Unsuspecting witnesses looked on agog on Thursday evening as a flaming ball of fire lit up the night sky before making landfall in southern Norway.

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Astrophysicist Knut Jørgen Røed Ødegaard was with his family in Hadeland when he caught sight of the sizzling sphere, which may have resulted from a meteorite's unpleasant encounter with the earth’s atmosphere.

“The fireball disintegrated almost like a New Year's firework and pieces of it sprinkled down as it flickered out. The light from the fireball was so strong that it lit up the entire terrain,” he said in an email to news agency NTB.

Ødegaard and his wife Anne Mette Sanne, both seasoned meteorite hunters, told newspaper Aftenposten they had already received some 400 emails from others who had caught a glimpse of the flying object.

They were busy on Friday cross-referencing the information they had received in an attempt to find out where the presumed meteorite hit land.

"It was also seen in Kristiansand and Bergen but there were very few people who heard the boom," Sannes told the newspaper.

"We rarely hear it ourselves so it's fun that we got to experience that for once."

Police in the Northern Buskerud district included the blazing orb in Thursday evening's incident log. From a vantage point in Norefjell, one person reported seeing a fireball trailed by a tail and generating a powerful light.

Shortly after 8.30pm, the witness heard a boom as the meteorite entered the earth's atmosphere. .