WCNC

A number of people called Lincoln County 911 to describe the object.

LINCOLN COUNTY -- Countless calls were made to emergency centers from across the Carolinas from people who reported seeing an unexplained bright light falling from the sky.

It was spotted around 8 p.m. Wednesday night.

A number of people called Lincoln County 911 to describe the object.

"It was unusually bright, like a comet coming down. They're usually straight down. This one went quite a ways across the sky and finally the light went out."

It was an unidentified object that was seen by people from Greer, South Carolina to Asheville at the exact time. It was so vivid that the Lincoln County 911 dispatcher sent an officer to check it out.

Dispatch: "Did you see it?"

Officer: "10-4."

Dispatch: "We've gotten several calls."

Officer: "I'm out on 27 heading west. I don’t know what it was… like a shooting star or something."

Lincolnton psychologist Granville Angell was with clients in a home office when it caught his eye. He immediately ran outside.

"It was like a ball that grew a tail. It was about 20 to 30 degrees above the horizon. Uh, and it came from west to east. It was like a shallow arc across the sky and descended down," he said.

At first Angell feared it might be an airplane crashing, but a former military pilot himself, he said the colors weren't right. The orb was a bluish-white and he said it moved too slowly to be a comet.

"It was a very shallow descent and a glowing flare as it went down. It was visible for about, oh, 10-15 seconds," he explained. "Heaven only knows what it could be, but some type of a UFO. I'm not saying an alien but something."

Then, just as suddenly as it appeared, all who saw it said it disappeared into the horizon without answers to what the strange sight was.

Interestingly the National Weather Service fielded more than a dozen calls, and of course there was no report of a downed plane, so the strange object remains a mystery.