The Carancas Conundrum

 

 

The pitch black night of September 15, 2007, for people living in Carancas – a town around 1,300 kilometers to the south of Lima, capital of Peru – would perhaps remain infamously etched into their baffled memories for a long time to come... In a perplexing incident right out of science fiction movies, locals witnessed a huge fireball streaking through the sky, in actuality a meteor, which moments later crashed into earth with massive force near this town (The impact even caused a mini-earthquake – it registered 1.5 on the Richter Scale!), showering debris almost a quarter of a kilometer in radius, and leaving a whopper of a crater close to 100 feet wide and 20 feet deep. So far, so good, at least, till the time something uncannily strange started happening to hundreds of residents in that town... They inexplicably started falling ill to a mysterious illness, which was accompanied by painful bouts of vomiting, nausea, dizziness and headaches – resulting in over 600 people getting affected.

Pravda, the official Russian newspaper, was the first to create a global furore by reporting that the meteor was in fact a top secret US satellite, KH-13, whose main power generator powered by the radioactive isotope Plutonium-238 had crashed into Carancas. But negating these early fears, the Peruvian Nuclear Energy Institute confirmed that there was no radiation detected from the site. BBC did at that time quote Peruvian officials revealing that the meteor strike had resulted in “fetid, noxious gases” being released in the atmosphere; and National Geographic had experts prognosticating that elements like arsenic could have caused the puzzling illness, though, in reality, doctors were never able to provide a definite diagnostic confirmation of the exact cause of the weird symptoms.

Although this mystifyingly bizarre incident in Carancas will fade from media news in the future, there’s at least one huge upshot for this previously obscure town – it’s the latest hotspot tourist attraction in Peru! The last one heard, nobody was complaining...