First, go read my first post about a "meteorite" impact in Peru.
OK, got it? 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launcher carried one missile and had three reloads available…but it is believed that the SS-1 `Scud’ missiles have been withdrawn from service in Russia and destroyed … `Scud B’ missiles have been exported to Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Egypt, Georgia,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!
September 20th, 2007 at 11:54 am
Well… When people in Peru start turning into brain-eating zombies, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Aside from that, that scud-angle is pretty odd. On the one hand, it makes sense, but on the other, I don’t see how they could bomb their own people testing the weapons. I mean, it’s Peru. They could just launch it straight out over the ocean.
September 20th, 2007 at 11:56 am
I really like that explanation better than “mystery space sickness.”
“Stupid Humans” is much easier to believe, and easier to explain.
September 20th, 2007 at 11:59 am
T Virus.
Mark my words.
September 20th, 2007 at 12:04 pm
Shouldn’t there be some rocket debris, or meteorites that would give clues as to what the object was? Wouldn’t that be the only way to be sure?
Could it be that the object hit something in the ground, buried toxic waste for instance, that is causing the illness?
I really have no idea, but I would like to know.
September 20th, 2007 at 12:05 pm
Way to (again) completely dismiss the phenomenon out of hand without (again) having any real information about it what so ever, duders. Très skeptico, très skeptico!
September 20th, 2007 at 12:08 pm
I can see a few problems with the scud theory. If there was an explosion wouldn’t almost all the fuel have burnt off in it? I mean that stuff is pretty volatile. Wouldn’t we see more metalic debris around the impact crater? Where did the boiling water come from? I can’t think of anything else at the moment but i’m sure it’s out there. It’s a good theory I just don’t know that I can buy into it.
September 20th, 2007 at 12:11 pm
[...] Astronomy just posted an interesting take on this. Rather than being a meteor impact crater, perhaps this was a Peruvian scud missile gone [...]
September 20th, 2007 at 12:16 pm
Sorry Abj… this “dismissal” is certainly no worse than “it was a meteor”.
Look at it from the scientific method approach.
Situation:
1. crater found
2. people sick, verifiable
3. evidence of heat-related damage around crater.
Hypotheses to explain situation:
1. meteor slammed into the earth there, was hot enough to burn things AND carried a mysterious pathogen
2. Scud missile malfunctioned and exploded spewing toxic fuel around
3. God did it.
Now, all three of those hypotheses have their strengths. The third one, in particular, would explain everything without even having the requirement for evidence or rational thought. However, we’re all about rational thought, so we will dismiss that one out of hand.
The first one certainly does explain the situation. It has weaknesses, however: most meteors don’t land hot, never has a recorded case of a meteor landing caused people to be sick, no meteor has been found. That said, certainly meteors have landed that have never been found, meteors have landed and created heat damage, and although no meteors have been known to make people sick, it is possible, however unlikely.
The second one explains all facets of the situation with feasible reasons. Exploding bombs or rocket engines do make craters and burn damage. Rocket fuel is often toxic AND produces the symptoms described by the sick people. In the absence of further evidence one way or the other, this hypothesis probably fits the situation better because it relies on events that are more likely to have occurred, even though the meteor theory is possible.
September 20th, 2007 at 12:27 pm
Just a pick, but RFNA (bad stuff if you’re a biological organism) is the oxidizer used by the SCUD. The fuel is a form of hydrazine, even badder stuff. The Proton launcher that failed recently dumped tons of both on Kazakhstan, but they’re used to that over there.
Disclaimer: I have no opinion about the Peru crater other than it doesn’t look like a meteorite caused it. But I could easily be wrong.
September 20th, 2007 at 12:32 pm
If this was caused by a Scud missile shouldn’t there be several more impact craters from the multiple Patriot missiles it brought down?
Sorry. Old joke. It was either that or something about amphipod crustaceans. Peru definitely has that type of scud, by the way.
September 20th, 2007 at 12:33 pm
The REAL explanation!
The one all you SO CALLED skeptics (but yet SO GULLIBLE) are trying to keep quiet!
http://lolthulhu.com/2007/09/19/35/
IT’S ALL SO CLEAR NOW.
September 20th, 2007 at 12:50 pm
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2007/09/20/science-meteor-peru.html
This sounds a little more likely. But then, who knows.
