From outer space:

Local media have reported eyewitness accounts of a fiery ball falling from the sky and smashing into the desolate Andean plain near the Bolivian border Saturday morning. Officials have said it was a meteorite.

Jorge Lopez, director of the health department in the southern state of Puno, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that 200 people have suffered headaches, nausea and respiratory problems caused by “toxic” fumes emanating from the resulting crater, which is some 66 feet wide and 16 feet deep.

But meteor expert Ursula Marvin, cast doubt on that theory, saying, “It wouldn’t be the meteorite itself, but the dust it raises.”

A meteorite “wouldn’t get much gas out of the earth,” said Marvin, who has studied the objects since 1961 at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Massachusetts.

To say that I do not envy these sick Peruvians is to say something that is far from the truth. To be made sick by an alien object that fell from space is to experience a higher (otherworldy) order of sickness. It puts to shame the earthy cough, the public sneeze, the domestic headache. What I would do to have a headache that has its cause in the mysterious materials of a meteorite. Or to have lungs that burn because of strange stuff from the stars. You lucky Peruvians, how I so envy your galactic stomach aches, nausea, and vomiting.