The article is devoted to the qualitative study of the eyewitness accounts of the meteorite fall in Chelyabinsk. On the basis of the frame analysis of 40 narratives obtained on the day of the incident, a pattern is built of interpretations and the connotations of an a-typical event in everyday life, recorded and summarizes are the ways of understanding the precarious situation from the standpoint of subjective-emotional perception of its narrators.