A blindingly bright fireball streaked across the morning sky Friday above the Ural Mountain city of Chelyabinsk, landing with an ear-splitting crash in a lake some 50 miles to the west. The shock wave from the impact blew out windows across town, injuring as many as a thousand people, three of them critically, and causing a million rubles' worth of damage.

Chelyabinsk's mayor soon after took to the airwaves and confirmed via radio what his rattled citizens had already concluded: that a meteorite now believed to have been traveling at 33,000 miles an hour and weighing ten tons, had indeed hit somewhere nearby. (Pictures: Meteorite Hits Russia)

But that's not the way firebrand Russian politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky saw it. Playing