Gnarly Nature

The Frog Pond #8: Rain of Terror

Or, the day meat fell on Kentucky - or did it?

Sarah L. Hawthorn

Jul 4, 2023 — 10 min read

The surface of the Frog Pond quivers in the July heat. Your skin smells of sunscreen and sunshine. When you sit in the grass on the edge of the water, you realize something is missing. There are no indignant quacks or urgent plops of frogs diving away, into the pond. No one flees from you anymore.

This month’s Frog Pond is preparing for big changes.

Mist-erious knowledge

A light summer rain begins as you straighten out your picnic blanket. You look up, but can’t spot any clouds. In fact, the rain seems to be focused entirely on you and your blanket. It grows stronger and stranger, until the mist forms out of its raindrops around you.

(Content Warning: Animal meat will be discussed in this section. I don’t go into detail more than mentioning the animals and body parts, but just a heads up in case that kind of talk freaks you out—feel free to skip it!)

The Kentucky meat shower of 1876

The meat shower, also referred to as the meat storm¹, remains an inconclusive 1870s mystery in Bath County, Kentucky. How? First:

The facts

On March 3, 1876, for a few minutes between 11 a.m. and 12 p.m., the residents of Olympia Springs encountered a bizarre phenomenon. Chunks of red meat fell from the sky, seemingly from nowhere. The meat chunks were roughly 2 x 2 inches to 4 x 4 inches large, and fell in an area roughly 100 x 50 yards². That’s the approximate length and width of an American football field.

Mrs. Crouch was sitting on her porch, making soap and looking out at her family’s farm when she saw pieces of meat falling from the sky. The meat slapped the ground about 40 steps from her house and onwards. The meat was described as fresh on falling³. While she believed it was a sign from God, scientists sampled the meat in the coming months to determine its origin.

A neighbour visited the site of the incident the next day and described it as spoiled, dry chunks of meat after being left out all day and night⁴.

While the meat appeared to be beef at first, taste testers (yes, two men did decided to try the sky meat) described it more like lamb or deer⁵. A wild game hunter who tried the meat promised it was bear⁶.

The news made local headlines, then into the New York Times. The first report on the samples later was made by Scientific American, with subsequent investigation by the Sanitarian and New York Medical Record.

The theories

One scientist at Scientific American believed it was Nostoc based on a 3 month old sample preserved in glycerin⁷. Nostoc is also known as star jelly, troll’s butter, spit of moon, fallen star, witch’s butter, or witch’s jelly (not to be confused with the multiple gelatinous fungi also called witch’s jelly).

Nostoc is a cyanobacteria—a bacteria that photosynthesizes. It looks like lumpy clear or green snot on the ground after rain makes it swell⁸. Otherwise, it’s usually too small to see on the ground. The taste of the substance (why do people keep eating this stuff!?!) is similar to frog or chicken⁹.

The type of the meat has been cited as beef, lamb, deer, bear, and lung tissue from either a horse or human infant (???). Further analysis cited the meat as various portions of lung, muscle, and cartilage¹⁰.

A previous version of the Wikipedia page for this event shows that there was once a mention of UFOs, but provided no citations and was eventually deleted¹¹. A project page discussion requested the article be removed from Wikipedia, as they believed it was a hoax cooked up by the New York Times or local Kentucky newspapers. So the very foundation of this phenomena may be fiction¹²!

The most prominent theory of Kentucky locals was the simplest. Many believed that the meat came from buzzards flying overhead and regurgitating the meat¹³.

The problems with the theories

The Nostoc jelly theory doesn’t pan out for a couple reasons: First, the clear or green jelly doesn’t look like red meat—the sample was described as “flesh-coloured” by the scientists, but Nostoc is normally the colour of seaweed (which makes sense, as cyanobacteria’s common name is blue-green algae!¹⁴). Second, Nostoc doesn’t fall from the sky. Colonies of the bacteria grow from the ground in response to rain. So any sightings of falling objects refutes this theory¹⁵.