September 20th, 2007 at 12:58 pm
“Way to (again) completely dismiss the phenomenon out of hand without (again) having any real information about it what so ever, duders. Très skeptico, très skeptico!”
Um, dismiss??? Nobody’s dismissing anything. The BA is just proposing a hypothesis based on things that can be checked out. I think it would be a bad idea to start a door to door search for Elvis, but probably a good idea to wear whatever protective clothing is needed for RFNA & hydrazene while CONTINUING TO LOOK FOR EVIDENCE.
-Tom
September 20th, 2007 at 1:09 pm
From that cbc.ca article:
“Hernando Tavera, a geophysicist at the institute, said similar cases were reported in 2002 and 2004 elsewhere in southern Peru, but were never confirmed as meteorites.”
Lots of dud scuds?
I think we should apply http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam’s_razor when trying to figure out what happened in Peru.
September 20th, 2007 at 1:09 pm
So what does the crater made by a scud look like? I tried to google some pictures but couldn’t find any.
September 20th, 2007 at 1:35 pm
Ah – hypergolic propellants. I originally thought UDMH (no, I won’t type it’s full name), because that apparently causes similar symptoms.
I recall the Soviet Cheif Designer refused to use red fuming nitric acid in his rockets, describing it as ‘the devils venom’ – how this differs from inhibited rfna is beyond my knowledge of chemistry.
September 20th, 2007 at 2:20 pm
Whatever caused the crater, when I read that people got sick, I immediately thought about the Native American dancers who got sick from rat feces in the dirt. As I recall, their feet ground the rat droppings into the sand until it was just little particulates, then as they danced, the dust mixed with bacteria-laden rat poop caused them to get very sick.
Something similar could have happened here, especially if the prevailing wind was towards the village. Even if a 20-meter crater isn’t big by meteorite standards, that’s plenty of ground for bacteria to hide in (my back-of-the-envelope calculations give me 2.5 million kilos of dirt removed from the crater).
September 20th, 2007 at 3:15 pm
I still would find the volcanic explanation more likely, the whole region seems to be earthquake prone not to mention these similar (at least in size) older holes that are present in the same area:
http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=-16.630065,-69.230046&spn=0.019491,0.033474&t=h&z=15&om=1
A new hot spring erupting would explain boiling water, sulfurous gases and whatnot, carbon monoxide among other gases might explain the reported sicknesses though it would not be surprising if it were simply mass hysteria.
At, http://www.avaruus.fi/ (it’s in finnish but it’s there) which is an astronomy publication, they mention that NASA meteorite expert Ron Baalke would have dismissed the confirmed claim of a meteorite crater because it would require someone specially trained in these matters to actually make that call rather than just some geologist. (Doesn’t offer sources though).
This however doesn’t explain the sighting of the fireball, except I’ve never seen it explained more thoroughly than “someone heard an explosion and saw a fireball”.
September 20th, 2007 at 3:20 pm
>>> 1. meteor slammed into the earth there, was
>>> hot enough to burn things AND carried a mysterious
>>> pathogen
Pathogen already present in soil?
September 20th, 2007 at 3:52 pm
This Pravda article is a hoot.
http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/feedback/20-09-2007/97410-american_spy_satellite-0
September 20th, 2007 at 4:27 pm
Pathogen carried by the meteor or stirred up from the soil… either way works.
September 20th, 2007 at 6:00 pm
I think this was a direct hit into a pile of alpaca manure. That would explain the foul smell and the release of methane and ammonia could sicken people.
After the ground water is pumped off and they dig down quite a ways they will find a sizable stony meteorite.
September 20th, 2007 at 6:49 pm
One other possiblity. When I was in high school in northeastern Arizona, there was an explosion out in the fields one day. The people who checked it out found a crater, and a number of people reported seeing a fireball in the sky. Then it turned out that the crater was a hole someone had dug years before, and the explosion was somebody playing with dynamite. The fireball was a figment of several peoples imagination.
It also seems to me that skin rashes, headaches, and vomiting are pretty common hysteria symptoms.
So it’s entirely possible that nothing’s happened.
September 20th, 2007 at 7:03 pm
Great detective work, BA. Velma Dinkley would be proud.
