I’ve been eyeballs deep in Daniel Yergin’s The Prize: The Epic Quest For Oil, Money, & Power (short review so far: unlike most corporations the oil industry operates on schedules of decades – they’re already way ahead of most critics, power groups, and governments) to pay much attention to recent national debates on men’s restroom symbolic interactions and whether or not the world is round or flat but the Peruvian “mystery illness” meteor is high weirdness chum in the water.
The first thing I thought was that it’s not a meteor or inquisitive Fungi from Yuggoth, but a deorbited spy satellite loaded with radioactive fuel. There’s evidence for this… In 1978, Cosmos 954 crashed into Canada, spewing radioactivity over 600km of the Northwest Territories. More recently there was the crash of Mars 96 which had 200g of plutonium pellets which may (or may not) have landed in Chile and Bolivia.
Then there’s this story from the Oberg article:
After the explosion of a rocket near the Baikonur cosmodrome in 1970, Soviet soldiers found a nuclear battery in the wreckage. Later, investigators looking for the battery discovered that the shivering soldiers had secretly kept it as a hand-warmer in their poorly heated guardhouse. In this case, the unit was spotted by one of the searchers and confiscated immediately.
At least the Peru meteor didn’t crash into anywhere in the Middle East. Cthulhu knows how the itchy trigger fingers would react there.
Time to fulfill one of the rules of having a blog: self-promotion!