Ever hear of the Oakville Blobs?

C’mon now don’t talk about my family that way

Conspirators!!

Do you ever have one of those days where you go outside and it’s raining gelatinous, nausea-inducing blobs from the sky? No? Yeah, uhh, same with us…

What if I told you that not only did this happen, but it happened SIX TIMES over the course of three weeks! Let’s dive into this before we get all sticky.

Just don’t open your mouth when it’s raining… that’s all we’re saying

The date is August 7th, 1994 and police officer David Lacey is on patrol. Around 3AM, it started raining...something:

“We turned our windshield wipers on and it just started smearing to the point where we could almost not see. And [I] said, ‘Jeez, this isn’t right.’ I mean… out in the middle of nowhere, basically, and where did this come from?”

His report was not the first... or the last. A local resident, one Dotty Hearn, thought it was hail at first but knew immediately something was wrong when she went to go touch it. 

A description of the blobs, again from Officer Lacey: 

“The substance was very mushy. It’s almost like if you had Jell-O in your hand… We did have some bells go off in our heads that basically said that this isn’t right, this isn’t normal.”

Now that’s strange enough, but what happened next is even MORE CONSPIRACY NIBBLES (dammit I thought that was going to work…we’ll just pretend I wrote “more ‘spicious” and move past it.) 

Yes, hello, Mr. Yelp? The place was charming, until it rained goo. 1/5 Stars.

By the afternoon that very same day, Officer Lacey, Dotty Hearn, and several other residents had become mysteriously and violently ill - with symptoms that included difficulty breathing, vertigo, and nausea. Throughout the duration of the 3 weeks, resident Beverly Roberts claimed that everyone in the town had contracted a flu-like illness lasting up to two to three months. 

Even cats and dogs that had come into contact with the blobs fell ill. Several died. 

So what are we dealing with here?

Samples of the blobs were tested and the results were… interesting. One lab tech found that the substance contained human white blood cells. Tim Davis, a microbiologist who also tested the blobs, believed he saw an Eukaryotic cell, meaning that the substance was, or had been, alive. 

Perhaps most intriguing of all, a sample was sent to the Washington State Department of Health and tested by microbiologist Mike McDowell. McDowell discovered two species of bacteria in the blobs (one of which is also found in the human digestive system.) Why is this one the most intriguing? Because when McDowell came back to the lab after his testing, the substances were gone and he was told to stay quiet about the whole thing. According to McDowell:

“I came in, and the material was not where it was supposed to be. I asked management, ‘what happened to it’ and the exact words were ‘Do Not Ask.’”

Is it… poop? Poop FROM THE SKY??

Alright now the fun part- here are the conspiracies that exist concerning what the heck these raining blobs could actually be:

1. Human waste from an airplane (the Federal Aviation Administration requires the waste to be dyed blue, however, so that kind of debunks this one.)

2. Jellyfish remains (stay with me.) The Air Force confirms that they were practicing bombing runs over the Pacific around this time. The thought is that they exploded a school of jellyfish that sent their remains into the atmosphere… uh, yeah sure.

3. Military experiment testing an organic weapon (classic.)

4. Slime Mold (this one implies that residents woke up to find the blobs, not that it was raining down from the heavens.)

5. Star Jelly (According to folklore, this material is deposited on Earth during meteor showers)

6. Here’s the patent for a “method for artificially modifying the weather by seeding rain clouds of a storm with suitable cross-linked aqueous polymer… thus, diminishing the clouds ability to rain.” (could be this…because fuck mother nature, right?)

7. Aliens

8. Aliens’ poop

No theory was ever proven to be correct (so we’re for sure leaning alien poop. We KNEW it would be white and gooey. Just knew it.)

I don’t think you’re ready for this Jelly

If you’re ready for a little extra, Unsolved Mysteries (the original show) covered it in the episode below. Plus, a local Washington radio station did a cool wrap up on the whole situation on its 20 year anniversary. Take a bigger nibble!

• Unsolved Mysteries episode

• KXRO news public radio special on “20 Years Later”

And as always,

Stay ‘spicious.