“At first, I couldn’t understand what’s going on. There was a sudden luminescence. It wasn’t as light as day, but still quite bright,” witness Olga Sagalakova told RT.

“We looked at the mountain near us… and there was huge meteor flying above it. It had a tail. Frankly, I was scared. I thought that it was a bomb,” she said.

Night into Day: Meteor explodes over Siberian city (VIDEOS) https://t.co/TdLwrABSmC pic.twitter.com/vMvcdcMmtn

— RT (@RT_com) December 6, 2016

Reports of the rare occurrence came from across Khakassia, as well as from the neighboring Krasnoyarsk Region, local news website xakac.info reports. The event was best seen over the town of Sayanogorsk.

A Khakassia resident, Nikolay Soldatov, said that the meteor “emitted a cold light like a fluorescent lamp.”

“I saw that it was starting to brighten fast. The flash was really bright. It wasn’t blinding, but it was still bright. I looked up and… above the city hospital there was a meteor,” he told RT.

The meteor was seen for three or four seconds and around half a minute later there was a loud bang, triggering car alarms in many parts of the city, the witness said.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8H4nwkLunA

“It was very beautiful. You don’t see this every day,” Sergey Isaykin said of the meteor. “But we weren’t scared as we instantly understood that it was something like [what happened] in Chelyabinsk three years ago.”

The apparent meteor burned up high in the atmosphere as little or no blast sound was heard on the ground by most eyewitnesses, the Emergencies Ministry has announced.

Local forums were bombarded with speculation of a possible rocket malfunction or other technological mishaps, but authorities assured locals that the flare was natural and had caused no damage.