EDMONTON - The fireball spotted by hundreds of people Thursday evening likely broke into pieces that landed around the Alberta-Saskatchewan border near Wainwright, says a meteor expert.

More than 400 people reported seeing the object, said Alan Hildebrand, co-ordinator of the Canadian Fireball Reporting Centre at the University of Calgary. All the sightings helped narrow where meteorites might be found, said Hildebrand, who was headed for the area Friday night.

He also wants to view security camera videos that may have caught the fireball.

Hildebrand is especially interested in hearing from people in the Wainwright, Provost, Chauvin and Ribstone areas.

The meteor may have broken into hundreds of meteorites of various sizes. Landowners should look on their property for unusually shaped dark grey or black rocks that are denser than average rocks.

Frank Florian thinks the search for the meteorite is at the mercy of Mother Nature.

"As soon as the snow falls, there's no chance of finding anything until springtime," said Florian, community astronomer at the Telus World of Science.

Environment Canada's forecast late Friday afternoon was for a 30-per-cent chance of flurries overnight. If that doesn't happen, there's no snow forecast through to Tuesday.

The brightness of the fireball may have misled people to think it fell close by, Florian said.

The official way to report a sighting is to the Meteorites and Impacts Advisory Committee, a volunteer group of geologists and astronomers that serves as the co-ordinating body for meteorite reporting and research in Canada.

Six special cameras set up to record fireballs will also help narrow the search area. The cameras, operated by the Canadian Fireball Reporting Centre, are located in Edmonton, Athabasca, Calgary and smaller centres.

Hundreds of people reported seeing the meteor, but what Chris Herd is waiting anxiously for is a report from someone who found a piece it.

"The sooner it's picked up, the better, for scientific reasons," said Herd, a University of Alberta associate professor of earth and atmospheric sciences.

Meteorites that aren't quickly recovered become weathered and rusty and less representative of what they were originally.

This particular meteor was thought to weigh about one to seven tonnes before it entered the Earth's atmosphere, and was five times as bright as a full moon.

The vast majority of meteorites come from an asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, he said. Rocks get liberated from there every now and then when the orbit of Jupiter disrupts the orbit of the rocks, and sends them in towards the sun. They can spend a few million years going around the sun before they cross the orbit of the Earth and fall to the ground here.

The age and origin of these rocks creates keen interest.

Robert Haag has made a living for the past 30 years buying and selling meteorites and other space debris.

The famous American meteorite collector is offering $10,000 to anyone who can locate and give him the first one-kilogram chunk of the meteorite that fell Thursday.