Peruvian Meteorite Sickness Mystery

international | sci-tech | other press Tuesday September 18, 2007 21:53 by gerbil afterburner

An object thought to be a meteorite landed Saturday last at 16º24'12"S, 69º2'59"W just on the Peruvian border with Bolivia. It left a crater 6 meters (19 feet) deep and 30 meters (98 feet) wide. Since then both locals and police who were sent to investigate claims of a mystery sickness have been hospitalised. All indications are of radiation poisoning. & the appropriate authorities of scientists have taken samples and closed the area. Very rational & "move along there - nothing to see" stuff, most people will agree. But the global media heard of it. & now the Peruvian health ministry has made a statement on the general lines that the Andean state is not being invaded by cosmic inter-plantery bugs or viruses. So I thought I'd let you know.

We can now go several ways on this story.

(1) leave it at the facts, throw in the video link & wait for the scientists' report whilst making a mental note never to visit the Peruvian / Bolivian border.

(2) we can remember the "Andromeda Strain" movie of 1971 which saw a meteorite deliver a virus of pandemic destrucive capability to our planet & almost everyone would have died if the secret underground yankee base hadn't sorted it out with a nifty subplot on big corporation employee issues and tobacco smoking.

(3) we can ask the meteorite experts have there been any cases of illness of either radiation or other kind associated with such events in the past.

(1)
http://www.livinginperu.com/news-4724-environmentnature...-peru
http://www.livinginperu.com/news/4728
http://www.guardian.co.uk/space/article/0,,2171920,00.html
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5hJXaoGPq5CeSJMcddxE...vcntw
here's the BBC spanish world site with a video too
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/spanish/science/newsid_7000000...0.stm

(2) the "Andromeda Strain" was just a movie for entertainment & as such ought not be used as a reference guide for global disaster. Which is why most blogosphere christian apocalyptic types have already brought in the much more reliable Chernobyl / Woomword verse of Revelations thing.

(3) The experts are really the people to look to at times like this. Other than a bunch of ufo-ologists who forever reproduce each others unsourced titbits as being "canon" or refute additions as "propostrous", nobody ever links radiation sickness to a meteorite. There are some assertions that the 1908 Tunguska event was followed by illness amongst the peasantry of Siberia, but most people probably think it was bad third world Galway type water that did for them & did them in. Anyway as any expert would tell you, if the Tunguska event was a meteorite it came from a different shower. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event Which really is part of the wonder of this current Peruvian mystery............where did the meteorite come from?

The answer is simple - it came from outer space.

But it was not one of the seasonal Perseids and was more likely to have been one of the much less widely known or seen "aries triangulids".
Here is a list of all major meteor showers - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_meteor_showers For the moment my advise would be the usual.

Await for the Peruvian scientists to offer us a better explanation than the US media can, therefore ignore all space based or related paranoia warnings over the next week. Remember only a few generations ago that God fearing & indoubtedly fucked up people were absorbing HP Lovecraft's "The colour out of Space" which saw a meteorite poison farmers in Virginia with noisome eldritch stuff.

Learn about meteorites
http://meteoritemag.uark.edu/index.htm

I'll update ye.