Mrs. Crouch said that the sky was clear at the time, and the meat fell “like large snowflakes”¹⁶. At the time of the incident, many believed that Nostoc could float on the breeze when dry¹⁷, only to drop and expand when it rained like hail¹⁸. According to other locals as well as Charles Fort¹⁹ in The Book of the Damned, a paranormal book that discusses this incident, there was no rain that day. No rain, no visible Nostoc.

As for the many types of meat that have been theorized: Analysis of materials in 1876 was not as sophisticated as it is today. The theory of genetics wasn’t officially accepted by the scientific community until 1925. The structure of DNA wasn’t discovered until the early 1950s²⁰. So how did they test what kind of meat these pieces were made of? OTHER than eating it²¹?

A scientist from the Newark Scientific Association and microscopist to the Geological Survey of New Hampshire reached the human infant/horse lung tissue conclusion (how are these close to each other??) through examining the structure of the organ cells²². A histologist (study of samples of humans, animals, and plants) published in the Journal of Microscopy that one specimen had muscle fibers, while another had lung tissue²³.

Their findings might not stand up to modern practices of meat identification, such as enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) and polymerase chain reaction (PCR)²⁴. So what could we learn today? An article in Atlas Obscura features a modern sample of the meat suspended in liquid at Transylvania University. Unfortunately, the meat was contaminated and too old for the biology department to find anything through genetic testing²⁵. According to a Microscopist article from 2014, a sample of the original specimen was mounted in a microscope slide and eventually found in a collection in Ohio. The photo in the article was taken from an internet auction site²⁶. So, potentially, this meat might be viable to get tested again in modern day, but nothing successful yet.

So that leaves us with the other two theories…

Vultures, or vulgar lies?

The vulture theory was first proposed by Dr. Kastenbine in an article of the Louisville Medical News²⁷. He first dismisses that the meat shower was “batrachian spawn” (frog eggs/tadpoles) scattering in the air because it was not the right time of year (he’s also the first to mention frogs out of the articles I’ve read). He burned a small sample and found that the grease separated and the smell was distinctly like rancid mutton, then burned meat. He pronounced the meat to be of a sheep, and mentions that others have reported finding wool.

Then he gets to his theory for how: Vultures disgorged the meat as they flew over the farm at a high height, scattered by winds. The “variety of tissue” discovered is best explained by this theory²⁸.

Kentucky hosts two types of vulture: turkey vultures and black vultures²⁹. Both tend to gather in large numbers from fall to early spring, within the timeline of the event. Some of these communal roosts can be found near houses³⁰. They are known to feed on dead prey, though may eat living animals. They can be attracted to farms for their livestock, and can eat skunks, opossums, baby pigs, calves, and lambs. The stomach acid of vultures helps it to eat rotten meat and avoid diseases like rabies, botulism, distemper, and even Black Plague³¹. Vultures tend to vomit when scared or when taking off to reduce their weight for flying. This… material can blind predator if thrown in their face³².

Needless to say, it’s probably not the best idea to eat anything that’s been in a vulture’s stomach. Even if it tastes like mutton.

Then, there’s the null hypothesis: Was this even real? There’s been plenty of skepticism over the past 147 years. Some suggest the entire thing was a hoax involving an exploded sheep³³, or that nothing happened on that March day. The only person on record to have seen the event is Mrs. Crouch. Was she tricked? Did she lie?

And did Mrs. Crouch even exist? Or did the papers make up the story on a slow news day? I did some census record searching on her and her husband, cited as Allen Crouch. There were two Allen Crouchs in Bath County, Kentucky reported on the 1870 census as 37 and 61 years old, both married, but that’s all I could confirm.

What do you think? I’m in favour of the vultures-ate-a-sheep theory, but given all the wacky things that got reported in the 1870s, I’d also believe the whole thing was made up on a slow news day.

