A bird? A plane? Meteor grazes skies above New York City: NASA

New York has been the backdrop to countless "end of the world" storylines in film and TV.

But on Tuesday an actual meteor shot over the city's iconic Statue of Liberty before disintegrating high above Manhattan, NASA's Meteor Watch said in a post on Facebook.

Residents flooded the internet with reports of a fireball in the sky, with some describing the sensation of an earthquake, and others recounting the sound of a thunderstorm.

"At 34,000 miles per hour, the meteor descended at a steep angle of just 18 degrees from vertical, passing over the Statue of Liberty before disintegrating 29 miles above midtown Manhattan," the United States's space agency NASA wrote on social media Tuesday.

Footage from a doorbell camera uploaded to the American Meteor Society (AMS) showed a bright flash in the sky above Wayne, a town in New Jersey state which neighbors New York.

The AMS received a total of 43 witness reports connected to the meteor, according to its website.

NASA stressed in its update that "this trajectory is very crude and uncertain; it is based on a few eyewitness accounts and there is no camera or satellite data currently available to refine the solution."

No meteorites were produced, it added.

NASA said that "reports of military activity in the vicinity around the time of the fireball" would explain the reports of the tremors and booms.