SEATTLE – University of Washington scientists believe the meteor that streaked over the Northwest Tuesday did not hit the ground.

At about 5:30 a.m., Northwest U.S. and Canadian skies lit up with a flash that many experts now agree was a meteor, and it was one of the most viewed events of its kind in this region in decades.

In Spokane, a hospital surveillance camera picked up the streaking object that showered the area in light.

Another hospital security camera in Portland captured the plummeting object.

In Boise, Air National Guard cameras picked it up as it careened toward the Earth and an apparent impact.

It lit up the skies from Canada to Oregon and lit up 911 phone lines everywhere in between.

Everyone described the same thing: Bright lights, beautiful colors and an apparent impact at the end.

Geoff Chester, spokesman for the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C., speculated the meteor was the size of a big suitcase and had been orbiting the sun for millions of years before entering Earth's orbit.

A Federal Aviation Administration spokesman in Seattle, Mike Fergus, said a private pilot believes he saw the meteor hit the ground at about 5:45 a.m. Fergus said the pilot reported a flash and a burst of light near State Route 26 and the Lind-Hatton Road in the southeast corner of Adams County in southeastern Washington.

The best estimate so far as to what happened comes from the Pacific Northwest Seismographic Network's earthquake seismometers. A location was pinpointed a few miles south east of Walla Walla, due north of La Grand Oregon, right over Oregon's blue mountains.

"People in the area probably heard it.  They heard a boom of some sort. That's an acoustic airwave that comes down from the explosion and when it impacts the ground, is shakes the ground slightly," said Steve Malone, PSNS

It shook it enough to be picked up by seismometers in the ground in southeast Washington and northeast Oregon.  And by measuring how long it took those sound waves to reach those seismometers, experts can estimate the location and how high above the earth the explosion happened.

The estimate is that the meteor exploded 18 miles above the ground. That's three times higher than jetliners typically fly.

"It exploded. And as far as we know, we can see no actual impact of an object on the ground," said Malone.

But that doesn't mean little bits of the meteor couldn't have hit the ground.

KING 5's Glenn Farley and Gary Chittim contributed to this report.