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Neil Hart and his 10-year-old son Jayden left in the dark to go pig-hunting around 5.50am at Matawai.
As they were heading towards Ormond, they saw in the direction of Patutahi an extremely bright meteorite that lit up the early morning sky and all the hills around them.
Mr Hart's wife said the four of them in the car watched as it cut horizontally across the sky.
"It was quite spectacular - you could make out the rock with the sparks coming off it, it was very, very clear."
When the hunting group arrived at Matawai, the people they were meeting said they had heard a boom.
Another eye-witness in Mangapapa noticed an unusual light when he got up around the same time.
"It was very unusual. I wondered why the light was so different.
"By the time I got outside it was like a trail of sparks in the sky. It had an orange-red tail and was like a bright light going across the sky."
Amateur astronomer Roger Handford said it was not that common to see meteorites this low. For a boom to be heard meant it would have entered the lower atmosphere.
"It has probably blown up between 30 and 50 kilometres above ground and was most likely a stony meteorite - or the other possibility is space junk," he said
Mr Handford said it would have been the size of a fist, or more, to have penetrated the lower atmosphere.
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