According to a National Geographic news article, the meteorite that struck Peru recently (see here and here) really was a meteorite (and not a missile or anything else), and the reason people got sick in nearby villages is that it struck a location that had arsenic in the groundwater. Yikes.
We may finally have a story that makes sense. Samples of debris indicated it was extraterrestrial, but I wasn't sure how much weight to give that. The crater looks odd, but it turns out to have hit near Lake Titicaca, and the soil composition and shallow water table may account for the shape. The crater is pretty substantial: note the people on the upper right of the rim in that picture for scale. The claim now is that the meteoroid was hot when it hit (or the impact itself generated the heat), creating a steam plume tainted with arsenic -- ...
