Fire in the Sky
Phoenix and Scottsdale police and Rural/Metro Fire Department dispatchers received calls from residents reporting a plane going down in "a ball of fire." Another caller reported seeing a meteor.
"It was a large ball of flame," Rural/Metro Fire Department spokeswoman Alison Cooper said. "It was very large. It was seen as far as Washington state."
Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Mike O'Connor said he received about eight calls about it, but no reports of any aircraft in trouble.
A dispatcher with the Yakima County Sheriff's Office said one woman and an area police officer spotted a bright object shooting across the sky.
"It looked like a shooting star," she said, but closer. "It absolutely fell to the ground."
The flare-like object was first spotted by a fisherman near Whyalla.
Times reporter Aaron Leaman saw the object and thought it was a meteor.
A loud boom heard throughout the region was most likely to be from a meteorite, up to the size of a medicine ball, Stardome Observatory in Auckland says.
The loud boom was heard over Canterbury, with sightings as far afield as Hanmer Springs in North Canterbury, and Hinds in Mid-Canterbury.
Observatory spokesman Andrew Buckingham told NZPA: "We're still finding out what's going on".
Initial reports had come through the police communications system, with follow ups from eyewitness accounts.
"It sounds like a large meteor coming down... soccer ball size upwards," Mr Buckingham said.

A police dashboard camera caught a fireball streaking through the night over central Texas Tuesday night.
"It was the most spectacular thing I've ever seen - I have never seen anything like it before," he said. LaHooe called after he read my June 10 column in the Herald about the fireball that streaked across the sky June 2.
"It shot across the sky and looked like it landed right behind the Tetons," he said.