Thousands of Russian emergency workers sent out to clear up the damage from a meteor seen breaking up over Ural mountains have failed to find fragments of the rock, sparking conspiracy theories about secret weapons and acts of God.
Asked about the speculation, an official at the local branch of Russia's Emergencies Ministry simply replied: "Rubbish".
Residents of Chelyabinsk, an industrial city 1,500 km (950 miles) east of Moscow, heard an explosion, saw a bright light and then felt a shockwave that blew out windows and damaged the wall and roof of a zinc plant.
The meteor travelled through the atmosphere at 19 miles per second, according to Russian space agency Roscosmos, leaving a long white trail visible as far as 125 miles away.
NASA estimate the object was around 55 feet across before entering Earth's atmosphere and weighed about 10,000 tons.
It exploded miles above Earth, releasing nearly 500 kilotons of energy - about 30 times the size of the nuclear bomb dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima in World War Two, NASA added.
"We would expect an event of this magnitude to occur once every 100 years on average," said Paul Chodas of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
"When you have a fireball of this size we would expect a large number of meteorites to reach the surface and in this case there were probably some large ones."
The Chelyabinsk regional governor said the strike caused about 1 billion roubles ($33 million) worth of damage.
Life in the city had largely returned to normal by Saturday although 50 people were still in hospital. Officials said more than 1,200 people were injured, mostly by flying glass.
Repair work had to be done quickly because of the freezing temperatures, which sank close to -20 degrees Celsius (-4 Fahrenheit) at night.
Emergencies Minister Vladimir Puchkov inspected the damage after President Vladimir Putin sent him to the region.
His ministry is under pressure to clean up fast following criticism over the failure to issue warnings in time before fatal flooding in southern Russia last summer and over its handling of forest fires in 2010.
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