1/1000th of the story...

On the fifteenth of July in 1918 a massive explosion in southeastern Colorado burned a large area of land, just outside the town of Las Animas in Bent county. The pattern of destruction stretched in a circular shape in a three mile wide circumference. Witnesses reported a loud roar and saw a blinding flash in the sky. Trees and plains of high grass were pushed to the ground up to ten miles away from the explosion. At the center of the blast was a farmhouse that was the home the young Mills couple, Stephen and Joanne. Their home, the barn, and all of their land was incinerated in a single moment. The Mills died in the explosion along with an unnamed young woman and the woman's unborn child. The unidentified woman had come to stay with the Mills two weeks before the incident. It is believed she had been homeless and that she was looking for work and a safe haven where her child could be born. The cause of the explosion had been a mystery for most of the twentieth century. No evidence found at the scene offered a satisfactory explanation of what had caused the massive devastation. Local authorities would not support the rumors that the explosion was the result of the combustion of illegal blasting materials. No evidence of such materials had ever been discovered nor was it believed that the Mills would have had such materials on their property. Government investigators concluded that the explosion was the result of a meteor falling out of the sky, but no extraterrestrial materials had been discovered in the burned zone and none of the witness ever reported seeing anything streaking across the sky. Witnesses would only speak of a loud bang and a bright flash. Also there had been no impact crater that would show where a falling object would have crashed, which would support the government's explanation. However, decades later, in an issue of "Astrospace Journal", a feature article tells of a new hypothesis. Research from a team of students from Bent County Community College has become the definitive explanation of what caused the Mills/Las Animas explosion. It states that the event that flattened a forest, burned the land, destroyed the Mills farm and taken four lives was the result of the explosion of a low density asteroid, which broke apart when it came into the planet's atmosphere and sent its shockwave to the earth.