Police in southwest England say they were inundated with calls after a sonic boom, believed to be caused by a meteor, rocked Devon and Cornwall counties.

Staff at a police station in Devon said floors in the building shook while doors were also blown open at another station, the BBC reported.

Police officials said they first thought a mini-earthquake had struck the region, but British Geological Survey said it could find no evidence of an earth tremor and suggested the loud bang was in fact the sonic boom from a meteor.

"The first calls reported sounds like an explosion," police Inspector Gareth Twigg told the BBC.

"Further calls also described noise and then objects shaking.

"One lady on Dartmoor who was alive during World War II said it was like a bomb going off."

Experts said the chances of finding any remains of the meteorite on the ground are very slim.

"People might think if they heard the meteorite over Devon and Cornwall they could find it in a field, but the chances are that it went into the Atlantic," Mark Ford, chairman of the British and Irish Meteorite Society, said.

"It would have been several miles up and their trajectories and speed are such that they land hundreds of miles away from where they are heard or seen."