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Meteorite Makes Villagers Ill (Carancas, Peru; 2007)

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_Gnomey_

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VILLAGERS in southern Peru have been struck by a mysterious illness after a meteorite made a fiery crash to Earth in their area.

Around midday Saturday, villagers were startled by an explosion and a fireball that many were convinced was a plane crashing near their remote village, in the high Andes department of Puno in the Desaguadero region, near the border with Bolivia.

Residents complained of headaches and vomiting brought on by a "strange odour," local health department official Jorge Lopez told Peruvian radio RPP.

Seven policemen who went to check on the reports also became ill and had to be given oxygen before being taken to hospital, Mr Lopez said.

Rescue teams and experts were dispatched to the scene where the meteorite had left a crater 30m wide and 6m deep, said local official Marco Limache.

"Boiling water started coming out of the crater and particles of rock and cinders were found nearby. Residents are very concerned," he said.
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Source: http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,22439164-2,00.html


Later guys, I'm off to the outback, figure I'd best get a head start on the inevitable swarms of the undead.
 
I saw a related story where a childless couple took in an abandoned baby with an unusually strong grip.
 
jefflovestone said:
I saw a related story where a childless couple took in an abandoned baby with an unusually strong grip.
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Why so Kryptic, Jeff?
 
Did anyone ever read The Andromeda Strain??
 
prolly an indian navy satellite with a "special" power source. radiation poisoning probably, boiling water etc. 10kG of plutonium will do that.
 
_TMS_ said:
prolly an indian navy satellite with a "special" power source. radiation poisoning probably, boiling water etc. 10kG of plutonium will do that.
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Yeah, the boiling water had me thrown. (Vomiting from gas was easy, that stuff's all over the universe! ;) )
To my knowledge, apart from commets with ice middles (And remember, this is my knowledge, so it's quite thin. ;) ) no other water sources have been confirmed anywhere else in the galaxy. ? So it would either have to be part of a commet, or from Earth origonaly? :?:
Don't worry if I've just confused you, I've confused myself. :D
 
The water needn't have come from the meteor (or satellite) if it's a 6m deep hole it could have punched into the water table.
 
_Gnomey_ said:
Later guys, I'm off to the outback, figure I'd best get a head start on the inevitable swarms of the undead.
Click to expand...

Okay, so you figure you're safe now. But remember that when that army of the undead finally shows up in OZ, we'll all be part of it.

And there's already this strange odor in the air that's starting to give me a headache.
 
Various news reports on the Peruvian meteorite have used such words and phrases and "boiling water," "steam" and "calcined....cinders."

But the one thing standard Astronomy is adamant about is that there is no such thing as a "hot" meteor, outside of science-fiction and science-horror films. Meteors are cold, travelling through space at temperatures approaching absolute zero. Even as they descend through earth's atmosphere, creating the "fireball" effect, they heat to no more than a depth of about 1/1,000th of an inch, which entirely dissapates within a few seconds of landfall.

When witnesses "burn" their hands and fingers on freshly-fallen meteorites they are actually registering that tremenous cold. They are experiencing super-"freezer burn."

At least that's what Astronomy claims. But there are exceptions in the Fortean records and the Peruvian meteorite seems to be one of those exceptions.
 
OldTimeRadio said:
_Gnomey_ said:
Later guys, I'm off to the outback, figure I'd best get a head start on the inevitable swarms of the undead.
Click to expand...

Okay, so you figure you're safe now. But remember that when that army of the undead finally shows up in OZ, we'll all be part of it.
Click to expand...
The undead are already here, they're just waiting for the order from their leader, John Laws.
 
Very interesting (and plausable) take on this from Bad Astronomy

...I said it didn’t sound like a meteorite; in fact, the impacts reported in the vast majority of news stories have more mundane explanations.

But this one, maybe, has an even weirder explanation! In the newsgroup sci.space.history is a thread discussing this Peruvian event. One of the participants, Pat Flannery, has come up with a very interesting suggestion: this was no space rock, it was a Scud missile gone awry.

Look at the evidence: the crater doesn’t look like a hypersonic impact crater. The shape is wrong, the size is wrong. There has never, not once, in the history of mankind been a meteorite impact that caused people to become ill. No meteorite has yet been found in the crater, despite the incredibly high value of such an object. Circumstantially, too, most impacts are not caused by meteorites.

Now chew on this: in the late 1990s, Peru is rumored to have obtained several Scud missiles [emphasis mine]:

More than 700 `Scud’ launchers were deployed by the former Warsaw Pact nations, each launcher carried one missile and had three reloads available…but it is believed that the SS-1 `Scud’ missiles have been withdrawn from service in Russia and destroyed … `Scud B’ missiles have been exported to Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Egypt, Georgia, Hungary, Iran, Iraq, Kazakhstan, North Korea, Libya, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Syria, UAE, Ukraine, Vietnam and Yemen. Unconfirmed reports in 1995 and 1996 have suggested that `Scud B’ missiles may have been purchased by Armenia, Ecuador, Pakistan, Peru and Democratic Republic of the Congo…

OK, so let’s say Peru has Scuds. So what?

