Thousands of people saw the Big Boom, the Big Bang, the not-a-Russian-rocket-but-a-meteor as it blazed across the mid-Atlantic sky on Sunday night.

But only one person has said he saw where it landed.

Joe Butler of Suffolk says he was driving south across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel when night turned briefly into day.

"The sky was light all of a sudden, like it was daytime," Butler recalled on Friday. "There it was, coming right at my car. It was so fast that I didn't even have time to think that I might have been in danger.

"It shot right over my car, it went down in the water right between the two bridges."

Butler said he was near the tallest part of the bridge, near Fisherman Island, where the northbound and southbound lanes separate widely. The meteor, he said, splashed into the water between them.

"I was like, what in the world is going on?" Butler said. "My daughter, she said, 'Wow, what was that, Daddy?' and I said, 'I don't know, babe, I think that was a falling star.' "

The meteor flashed past Hampton Roads around 9:45 p.m. Sunday, briefly lighting up the landscape.

It was followed one to two minutes later by a sonic boom, which experts said meant it had penetrated deep enough into the atmosphere to leave meteorites.

An astronomer at the U.S. Naval Observatory identified the object as a piece of space junk from a Russian rocket launched a few days earlier.

However, on Tuesday the Joint Space Operations Center at Vandenberg Air Force Base, which tracks 19,000 man-made pieces of space debris, said it couldn't have been.

Butler agreed.

"The shape of it, it was just too perfect to be a piece of junk. It looked just like a miniature comet, pretty much," he said. "It was really, really white with blue flames. It was pretty wild."

Butler said he didn't hear the boom, only a whistling roar as the object flew past. The wind-blown water was really choppy, he added, but he could see the splash when it landed.

He saved the newspaper accounts for his 5-year-old daughter to read when she gets a little older.

Her main concern at the moment, he said, was whether dad had made a wish on the falling star.

Just for the record, no, he didn't.