September 20th, 2007 at 7:03 pm
The closest description of the location I could find was a “remote village, located in the high Andes department of Puno in the Desaguadero region, near the border with Bolivia.”
Peru has a history of border disputes with its neighbors reaching back over a hundred years. Although its last conflict was with Ecuador, it’s not unreasonable to assume that if Peru possesses Scud’s, it has prepositioned some of them along the Bolivian border as well. If they exist, they might have been placed there because of a perceived Bolivian threat or to safeguard them from an Ecuadorian incursion. There is certainly no love lost between the Bolivians and the Peruvians so the area would be a reasonable place to put a military post for training and border control. If I remember from the first Gulf War, the Scud was pointed rather than aimed. Even with the upgrades the Iraqi’s gave their missiles, they were notoriously inaccurate so a test or training firing gone of course is a possibility.
September 20th, 2007 at 7:05 pm
The closest description of the location I could find was a “remote village, located in the high Andes department of Puno in the Desaguadero region, near the border with Bolivia.”
Peru has a history of border disputes with its neighbors reaching back over a hundred years. Although its last conflict was with Ecuador, it’s not unreasonable to assume that if Peru possesses Scud’s, it has prepositioned some of them along the Bolivian border as well. Perhaps because of a perceived Bolivian threat or to safeguard them from an Ecuadorian incursion. There is certainly no love lost between the Bolivians and the Peruvians so the area would be a reasonable place to put a military post for training and border control. If I remember from the first Gulf War, the Scud was pointed rather than aimed. Even with the upgrades the Iraqi’s gave their missiles, they were notoriously inaccurate so a test or training firing gone of course is a possibility.
September 20th, 2007 at 7:41 pm
Just because an unverifiable report was used to explain Peru’s possible purchase of scud missiles, people jump the gun and assume it’s not a meteorite.
Apparently, peruvian geologists recovered some rocky samples and determined that the results were that of a stony meteorite. This will have to be further verified, but I only hope BA was being sarcastic. I myself am prone to being sarcastically challenged at times.
Here’s a link that may help address the situation in question. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070920/ap_on_sc/peru_meteorite;_ylt=Am6gBrXX30eKuMsZoEtLCRIPLBIF
September 20th, 2007 at 9:26 pm
I like the Yahoo story, Particularly the following quote:
As other astronomers learned more details,
they too said it appears likely that a legitimate meteorite
hit Earth on Saturday — an rare occurence.
I hate it when illegitimate meteorites hit the earth–those bastards!
Whatever caused the crater, when I read that people got sick,
I immediately thought about the Native American dancers who
got sick from rat feces in the dirt.
I doubt it was Hanta Virus. Have any more people got sick after the initial exposure? If so, maybe–but an explosion serving to deliver a virus is highly unlikely, Michael Chrichton not withstanding.
Has anyone noticed the size of the crater fluctuates depending on the news story?
Is still think it was a Jet Propelled Guided NAAFI gone off course.
September 20th, 2007 at 11:36 pm
Helioprogenus – You have it exactly backwards. The Scud report did not cause people to doubt it was a meteor. The initial reports did not sound much like a meteor to anyone who knows anything about them. Meteors don’t make people sick. Contrary to popular opinion, meteorites are generally not hot but ice cold. (Rock is not a good conductor of heat and most of the surface layer that heats up as the meteor passes through the air evaporates off, leaving only a very thin hot crust surrounding an extremely cold core. The crust rapidly cools off while the cold core slowly warms up. Net result is a very cold meteorite.) Meteors capable of causing craters the size shown in the pictures are extremely rare. Very small meteoroids (grain of sand to small pebbles) burn up high in the atmosphere and never reach the ground. Larger ones (small rocks up to a few tons) do reach the ground, but are slowed so much, to at most a few hundred miles/hour, definitely sub-sonic, that they don’t really make a crater at all, maybe just a dent in the ground that they come to rest in. Still larger meteors disintegrate under the force of deceleration, fragmenting into hundreds or thousands of small meteorites, which impact much as the smaller ones do, at relatively slow speed. Still bigger ones (boulder size to football field size) release enough energy to explode like a bomb, high in the atmosphere. If large enough, they can release as much energy as a small nuclear bomb, but because the explode many miles up, they usually don’t do any damage on the ground. At the extreme, like the Tunguska event, they’ll knock down trees and cause lots of surface devestation (but unlike a real nuclear explosion, there is no radioactivity) and there is never any crater. It takes an even bigger meteor to again punch right through the atmosphere without any significant slowing, and only then is the result a crater. But a much bigger crater, hundreds of meters across and much deeper. See the Barringer Crater in Arizona for a relatively small example.
So lots of people doubted it was a meteor from the initial reports. Then (and only then) was there any speculation about Scuds.
It might have been a meteor. If conditions were just right, a relatively small and structurally strong (iron or stony iron) meteorite might have reached the ground with enough velocity to cause the crater seen in the pictures. Maybe it hit a pile of alpaca dung or a toxic waste dump and released a cloud of toxic gas or bacteria that made people sick. Or maybe it was a Scud (known toxic fuels that produce the described symptoms) or maybe it was a piece of space junk (though anything big enough to cause a crater like this is carefully tracked and re-entries and possible landing sites are well-known, so that’s unlikely), or maybe it was a gas main explosion, or methane (swamp gas) or a crashing UFO. Nobody dismissed anything, except people like you who dismiss all alternate explanations without anything but Internet reports to go on.
September 20th, 2007 at 11:38 pm
P.S. I invoke Godwin’s Law on myself. (Re: gas main explosion.)
September 21st, 2007 at 5:29 am
David Hall said: “Is still think it was a Jet Propelled Guided NAAFI gone off course.”
LOL. It can’t be. They can’t get the wood, you know.
September 21st, 2007 at 5:45 am
[...] Meteorite crash wrecks havoc in Peru Meteorite Mayhem Part II: Maybe Missile Mayhem? Apple’s fight against iPhone unlocks may result in expensive bricks Hybrid hard drives: Why [...]
September 21st, 2007 at 7:13 am
Interesting possibility about the SCUD. Hopefully, the full explanation will come to light before this all fades from the radar screen.
For those who question why not shoot a SCUD into the ocean, they may have aimed that way and missed through either error or malfunction.
I’ve been near (upwind) a nitrogen tetroxide (a component of RFNA) leak. Nasty stuff. A report to look for would be for a big red or brownish cloud. Hydrazine would not really have a color.
September 21st, 2007 at 7:30 am
smapdion that pravda article was awesome!
September 21st, 2007 at 9:13 am
What, no-one looked at the lolthulhu link?
I’m somewhat disappointed.
September 21st, 2007 at 9:33 am
The pravda history rocks!
The hipotysis of the KH-13 satelite makes a some sense.
Are the simptons experienced compatible with radiation poisoning?
September 21st, 2007 at 10:14 am
JS, yes, the US shot down our own spy satellite to prevent it from going to Iran and starting our invasion, because some within the military are whistleblowing, but then we cover it up by claiming it is a meteor hit. Very much sense indeed. *rolleyes*
iain, lolthulu – cute. Didn’t get the specific reference, though.
September 21st, 2007 at 11:11 am
Interestingly, in one of the many articles a witness said that rocs rained down for 20 minutes. One of the videos briefly showed a tin roof with an obvious dent and a large fragment as well as many smaller pieces.
If this was true that fragments rained down for 20 minutes it would be consistant with a meteor breaking up in the upper atmosphere. I doubt if whatever caused this crater could fling fragments so high that they took 20 minutes to reach the ground again.
Also: in relation to foul odor and meteorites, here is an article about a meteor burst over Canada’s Yukon a few years ago:
http://aquarid.physics.uwo.ca/~pbrown/tagish/
Interestingly, many witnesses reported a foul odor like sulfur or burning metal although there are no reports of sickness associated with it. The meteor also created a large sonic boom that was recorded on seismic instruments as well as being detected by defense satellites.
I wish we’d soon here more about this event from good sources rather than all this internet blogsh*t running so rampant.
September 21st, 2007 at 11:14 am
“ain, lolthulu – cute. Didn’t get the specific reference, though.”
The Colour Out of Space by H. P. Lovecraft
September 21st, 2007 at 12:13 pm
Well, here’s the latest over at spaceweather.com :
http://fe7.news.re3.yahoo.com/s/ap/peru_meteorite;_ylt=AsU2OF4h91hVBXHdD_kthJnlWMcF
It looks to be a good ol’ meterite impact after all. Fragments and seismic signature are consistant with a rocky-iron body of about 10 foot diameter (when it entered Earth’s atmosphere).
While this might help put to rest the SCUD theory, it still leaves room for the zombies!
September 21st, 2007 at 12:32 pm
[...] An additional candidate came from Pat Flannery on the sci.space.news newsgroup via Jim Oberg & Bad Astronomy — here, the crater was formed by the crash of a stray Scud-B missile. Again, this could [...]
September 21st, 2007 at 12:42 pm
Actually, the Scud theory was a bad one from the get-go.
Scuds come back to Earth in one piece (they don’t separate their warheads) — this means Scud impacts are surrounded by lots of debris (the rest of the missile). Look at the pictures of the impact crater — no visible debris. From the sound of things, what bits of metal were found around the crater are magnetic. This is consistent with iron inclusions in a stony meteorite, not with a missile (which, generally speaking, is largely made of other / lighter metals).
More here: http://preview.tinyurl.com/33xk9r
Sam
September 21st, 2007 at 2:36 pm
Phil, what are you doing spreading conspiracy theories? Next you’ll be in a hot tub with Stanton Friedman.
September 21st, 2007 at 3:09 pm
[...] appears likely that a legitimate meteorite hit Earth on Saturday — an rare occurence. But the BA has another theory: [...]
September 21st, 2007 at 4:35 pm
[...] why was Bad Astronomy Blog in denial about the identity of the fallen object? (see here and here. It was no [...]
September 21st, 2007 at 5:37 pm
“Phil, what are you doing spreading conspiracy theories?”
Well, Phil actually isn’t saying is *was* a Scud missile, only that it seems the most likely explanation. I’m sure he’d admit that he could be wrong, and that it may be a type of meteorite that no one has even seen before.
September 21st, 2007 at 8:09 pm
Of course I could be wrong. But I’m still not buying that it was a meteorite until we get a sample analyzed.
September 21st, 2007 at 10:20 pm
Well this time I think Phil Plait blew it . Enjoy your bits on “Are We Alone” but you lost common sense here. Not from being skeptical of a meteorite impact but proposing the SCUD diversion. I gather as your opposition to the meteorite was falling apart the WMD solution was best. Who do you work for! Dick Cheney. I apologize thats below the belt
When I saw the first reports I at least was skeptical enough to say it could be a number of things including meteorites and orbital debris etc. But lets go back to common sense.
Fact 1: I think a lot of people miss this area is a plain around 13,000 ft. Terminal velocities are a lot higher. In terms of density this is above about 1/3 of the atmosphere
Fact 2: Even though nearer to the equator than California it is cold there.
Fact 3: Because of the cold although there is not a lot of stuff growing there the organic material works into the soil over the years and fairly slowly decomposes.
Fact 4: The very first reports said foul or bad odors. Not sulfur smelling.
Speculation 1. Interviewers are frequently suggestive in their questions thus possible “sulfurous smells” Maybe and maybe not. Foul might mean more like dead animal thus the supposed vomiting.
Fact 5. The site is not very far from Lake Titicaca. Ground water cannot be ruled out.
Fact 6: The very first reports I read said the crater was 15 meters by 6 meters deep. The latest reports are similar except now that the crater has water in it depth seems hazy.
Speculation 2. In the days following the initial reports the crater got larger and larger. The media never exaggerates. Yea, sure! Then a scientist measured it and it went back to the size the farmers said.
Fact 7: The size of a meteor is inversely proportional to the quantity arriving and most likely on a logarithmic curve. But that doesn’t mean something in the 2.5 tonne range never hits.
Fact 8: Iron/nickel metallic meteorites stay basically intact all the way to the ground (note 1300 lb meteorite at the McDonald Observatory visitor center.) At 13000 ft there is even better odds of intact landing.
Fact 9: Although much rarer the metallic meteorites are quite dense
Fact 10: First reports indicated the inhabitants suddenly heard a roar, saw a fireball coming and had time to watch it, and then heard a boom. The initial reports indicated the inhabitants thought it was an airplane crash.
Speculation 3: Obviously since they went to the crater relatively quickly they had also noted about where it hit.
Fact 11: SCUDs do not make fireballs coming inbound, They are aerodynamic so they do not make much noise in descent. Unless you just happen to see it, you would not be alerted to where its flight was. Ask Gulf War I soldiers about that. They needed the sirens to let them know they were inbound. The sirens were activated by the radar observers and not always. Although I personally have not had a SCUD fired at me I have had a 155 mm missile go by me, Never heard it. Friend saw it just as it went by.
Fact 12: SCUDs used an OXIDIZER of red fuming nitric acid and as fuel I believe use UDMH or as the Soviets called it heptyl (which maybe meant seven carbon but it wasn’t. More subterfuge) UDMH, unsymmetrical dimethyl hydrazine.
Fact 13: Any fuming nitric acid is quite noticeable (makes an orange cloud around it) and is very pungent (Yes, I have had experience with it.). Inhabitants said foul smelling. A later arriving medical person said it irritated his throat.
Speculation 4: UDMH is poisonous and I would have suspected severe problems not nausea for a couple hours if significantly present.
Observation 1: Someone with more aerodynamic knowledge than me simply has to calculate what size metallic 1 to 5 tonne meteorites would be, what their terminal velocities at that altitude would be and with an approximation of soil mechanics for the that area what the crater sizes should be. Then we can compare it to the real thing.
Should we start a pool. I guess Iron/nickel meteorite, 2 to 4 tonne, irregular shape, terminal velocity 450 kts. impact gases and smells from organic material in soil.
But there is a real opportunity. If it is a meteorite, if it is intact, if it is stony (unlike my speculation), if it does have pockets, if it was ground water in the crater and if it temperature stablized to reasonable temperatures quickly, then does it have bacteria on board and can it be detected and can it be characterized. The “are we alone” question might have a partial answer here. I sure hope we at least have a small contingent of serious investigators headed that way. Panspermia is a theory but it may get a test here
September 22nd, 2007 at 12:27 am
I have problems with the meteorite theory:
1. Meteorites, as previously stated, come in cold, not hot enough to make the water in the crater “boiling”, as several witnesses stated.
2. Meteorites have 2 components to their flight, a “hot flight” part, where the envelope of air around the incoming bolide is incandescing, and a “cold flight” part, where aerobraking has slowed the rock below that speed and it is simply falling at no longer cosmic speeds. Unless you have the misfortune to be at ground zero directly under the meteorite, these things usually travel a long distance from where the glowing meteor is first seen. If the locals saw the bolide, chances are good whatever they saw fell a long distance away, not close enough for them to get there soon after it fell.
3. Speaking of rocks, by now, everyone in every little hamlet knows that there are crazy people out there who pay big money for meteorites. If there was a “shower of rocks” associated with the fall, how come none of the other purported meteorites have been recovered?
4. I await the analysis of a real meteorite specialist, not a geologist, not a vulcanologist, and not media speculation! No reputable scientist from outside Peru has so far investigated the crater or seen the alleged meteorite fragments.
September 22nd, 2007 at 3:48 am
National Geographic News has a story up on it now. They say that the villagers were sickened by arsenic fumes apparently generated when the meteorite’s hot surface hit arsenic contaminated ground water.
Debris apparently was sent as much as 250 meters from the crater.
September 23rd, 2007 at 12:04 am
[...] Plait at Bad Astronomy has another WMD for filling the hole: “I’ll just bet that investigators will find debris [...]
September 23rd, 2007 at 8:49 am
They have found iron debris consistent with a meteor. The wells in the area have an arsenic problem. Arsenic is common in the area, and would cause nausea. I’m not as skeptical as all the skud mongers.
September 23rd, 2007 at 11:06 am
someone need to go out there to get the samples, whether it’s a meteorite, underground stuffs or leaked chemicals from missiles that cause illness,
September 24th, 2007 at 9:18 am
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/09/070921-meteor-peru.html
September 24th, 2007 at 9:39 am
[...] that this was not a meteorite impact. But it wasn’t space debris either he concluded, rather, it’s possible the crater was formed from the impact of a scud missile. In the newsgroup sci.space.history is a thread discussing this Peruvian event. One of the [...]
September 24th, 2007 at 12:32 pm
I’ve lived in the area, and most of the speculation here is absolute crap. The Fujimori government, in power during the 90s, wouldn’t have been interested in buying Scuds since they didn’t have any targets for them. They were busy spending their money on actual projects with concrete results, such as paving highways, improving mine safety, and getting rid of the Sendero Luminso scumbags.
Carancas is hell-and-gone in the middle of nowhere. There are no toxic waste dumps there, because there are no industries besides extremely small-scale tin, lead and silver mines.
The idea put forward by the racist bitch from the London Natural History Museum, that there was a stinking lake bubbling with methane which no one noticed until a fireball drew their attention to it, is so absurd as to be risible. These are local people, intimately familiar with the territory, not London suburbanites out for a picnic. If a stinking lake suddenly appeared in Devonshire where a fireball had been seen, I somehow think that she would figure that it should be investigated.
No one builds piles of alpaca dung.
The area is over 13,000 feet above sea level. There is remarkably little atmosphere for the meteorite to have passed through, and what air exists is thin enough that internal stresses on the meteorite would be fairly minimal compared to (for example) the altitude of Tunguska. Meteorites fall intact fairly frequently in the Antarctic highlands and Tibet, I don’t see why you would think that it’s impossible in the Andes.
The ground in the Altiplano is not a nice homogeneous glacial fill like in North America and Europe. Most of the ground there is broken up with rocks the size of busses or larger, with ridges of bedrock slicing through the terrain. I’ve seen fields planted in a crack in the bedrock 20 meters wide. If the meteorite excavated a crater in the Altiplano I would certainly NOT expect it to be a nice round hole like the Arizona Meteor Crater. That would be almost impossible.
September 25th, 2007 at 4:18 am
Finally, a snippet of reality!
My referance to the meteor hitting a pile of alpaca sh*t was tounge-in-cheek. That is… …sarcastic. ‘ Just my reaction to all the nin-cum-poop (no pun intended) Ca ca-maney (OK, pun intended) SCUD-alien zomby theories running rampid on this internet. My apologies if I got any crap on your shoes.
P.S. I have a feeling that with lack of fuel at this remote high-altitude location, alpaca dung has a much better use than to sit around in a pile collecting meteorites.
P.P.S. North America is a pretty large and diverse place to be making a generalization like “nice homogenous glacial fill.” Could you please clue me in to where I might find this part of N.A.?
September 25th, 2007 at 11:31 am
Here’s another story that sheds a little better light on this thing.
http://forgetomori.com/2007/skepticism/peru-crater-meteorite-secret-satellites-and-zombies/
Near the bottom is a photo of an impact crater created by an errant Russian rocket and the story mentions Phil’s SCUD theory.
The crater is similar to the one in Peru, so this type of thing can and does happen but the size of the rocket and amount of propellant required to blast a crater of the size in Peru rules out a SCUD missile as the culprit to thre Peru crater but we already knew this didn’t we?
September 27th, 2007 at 11:16 am
Lab report relaeased at:
http://www.ingemmet.gob.pe/paginas/pl01_quienes_somos.aspx?opcion=320
September 28th, 2007 at 10:18 pm
[...] News. Scuds. Pravda. National Geographic. Bad [...]
October 27th, 2007 at 12:35 pm
Wouldnt the meteorite have been broken down to nothing by the atmosphere? If it caused a 100ft wide 20 ft hole that big on the ground then that meteorite sure had to be really big. What I’m saying is that if it were that big wouldn’t somebody have noticed it coming towards earth? Don’t we have astronomers and other scientist observing the skys? Space? Don’t you guys think somebody would have saw a 30 meter wide meteor coming towards earth??
October 31st, 2007 at 10:39 am
[...] read more | digg story [...]
June 29th, 2008 at 3:41 pm
It’s not that I doubt that it was a scud impact, but rather, that I don’t see any reason to discount the meteorite theory based on the reasons given thus far:
The impact crater isn’t shaped right.
The impact crater is too small
There’s never been a meteorite that made people sick.
I’m no astronomer but isn’t it possible that the object was shaped in such a way that it was slowed more than usual by friction or drag. Could it have been a piece of icy mud that didn’t become completely vaporized in the atmosphere? I dunno…
but you would think that a scud would leave scud-parts at the scene, and the fuming nitric screaming meme stuff would burn up in the explosion…no?
Peruvians are probably always getting sick. But the history of mankind is mostly unknown. We don’t know if anyone ever got sick from a meteorite before we started recording our history. For all we know, HIV could’ve come here on a meteorite.
We could’ve come here on a meteorite.