Polk County sheriff’s deputies are investigating what they described as “a large fireball” which many residents spotted falling out of the sky Thursday evening and landing somewhere in the wilderness of southwestern Polk County.

Around 9:30 p.m. the sheriff’s office said they were scaling back resources, and would resume the search in the morning. They said the sight was initially reported as a plane crash, but no planes have been reported missing.

Jim Todd, director of Space Science Education at OMSI, told KPTV the fireball could have been part of a meteor shower.

It could have started as big as a car and gotten as small as a baseball upon entering the atmosphere, he told the news station.

Such fireballs are common, he said, but people normally don’t see them.

“These fireballs or meteors occur almost every day, but most of them are so far up, we don’t notice them,” Todd told KPTV. “This one was large enough to survive the entry to the point that we could see it.”

Officers said they will continue to try to find an exact location and figure out what the object was before wrapping up the search.

—Jayati Ramakrishnan; 503-221-4320; jramakrishnan@oregonian.com; @JRamakrishnanOR