Ah, the fuel used by Scud missiles is called Inhibited Red Fuming Nitric Acid. This is a toxic brew that can cause nausea and skin irritation, the same symptoms reported to have been seen in the people in Peru near the crater. A missile impact would also explain the witnessed fireball and the impact crater! Fuel leaks are not uncommon in missile impacts, especially if something went wrong with the missile (and with Scuds, that’s very common).

As usual, when we get news reports about meteorite impacts in remote areas, all sorts of contradictory information is reported. We’ll see how this goes, but I’ll just bet that investigators will find debris from a missile around the impact site. But if that’s true, chances are the reports will get suppressed, since I sincerely doubt the Peruvian government will want the news leaked that a) they have Scud missiles, and b) they screwed up and dropped one on their own people.

As bad as this is, I hope it doesn’t turn into a Peruvian Roswell.

Anyway, my thanks to Jim Oberg for turning my attention to the sci.space.history discussion, and to Allen Thomson as well for his help!
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Peru meteorite may rewrite rules
By Paul Rincon
Science reporter, BBC News, Houston

A meteorite which ploughed into the Peruvian countryside last year should have shattered and dispersed long before reaching the ground.

That is the conclusion of scientists who have been examining samples of the space rock and the 15m-wide crater it dug out in Carancas last September.

The discovery of a water-filled hole, following reports of a fireball in the sky, made headlines around the world.

Now experts say the event challenges conventional theories about meteorites.

This has nothing to do with the mass panic that famously followed the impact; rather it has to do with the science of space impacts.

Usually, only meteorites made of metal survive the passage through Earth's atmosphere sufficiently intact to scoop out a crater.

But the object which came down in the Puno region of Peru was a relatively fragile stony meteorite. During the fiery descent through Earth's atmosphere, these are thought to fragment into smaller pieces which then scatter over a wide area.

Yet pieces of the estimated 1m-wide meteorite are thought to have stayed together during entry, hitting the ground as one.

Details of the work were unveiled at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas.

Surprising speed

Peter Schultz told the conference that the meteorite was travelling at about 24,000km/h (15,000mph) at the moment of impact - much faster than would be expected.

"This just isn't what we expected," said Schultz, a professor of geological sciences at Brown University. "It was to the point that many thought this was fake. It was completely inconsistent with our understanding of how stony meteorites act."

Typically, fragments shoot off in many directions as the meteorite hurtles towards the ground - the so-called "pancake" model of atmospheric descent.

Professor Schultz believes fragments from the Carancas meteorite, which crashed to Earth on 15 September last year, may have stayed within the speeding fireball until they struck the ground.

This might have been due to the meteorite's high speed.

At the velocity it was travelling, fragments could not escape the "shock-wave" barrier which accompanies the meteorite's passage through the atmosphere.

Instead, the fragments may have reconstituted themselves into another shape, which made them more aerodynamic. Consequently, they encountered less friction during their plunge to Earth, holding together until they reached the ground.

"Although [the meteorite] is quickly broken up, it is behaving like a solid mass," Professor Schultz told the conference.

Fact and fiction

The chunks slammed into a dry riverbed near Lake Titicaca, on the border with Bolivia. The impact created a depression which filled with water from below ground in the first 15-30 minutes after the impact.

At the time, scores of local people who visited the crater complained of headaches, vomiting and nausea. Some commentators had speculated that a chemical reaction might have released toxins such as sulphur and arsenic. But mass hysteria is thought to be the most likely explanation.

Professor Schultz said he hoped his work would "distinguish fact from fiction".

He commented: "Reports about arsenic, bubbling [of water in the crater] and sickness were probably overblown. People were frightened, but some were also afraid they were under attack from a nearby country."

Eyewitnesses reported a cloud of dust travelling outwards from the impact site after the meteorite fell.

Reports of numerous livestock deaths are believed to have been exaggerated, though the researchers confirm that a bull's horn was ripped off in the impact.

Professor Schultz added that the Carancas event raised the possibility there were many other small craters caused by stony meteorites which go unrecognised.

Large buried iron meteorites are easier to detect, while stony meteorites fragment on impact and become intimately mixed with terrestrial soil.

"Maybe there are more of these things and we just don't recognise them because they're rock. When these things get pounded into cement, you won't see them," Professor Schultz explained.

The Carancas crater has eroded noticeably since September, and is expected to soon lose telltale features of an impact crater.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7292863.stm
 
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