My takeaway was this was an impact from a meteorite but I'm not 100% sure. Is there an "explain this like we are having a real life conversion" version?
Yup, looks to me like there was a really hot 20 Km circle in the desert for a little while there almost 30 million years ago.
And the silica sand melted down and resolidified as a glass which has inclusions that could be meteoric material.
This is already glass so I would want to prepare representative samples of pure material for direct exchange between laboratories without anyone having to use KBr pellets as spectroscopic windows.