h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

This must be the year for seeing peculiar things! Coming back in the car from supper at a Chinese restaurant on Tuesday night I saw something most strange in the sky. I asked my brother to stop, so that we could all see it, but there was nowhere to pull in. It was a bright light with a smokey tail, a bit like a comet, but the 'tail' was very like smoke, widening behind, and pointing the 'wrong' way for a comet. The phenomenon only lasted a couple of minutes.
On the front page of a weekly local newspaper yesterday was the report of a UFO which had been tracked on radar and had been reported from other parts of the country. The description was the same, and as I had drawn it for the rest of the family to imagine.

A bright light with a smoke trail?

Sounds Rum and Uncanny to me...
it also sounds a lot like a meteorite, so I'm deeply envious. I've always wanted to see one! Where was it?

Yes. The trail was not like a plane' vapour trail, but short and broadening out, so not travelling very fast?? The smoke effect was lit by a nearly full moon. My first thought was 'comet', but it was pointing away from where the sun most likely was and probably in the atmosphere. Lasted just a couple of minutes until the bright point of light faded and the trail 'melted' away.
It was picked up on radar from an air force base. Seen in Beja, Montijo and Lisbon. All other reported sightings only in Portugal.
We were on the EN125 in the Algarve, heading west and I noticed it just below a line between the Plough and the Pole Star.
Can't comment on any noise, as was in a car with the windows up. No noise was reported from anywhere else.

It was obviously something giving me a tip for the Derby??!! (North Light has just won!)

Some years ago we had a meteor land just over the Spanish border - and that lit up the whole sky and was followed by an explosion and shock wave some time later. We thought that that had been an explosion at sea to the west of us, whereas it had been about 150 miles east!