What happened
Shortly before noon on September 15, 2007, residents of the village of Carancas on the Altiplano plateau, near Lake Titicaca and the border with Bolivia, saw a fireball and heard a powerful explosion. A crater about 13 meters in diameter formed in a nearby field and quickly filled with murky, bubbling groundwater. Over the following days, many residents reported headaches, nausea, and vomiting, which the media described as a “mysterious illness from space.” Geologists, doctors, and scientists came to the site, confirmed that it was an impact crater, and collected fragments of the meteorite. The event surprised specialists, because the stony meteorite reached the ground at high speed instead of slowing down and breaking up in the atmosphere.
Witnesses
Residents of Carancas, who saw the fireball and heard the explosion; the crater was studied by scientists from Peru and abroad.
Explanations and hypotheses
Studies showed that the crater was made by a stony meteorite – an ordinary chondrite – that did not break up in the atmosphere, as usually happens with objects of this size; this prompted researchers to revise models of meteoroid entry. The residents’ symptoms are most often attributed to inhaling vapors from heated groundwater, which in the region contains arsenic, or to a psychogenic reaction. No radiation was detected.
Explained The phenomenon has a widely accepted, down-to-earth explanation.
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