Meteor shower sparks alarm in East

Bright lights visible from Long Island to Maine

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updated 10:36 p.m. ET April 24, 2005

BOSTON - A meteor shower Sunday night sparked a flurry of frantic phone calls to police departments across New England from people who saw bright lights moving in the sky, a spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration said.

The meteor shower was seen as far north as Portland, Maine, and as far south as Long Island. Some witnesses apparently mistook the meteor shower for a plane crashing in Connecticut, the FAA’s Holly Baker said.

“We’ve checked all around. There are no aircraft unaccounted for,” she said.

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The bright lights apparently came from the Lyrid meteor shower, which was scheduled to be visible to the naked eye between April 20 and April 25, said Peter Judge, spokesman for the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency.

“We’re getting various descriptions of lights in the sky,” he said. “Everything from green lights to planes going down.”

Firefighters in Branford, Conn., responded to several reports of a possible plane crash in Long Island Sound in the Thimble Island area, but a search did not turn up anything and was called off a short while later.