At around 11:45 AM On September 15, 2007, the residents of the village of Carancas in the remote highlands of Peru, near the Bolivian border and Lake Titicaca, had their normally quiet, uneventful day intruded upon by the sight of a fiery ball shooting across the sky trailing smoke, bright enough to be seen for miles around despite it being the middle of the day. It was quite the spectacle for the rural, superstitious locals, and it became even more intense when the object smacked down into the earth nearby, generating a mushroom shaped cloud and leaving behind a crater measuring 20 feet deep and 45 feet wide, from which spewed boiling water and noxious fumes, the whole of it surrounded by smoking black fragments. The impact from the object was so strong that the shockwave shattered windows up to one kilometer away, damaged buildings, knocked a man off of his bicycle, and its vibrations were picked up on seismographic and infrasound monitoring equipment as far away as Bolivia. It would have seemed almost like a catastrophic event for the scared locals, and they even thought it might be an attack. Yet it would get stranger still, as this particular meteorite would prove to have some strange properties, and it would go on to spark a mysterious illness that remains unsolved.