On the morning of September 15, 2007, station I08BO—an infrasound monitoring post for the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty near La Paz, Bolivia—picked up a series of atmospheric vibrations. It was an explosion at very high altitude, and there was something streaking across the sky, heading southwest at 27,000 mph.

A few minutes later, at about 11:45 am, a brilliant fireball flashed over Carancas, a tiny village at 12,000 feet in Peru’s remote altiplano, a high plain bounded by the Andes. For those on the ground, this celestial visitor was the brightest thing anyone had ever seen in the sky.

A local radio host witnessed the blaze descend behind a hilltop statue of Jesus and rushed to his station to announce the arrival of a UFO. One villager saw the smoky trail and figured it must be Superman. Someone else saw a scorpion falling; he thought it was an antahualla, a mythical creature in local lore that soars from mountaintop to mountaintop at night, cloaked in light, menacing those below.

This article is a collaboration between WIRED and Epic Magazine. Joshua Davis contributed to the story.

What they all saw was a rock, somewhere between 7 and 12 tons of chondrite studded with pyroxene, olivine, and feldspar, burning at 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. It had begun its journey in the asteroid belt, more than 110 million miles away, floating between Mars and Jupiter, and it was among the largest meteorite arrivals in living memory. The rock was probably not much bigger than a dinette set, but that was large enough to generate an exospheric detonation with the energy of a low-yield nuclear weapon. Then it struck Earth.

Gregorio Urury, a farmer in Carancas, was sitting outside his small adobe house, taking a break from tending his sheep, when he felt the impact. He listened, paralyzed, as the sound passed over him—a low hum that quickly rose into a scream—until the ground shook. He couldn’t stand up at first. His dogs barked wildly. When he gathered himself and searched the plain, he saw a column of dense smoke rising in the distance.

It was the end of the dry season and the land was parched. The spring storms were about to roll in, and farmers would take cover indoors for fear of being found by a lightning bolt in the flat expanse. Urury, like most residents of Carancas, is part of the indigenous Aymara nation, a group that has lived here for centuries. Their land is hard to farm, contains few minerals, and has almost no features but for sod brick houses, shepherds, and their flocks, along with wild herds of vicuña, a more graceful relative of the llama. There are no fences, and a single dirt road bisects the plain. Urury’s farm is a modest holding that he had meant to leave to his children, until they, like so many others, left their father’s village for the cities.

Urury got on his bicycle and raced toward the smoke. He discovered a crater nearly 50 feet wide. The ground was dusted red, and a sulphuric smell stung his nose as he peered over the edge of the pit. The water table in this area is very shallow, only about 5 feet below the surface, and the hole had immediately filled with dark green water, which was bubbling from the heat. Around him he saw debris: clay and jagged rock, scattered like shrapnel. It looked like a bomb had gone off.

Urury borrowed a motorcycle and rode the 7 miles to Desaguadero, a town of about 20,000 people, to alert the local police. By the time they arrived, dozens of people had gathered and were picking up rock fragments around the crater. Urury and the police started collecting debris as well. The police chief went to find Maximiliano Trujillo, the mayor of Carancas, who was at a celebration for Santa María at a nearby church. He saw the object in the sky but didn’t know what to make of it when the police arrived and presented him with a handful of smoking black rocks. “What do you think it is?” the police chief asked.

The meteorite left a crater in the Peruvian altiplano that was 50 feet wide and 20 feet deep. Jake Naughton

By now, panic and confusion had taken hold in some places around the altiplano. Some thought the plain had combusted and were waiting for the fire that would engulf them. Others were certain that the end of days had arrived. People retreated to their houses to pray with their children. A local barfly named Vincente paused at the sound of the crash and then ordered another round of Paceña.