"I was driving in the car across the square. Suddenly the square lit up with a bright, bright light, not a normal light," said Vasily Rozhko.

"There was literally three or four seconds of bright light, then back to normal. As I could see from the car, this trail appeared. Then when I was driving, the explosion went off," the resident of Chelyabinsk in central Russia told Russian television

Witnesses of the falling meteor over the Russian Urals spoke of their shock and horror Friday at seeing a giant bright light in the sky that many thought was a crashing plane, followed by a loud explosion that blew out windows in many buildings.

Life News website posted video footage of children screaming in Chelyabinsk School Number 15 corridor and glass and pieces of wood from blown-out windows lying on the floor.

"First there was an unreal light that lit up all the classrooms on the right side of the school. That kind of light doesn't happen in life, only at the end of the world, then a trail appeared like from a plane but only 10 times bigger," teacher Valentina Nikolayeva, told Life News.

"First I thought it was a plane falling, but there was no sound from the engine... after a moment a powerful explosion went off," said another Chelyabinsk witness, Denis Laskov.

"In a lot of the houses on our street the windows were blown out."

"I was standing in the kitchen at that moment and saw in the sky a very bright flash at a great height. Then there was an explosion, it was so strong that the window opened, I was thrown away from it, and the cactuses that were standing on the windowsill flew all over the kitchen," Chelyabinsk resident Anton Yemelyanov told the RIA Novosti news agency.

Witnesses posted videos filmed on cell phones showing the flash and the white trail across the blue morning sky.

In one video posted on YouTube, a driver's dashboard video camera shows a white bright light appearing in the sky, getting brighter and brighter and becoming dazzling before it appears to broaden into a huge explosion as it hits the horizon.

The leader of band Smysloviye Gallyutsinatsii from the Urals main city of Yekaterinburg, Sergei Bobunets wrote on a social networking site that he saw the flash from Yekaterinburg, quoted by local news website Ura.ru.

"I was smoking outside the door when I looked up at the sky and suddenly the sky lit up with a bright light and something that looked like the Sun fell somewhere to the south of Yekaterinburg. Did anyone see it? What was it?" he wrote.