Instead, it likely was a piece of space debris - something man-made - that burned in the atmosphere.

David Dundee, astronomer for the Tellus Science Museum in Cartersville, said that at only 14,500 miles per hour, the object was traveling too slowly to be a meteor or a fireball.

"Looking at the video, the way it broke into pieces, it could be a piece of space debris," Dundee said Monday.

"There's a lot of old stuff kicking around up there," he noted.

Dundee said there were about 120 eyewitness accounts of the flash, which was seen around 1:30 a.m. over Georgia as well as South Carolina, Tennessee and Alabama.

He said it's likely the military will more precisely identify the debris in the coming days.