanity was threatened with annihilation, we like to think, we would all respond with the alacrity of Hasselhoff in his prime and do whatever might be conceivably necessary to avert such a calamity.

We dearly need such dreams at a time when the world is riven with division. Wales has far fewer statues than Rome - maybe there's space to erect one of Ms Hodges and her meteor?

Observers of the lights have reported them to appear as bright, glowing orbs above Table Rock, Linville Gorge and Brown Mountain.

Caton said they have been reported in every color, and sometimes last for a few hours. Caton received an e-mail from someone who saw the lights from a distance of eight feet in a parking area.

Caton's idea to research the Brown Mountain Lights is in the form of a web-cam, which he has already procured through university funding.

Caton received permission from the U.S. Forest Service to place the web-cam on a pulpit at the Wiseman's View overlook off the Blue Ridge Parkway, but realized the camera might be destroyed by vandalism.

To solve that problem, Caton and his associates proposed the building of a tower to house the web-cam. Permits for the tower are expected to be approved by the Forest Service next month.

However, the funding for construction of the tower through the University Research Council was recently denied.

"Now we're in the odd position that the U.S. Forest Service is likely to approve the permit, but we lack funding," Caton said.

"If I get approval, I will make it happen somehow," Caton said.

Ultimately, Caton hopes to set up a system where viewers around the globe will be able to access the web-cam via the Internet and monitor activity of the lights, using an instant-messaging service to notify Caton and his associates of any possible sightings.

The signpost at the Wiseman's View overlook cites a few myths associated with the existence of the Brown Mountain Lights. For example, stories circulate that they are the lights of Cherokee maidens looking for their lost lovers who were killed in war.

DE Brahm, George Washington's surveyor, reported witnessing the lights and sounds associated with them in the 1770s.

In 1913, The Charlotte Observer ran a story about the lights, reporting that residents of Burke County, near Brown Mountain, witnessed them rising above the horizon almost every night, looking similar to "toy fire balloons."

Caton estimates he has traveled to study the lights about 20 times, but has yet to actually witness them firsthand.

An Associated Press reporter interviewed Caton for a story about the lights about a year ago, at which time Caton said he was "really discouraged."

However, the article prompted a surge of e-mails to Caton, among which he found a "core of very interesting sightings."

Caton began to examine the possibility that the lights could be a phenomenon known as ball lightning, something that is little understood by physics.

The idea of ball lightning renewed Caton's interest in studying the Brown Mountain Lights.

Currently, 90 to 95 percent of sightings can be attributed to campers on Table Rock, hikers, headlights, trains and roads in the area, Caton said.

Students Patrick T. McCaully, a senior interdisciplinary studies major, and Chase R. Casadonte, a senior philosophy and religion major, think they may have witnessed the Brown Mountain Lights on a class field trip to the Blue Ridge Parkway.

"They looked like eerie, glowing, pulsating lights hovering over the ridge," Casadonte said.

However, every sighting seems to be the source of some debate.

The teacher of Casadonte and McCaully's class, Outdoor Programs Adventure Education Specialist Andrew Miller, does not recall witnessing them.

A report from a country vicar that Dr Alexander Cannon, a qualified psychiatrist who used spirit mediums to "advise" hypnotised patients on how to counter alcoholism and other problems of addiction, reached the Archbishop of Canterbury on Dec 4, 1936.

So seriously did the archbishop, Dr Cosmo Lang, take the information that he immediately questioned a Harley Street doctor to find out about Dr Cannon and later informed Downing Street of the news.

According to a BBC documentary broadcast last night, the news reached Lambeth Palace when a parishioner in Eye, Suffolk, told her vicar she had heard Dr Cannon boasting that he was treating the king for alcoholism.

Dr Cannon's other patients included George Drummond, a banker who subsidised Oswald Mosley, the fascist leader, and his British Union movement.

The timing of the information was critical.

Two days earlier, a speech by the Bishop of Bradford had brought into the open what everyone "in the know" in Britain had been gossiping about for months: the affair that the king had been conducting with Mrs Wallis Simpson, a divorced Roman Catholic American.

Both Church and State were in a fevered state of uncertainty as to how the King would act and whether his mental frailties would cause an implosion of the royal dignity.

It was in this context that the vicar contacted the archbishop to tell him about the King's hypnosis treatment, the programme claimed. Dr Lang's chaplain immediately replied asking for further details.

Tellingly, the chaplain wrote: "He regards the information which you have supplied as worthy of consideration as it appears to offer a possible explanation of certain things which are known to His Grace.

"You will of course treat this as strictly confidential."

By then, Dr Lang had already contacted Dr William Brown, an eminent Harley Street psychiatrist, for his opinion of the eccentric doctor.

Dr Brown replied that one of his own patients had consulted Dr Cannon and described how he "put a medium into a trance and invited her to ask questions of the medium".

It was not a procedure he himself would use.

By the time his information reached the archbishop, on Dec 10, the King had just been persuaded to abdicate, but it seems likely that this information would have been used as part of the effort by Dr Lang and Stanley Baldwin, the Prime Minister, to achieve exactly that end.

Philip Ziegler, official biographer of the Duke of Windsor, as the King became, said last night: "I find this very intriguing.

"I very much doubt that Edward would have consulted this man for alcoholism: it was the one thing his critics never accused him of and although, of course, he did drink, it did not become a problem."

He agreed it was possible that the King was being treated for a sexual problem and perhaps even Dr Cannon, a profound bragger, stopped short of committing that degree of indiscretion against his royal subject.

The second part of the report on the King and the hypnotist is on BBC Look North at 6.30pm tonight.