Whether real or faked, I’m glad this strange story got me researching everything from cyanobacteria to meat identification techniques to vultures.

A word from a passing frog

I hope July brings all of us good news! Sorry for the late edition this month, but hopefully you found it worth the wait.

Querying

Submitted: 117

Rejections: 93

Active Full Requests: 4 (1 new in June!)

I decided on the reward for when I reach 100 rejections! I plan to enjoy a Nordic spa not too far from me. Nothing I can think of better for this kind of milestone than something relaxing!

Drafting

I reached 13,000 words in TIE, my sci-fi eco-horror novel I’m re-writing. It’s been going well! A little slower than I’d like, but this past month has had a lot of celebrations and preparations! Family birthdays, a graduation, a trip to the big city, and the beginnings of planning for our big move at the end of the summer!

While this month will also be busy, I’ve joined July’s Camp NaNo for some healthy motivation! My wordcount goal isn’t particularly ambitious, but will hopefully help me reset on some good habits. So far, so good!

Reading

I’ve been light on reading published books lately! Or at least finishing them. This month I started LITTLE THIEVES by Margaret Owen and GIDEON THE NINTH by Tamsyn Muir. Both have really distinct voices I’ve been enjoying so far!

A long-awaited dip

You are soaked to the bone by the time the mist has cleared. Already wet, you see no reason not to enjoy the pond yourself. You swim to the middle. A cool comfort surrounds you, and you wonder—are you about to head home, or leave it?

You climb out of the pond after your fingers have long past begun to prune. There are responsibilities and joys to get on with. Books to read, herbs to reap, and words to write. The world keeps moving, even if the frog pond stays quiet, strange, and weirdly wonderful.

But maybe you’ll turn left again, the next time you go walking.

Footnotes

http://www.bizarrejournal.com/2015/05/debunked-kentucky-meat-storm-of-1876.html

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1876/03/10/81687268.pdf

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/running-ponies/the-great-kentucky-meat-shower-mystery-unwound-by-projectile-vulture-vomit/

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1876/03/10/81687268.pdf

http://www.bizarrejournal.com/2015/05/debunked-kentucky-meat-storm-of-1876.html

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/running-ponies/the-great-kentucky-meat-shower-mystery-unwound-by-projectile-vulture-vomit/

https://academic.oup.com/aob/article/114/1/17/225508?login=false

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/running-ponies/the-great-kentucky-meat-shower-mystery-unwound-by-projectile-vulture-vomit/

I’ve been watching a lot of Mystery Files, so it felt remiss to not include at least one UFO mention to this one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Kentucky_meat_shower

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/running-ponies/the-great-kentucky-meat-shower-mystery-unwound-by-projectile-vulture-vomit/

You can learn more about algae in a previous Frog Pond:

The Frog Pond #6: Liquid Trees SARAH L. HAWTHORN·MAY 1, 2023Read full story

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/running-ponies/the-great-kentucky-meat-shower-mystery-unwound-by-projectile-vulture-vomit/

https://archive.org/details/americanjournal163unkngoog/page/n66/mode/2up?view=theater&q=nostoc

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/running-ponies/the-great-kentucky-meat-shower-mystery-unwound-by-projectile-vulture-vomit/

Sidenote: Also important to note though that Charles Fort was either a satirical skeptic or a person with very odd beliefs, like there being a place in the Super-Sargasso Sea (a region in the Atlantic Ocean where four currents form an ocean gyre/large circulating current system), where “all lost things go”. So watch your daily intake of salt with how much you should take with his words on anything.

Sidenote to the Sidenote: Charles Fort is credited with inventing the term “teleportation” and as the first person to suggest alien abduction to explain strange appearances and disappearances of people.

https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/discovery-of-dna-structure-and-function-watson-397/

You can learn more about people possibly eating things they shouldn’t in a previous Frog Pond: