Eskimo North

My wife heard a story on television of a meteor falling in southern Peru causing 600 people to be sick with headaches, nausea, and sore throats.

I went searching on the the Internet and found many stories, the earliest ones claiming 600 sickened, and peoples livestock dying, later ones claiming 200 sick, and then the most recent, when a team of doctors reached the area they say they've found no evidence at all of people being sickened and attribute it to psychosomatic illness.

The meteor left a crater around 15 feet deep and 65 feet wide. It was reported to have caused water to boil for ten minutes in the crater. Scientists say that craters of that size usually aren't hot. Meanwhile, the Russian newspaper Pravda, claims that it was a US KH-11 Spy Satellite.

If it was a satellite, spy or otherwise, with a thermal nuclear power source, the U.S. govt wouldn't be letting souvenir hunters scramble all over it looking for stuff.

The ground in the area where this thing fell is sopping wet, meaning that there are anaerobic bacteria munching away merrily just under the surface generating their foul-smelling waste products. To get some idea of what happened when this thing hit that kind of ground, take a paper towel, fold it into a square about 3 inches on a side, soak it with water, open it once (so that if you were to fold it once you would have the square again), heat up a quarter on the stove until it's red hot, and then drop the quarter onto the wet towel and fold the towel over the quarter. After about 3 seconds steam will jet out noisily from the edges of the folded paper towel. Now imagine that you used foul, stinking, swampy water instead of tap water. If you're feeling really energetic, do the same experiment with a big hunk of steel and drop it into a hole in the ground and then dump a bucket of thick mud over it... We used to do this for entertainment when I was little.

I don't consider Pravda as a serious source of information, something more on the order of the National Enquirer or India Times.