The Oakville Blobs

A photo of the gelatinous rain that fell in Oakville in August 1994. Photo credit: unsolvedmysteries.fandom.

On the 7th of August 1994 a rainstorm hit the town of Oakville, Washington. This wasn’t just any rainstorm, the rain fell as gelatinous blobs and soon afterwards many residents of the town became ill. What were the Oakville blobs?

Oakville, Washington

An image of Oakville, Washington. Photo credit: Wikipedia

Oakville is a small town in Grays Harbor County, Washington. It has a population of about 700 people, a small grocery store, a few restaurants and a handful of retail businesses. There is one elementary school, one middle school and one high school.

Oakville is located on the northern shore of the Chehalis River and is bordered by the Capitol State Forest’s hills, valleys and woodlands.

The day the Gelatinous Blobs Fell in Oakville

A blurry windscreen. Photo credit: Unsplash.

At 3am on August 7th 1994 in Oakville, WA, heavy rain began to fall. While this is nothing out of the ordinary in Oakville the type of rain that fell that evening was quite strange.

Police Officer David Lacey was out patrolling the streets in his car at the time with a civilian friend. The rain began and he turned on his windscreen wipers to clear his view only to find the rain smeared across his windscreen like blobs of Vaseline.

The pair were forced to pull into a gas station to try and clear their windscreen so they could continue driving safely. Lacey put on a pair of gloves for safety and picked up the substance describing it as being very mushy and like jello.

Another Local resident named Dotty Hearn stepped outside after the rain had stopped and noticed the strange gelatinous blobs were all over her yard. At first she thought it was hailstones but upon closer inspection she realised it was something much stranger.

The Oakville blobs were about the size of a grain of rice. They could be squished in your fingers, were colorless and odorless.

The gelatinous blob rain was reported several more times over the next 3 weeks in Oakville and the surrounding areas. Following the appearance of the blobs several members of the Oakville community claim to have become seriously ill and a number of pet dogs and cats died after coming in to contact with the substance.

Sickness Caused by the Gelatinous Rain in Oakville

The Oakville Blobs made some people very sick. Photo credit: Unsplash

By the afternoon following the first appearance of the gelatinous rain several residents began to fall ill.

Dotty Hearn collapsed in her bathroom just a few hours after coming in to contact with the substance. She spent four days in hospital with a severe ear infection.

Dotty’s daughter, Sunny, remembered the weird substance and sent a sample of it to the hospital wondering if it could be connected to her mothers sudden illness.

Hospital tests found the substance contained human white blood cells but could not ascertain what it was or where it had come from.

The hospital sent the substance to the Washington State Department of Health. Microbiologist Mike McDowell noted that the specimen was teeming with bacteria including some that are usually found in the human digestive tract.

Many of the town’s other residents came down with flu like symptoms in the days and weeks following the incident. Local resident Beverly Roberts claimed that almost everyone in town got sick and took several weeks to recover.

A higher than normal amount of cats, dogs and farm animals died in the weeks following contact with the gelatinous blobs. Usually the animals first presented with digestive or respiratory issues.

Theories about the Oakville Blobs

Was Oakville’s gelatinous rain actually jellyfish? Photo: Unsplash.

Local resident Sunny Barclift is convinced that the substance was man made and possibly being developed by the US military for biological warfare.

She claimed on an online forum that Mike McDowell suggested to her that the Oakville Blobs were man made and possibly developed to be a vehicle for a bacteria or virus. Sunny says that Mike told her the sample had been stolen from his laboratory and that no other sample had gone missing like that in all his years on the job.

Another theory that was floated was the possibility of the blobs being human waste falling from an airplane. This was deemed unlikely as human waste is dyed blue on airplanes for easy identification.

It has also been suggested that the blobs were parts of jellyfish that had been blown up by a US military exercise in the ocean and then fell back down to earth as rain. While this sounds ridiculous on the surface level it may actually be the most plausible explanation for the Oakville blobs.

The Military were confirmed to be undertaking training using explosives in the ocean near Oakville around the same time as the gelatinous rain. If these bombs struck a school of jellyfish it is possible that their bodies were exploded into tiny fragments which floated in the atmosphere until falling with the rain.

What do you think the Oakville blobs were? Let us know in the comments below!

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