Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Peruvian Pod People Update


The Peruvian Pod People I told you about are OK, and about to make a bunch of money on tourists.
First, the crater outside a Peruvian town near Lake Titicaca was caused by a
meteorite, not a mud volcano, crashed American satellite, Chilean
missile attack
or “a lake of sedimentary deposit.”
Secondly, the mystery illness is probably not due to “panspermic alien
microbes” or other space-based bacteria, as much as some had hoped or feared,
however unseriously. It came from the soil, a Peruvian researcher who has
visited the site tells National
Geographic
:

The illness was the result of inhaling arsenic fumes, according to
Luisa Macedo, a researcher for Peru’s Mining, Metallurgy, and Geology Institute
(INGEMMET), who visited the crash site.
The meteorite created the gases when
the object’s hot surface met an underground water supply tainted with arsenic,
the scientists said.

Numerous arsenic deposits have been found in the subsoils of southern
Peru, explained Modesto Montoya, a nuclear physicist who collaborated with the
team. The naturally formed deposits contaminate local drinking water.

“If the meteorite arrives incandescent and at a high temperature
because of friction in the atmosphere, hitting water can create a column of
steam,” added José Ishitsuka, an astronomer at the Peruvian Geophysics
Institute, who analyzed the object.

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