" I thought I was hallucinating, " said 14-year-old Amanda Ishmael of Copperas Cove.

Ishmael was standing in the driveway of her home and talking on the phone, a little before 9:30 Thursday night, when she saw what she thought was a crashing plane.

"I saw something out of the corner of my eye and naturally I turned to look and it and it was basketball size and it was red and orange and a pulsating ball of fire and it shocked me. I thought it was a helicopter or a plane because we're so close to Fort Hood, " Amanda said.

"Amanda has a large imagination, so I had to think a minute, but she was really adamant about telling me that something fell from the sky, " said Janis Hill, Amanda's mother.

What Amanda saw and apparently so did hundreds of other Central Texans was a meteor which came crashing to the earth at very high speeds.

John McAnally, the President of the Central Texas Astronomical Society says sightings like this one are pretty rare.

"The real value would be in finding it, if it survived and landed on the ground, but at that altitude, it's probably landed somewhere in Colorado," said McAnally.

The meteor was seen going from the southeast to the northwest and McAnally says it was probably travelling somewhere between 90 and 100 miles high when it crossed over Texas.

So far, residents from several other states, including Tennessee, Oklahoma and Kansas have reported seeing it too.

"It was visible for almost a minute which means it was a rather large object, " said McAnally.

Large and fast moving. Something only those who were looking up at the sky at precisely the right moment were able to see.

"It was just amazing, very few people get to see meteors like that and it was just amazing, " Amanda said.