A fire in Maryland that officials said might have been caused by a meteorite turns out not to have been caused by a meteorite at all.

Late Sunday night, the Bowie Volunteer Fire Department reported that its Station 39 had responded to a “massive brush fire” near Scarlett Oak Terrace. “39 runs an odd one,” the department tweeted. “Possible meteorite strike.” The tweet was accompanied by the photograph of a crater and a small, rock-like object.

After some local media began following the story, however, the volunteer fire department’s captain apologized. He explained that the two-acre fire took 15 firefighters four hours to extinguish, but said it was not caused by a meteorite.

“A tweet was sent out using the official department Twitter account that insinuated that there was a relationship between a meteorite and the cause of fire,” Chief Jonathan D. Howard Sr. said in a statement. “This was simply not so and the post should have never been made listing a cause. Cause and determination is made solely by the Prince George’s County Fire/EMS Department. As the Chief of the Bowie Volunteer Fire Department, I apologize for the media attention this has created and have put measures in place to make sure this doesn’t occur again.”

In a statement, a spokesman for the Prince George’s County Fire Department said the cause of the fire was “undetermined.”

[Did a meteorite cause a brush fire? Definitely not, and here’s why.]

U.S. Naval Observatory astronomer Geoff Chester told The Washington Post that meteorites are cold when they strike the Earth and do not cause fires, unless they strike a flammable object like, for example, a gas line.

“The likelihood that the fire was caused by a meteorite is somewhere between slim and nil,” he said. “I think they have to look for some other cause for this one.”