A Crater and Questions

On Saturday night, a fiery object fell from the sky in Carangas, located in the Puno province of Peru. Stunned residents said they tracked it to a fresh hole in the earth that was more than 60 feet wide, 15 feet deep, filled with boiling water and steaming with noxious fumes, according to a statement from the Health Ministry.

Beware of the Blob!

And then people started getting sick: more than 150 reported symptoms like dizziness, vomiting and skin lesions, according to a government statement quoted by Bloomberg News.

The Associated Press reports that a local official confirmed through tests that a “rocky meteorite” created the crater. But a meteorite expert at the Natural History Museum in London said that “increasingly we think that people witnessed a fireball,” which she said would not be uncommon, and that the hole in the ground was unrelated. After seeing the fire in the sky, the local people “went off to investigate, and found a lake of sedimentary deposit, which may be full of smelly, methane-rich organic matter,” Dr. Caroline Smith suggested. “This has been mistaken for a crater.”

A well-informed blogger also raises the possibility of a mud volcano and voices more doubts that a meteor was responsible. The local official who confirmed the meteorite strike also said that the water in the crater was boiling for 10 minutes.

Pravda, Russia’s newspaper, brought up the idea that the crater was created when the United States Air Force shot down one of its own satellites. The satellite was spying on Iran, and destroying it helps the United States lay the groundwork for an invasion. Radiation from the supposed satellite’s fuel cell is what sickened all those people.

Personally, methinks it’s the BLOB.