Three teenage boys saw a fireball plummeting to Earth early Tuesday morning. Now their meteor, or the story of it, is the biggest thing to hit Elma.

"I looked over and I saw this bright streak through the sky," says Brian Reed. "It had a tail that was probably six or seven feet long and at the end it was glowing red. It was good size."

Brian's cousin Scott Reed also saw it. He says they watched the fireball disappear in the direction of their high school and then saw a cloud of dust go up in the air.

"We came down here and looked," explains Scott, "and all there was, was little holes and craters. We just started digging around right there, moving gravel, and we found little pieces that looked different."

The boys collected handfuls of tiny black rocks. One was so hot, it burned their friend Dan's thumb and finger.

The story of the meteorite crash spread through town, and soon everyone was sifting through the gravel looking for evidence.

"I never would've expected an asteroid or meteor would land in Elma," said one young girl.

And it's starting to look like one didn't.

Meteorite hunters from the Seattle area came to Elma after hearing the story, and they delivered bad news.

"We don't have a sample of it yet," says collector Blake Johnson. "If it stuck to a magnet I'd get pretty excited."

"They might be picking up the wrong rocks," adds collector Adam Hupe. "There might be some real meteorites mixed in there. I don't know. We've got to look at every single one."

The glassy black rocks could be worn asphalt or pieces of the old high school track. Any promising samples will go to scientists at the University of Washington to see if they're genuine.

But even if they're not, imaginations are free to run wild.

"We'll still think that it's awesome," smiles Scott Reed. "We'll still have it in our minds that we started something really big here."

And he adds, "I think it was a meteorite."

KOMO 4 News also received a handful of e-mail from other independent viewers saying they too saw the fireball streak across the sky shortly before 1 a.m.