A METEORITE shower is suspected to be the cause of a spate of emergency calls off the North-East coast tonight.

Humber Coastguard received a number of calls at about 8.45pm reporting what appeared to be red flares fired into the sky from the vicinity of Saltscar Buoy, approximately three miles from the shore at Redcar.

The RNLI Atlantic 75 class lifeboat Leicester Challenge 2 was launched from Redcar to carry out a search.

Humber Coastguard called off the search after they received a large number of similar calls from along the length of the North-East coast from Tynemouth to Hull.

Dave Cocks, deputy launching authority at Redcar lifeboat station said: "Everyone involved was happy that this was a natural phenomenon and not a real distress signal.

"The sightings along the coast led the coastguard to conclude that the calls they had received were false alarms with the best of intentions and the lifeboat was stood down.

"The situation was further complicated by the fact that there was helicopter activity in the area at exactly the same time and the aircraft's lights may have been mistaken for distress flares."