The Mystery of the Oakville Blobs.

Oakville, in Washington State, isn’t a place that would normally cross your radar. The population of the small city, nicknamed “Timber Town”, was only 715 according to the census in 2020. In an average year, you can expect around 54 inches or 137cm of rainfall, which probably comes up past Danny DeVito’s eyebrows. This is more than the UK’s average annual rainfall, so it’s a pretty wet city.

In such a rainy place, you might expect people to be used to it by now, to think nothing of the odd deluge or heavy shower. But what if one day the rain was actually something else? Some mysterious substance that made a whole town sick, which has never been fully explained, and samples of which disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Put up your umbrella, maybe don a pair of rubber gloves and let’s do our best to pick through the sticky goop of the story of the Oakville Blobs.

It’s Raining Blobs

In the early hours of the 7th of August 1994, it rained over the small city of Oakville. No big deal there, but this rain seemed just a little bit different. When residents ventured outside after it stopped, they were met with a strange sight.

Dotty Hearn, who owned a small farm at the time, went out and saw what looked like little hailstones on the surfaces of her outbuildings. When she touched them, however, instead of feeling cold and hard and melting under her touch, they felt jelly-like and were very small, commonly being described as about half the size of a grain of rice. They had fallen everywhere, coating the ground and nearby structures.

Dotty’s daughter, Sunny Barclift, was staying with her at the time and also noted the strangeness of the blobs as they were nothing like she’d ever seen before. Dotty had touched them with her bare hands, but Sunny was working in occupational health and safety at the time and decided to collect some samples of the blobs while wearing gloves.

Later that afternoon, Sunny found her mother lying on the bathroom floor with severe nausea and feelings of vertigo. Dotty went to the hospital and stayed there for three nights. Getting a hunch that her mother’s sudden illness might be linked to the mysterious blobs, Sunny took a sample with her to the hospital for testing. She also performed her own basic tests on the blobs, finding out that they floated in water, did not dissolve in alcohol and were not flammable.

She didn’t think they were a natural phenomenon, so was worried about the amount that had fallen over crops and farmland. Sunny contacted the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Ecology, but neither of them was very interested or very helpful.

Back at the hospital, Dr. David Little had a lab technician check out the blobs, and they reported back that they looked like human white blood cells. The lab at the hospital wasn’t a speciality one, though, and there wasn’t much more that they could do with these things, so they passed them on to the Washington State Department of Health.

Returning to Dotty’s farm, Sunny found that her kitten had died, and other locals also reported a number of dead birds and small animals. More people were coming down with flu-like symptoms, dizziness and trouble breathing, and Sunny was increasingly convinced that the blobs were somehow to blame. As well as the samples she’d given the hospital, Sunny hand-delivered some samples of the blobs to the Department of Ecology. You may have noticed at this point that Sunny is a woman of action.

The State Department of Ecology eventually came back with a bit more info, as detailed in an article by the New York Times headlined “Mystery Blobs Were Once Alive”. Mike Osweiler, who worked for the hazardous material unit, said that upon further investigation, the blobs didn’t have any nuclei in them, meaning that they couldn’t be human white blood cells. The article also says: “he will ask the State Department of Health to take a look since his unit is not equipped to identify biological cells.”

Presumably, this means the blobs weren’t found to be hazardous, or Osweiler might have mentioned it.

Eventually, microbiologist Mike McDowell, who worked for the Department of Health, took a look at the blobs and saw at least two types of bacteria, one of which was found “in the intestinal tract of man”, according to his notes. McDowell was very interested in the blobs, but when he went back into his lab the next day, the samples were nowhere to be found. McDowell had never had a sample go missing before, and when he asked around, his receptionist allegedly told him that “black suits came and took it”. When he went to the supervisor to inquire about what happened to the blobs, he was told: “Do not ask.”

Dotty was eventually discharged from the hospital with her official diagnosis being “some kind of virus”. The blobs gradually melted away, and the story might have melted away too had there not been five more instances of the gelatinous rain in the same area over the next three weeks. And in an interesting addendum, a couple of years later, in 1997, Sunny was working somewhere new in Oakville, and a group of three strange men came in to question her about the events of 1994.

Sunny couldn’t tell them very much and felt uncomfortable with the way they were asking her questions. Eventually, they left and drove away. A customer had also thought they were a bit strange and had had the presence of mind to write down their car license plate.

When they followed this clue up, they found out it was registered to what was then called Fort Hood, now known as Fort Cavazos, an army base in Texas.

So what could these little blobs have been? There are plenty of ideas, some more believable than others, of course, and some of them extremely dodgy-sounding, but there has never been a definitive explanation for what fell over Oakville that summer in 1994. Let’s go through the runners and riders and see where we end up.

Explanation One: Aliens

Come on, we’ve got to start here. Were the Oakville Blobs evidence of some sort of extraterrestrial visitors? Maybe they were fuel residue from alien craft, maybe they were aliens themselves, invading a small area of the planet Earth, only to find its conditions inhospitable and promptly dying. Or they found Oakville extremely boring and just left one day as mysteriously as they had arrived.

Another floated hypothesis was that a meteorite had impacted somewhere in the Earth’s atmosphere, and the blobs were tiny lifeforms or extraterrestrial biomatter that had been on said meteorite, or they were tiny particles of the meteorite itself. We can speculate or make up alien ideas all day long; in fact, I seriously embellished the entire previous paragraph, but as there are no remaining samples of the blobs, we cannot rule alien life in or out of the story. There are plenty more earthly suggestions for what they might have been before we get into the realm of the little green men, however, so I’ll give this about a 0.1 per cent chance of being the answer. I’m sure Simon will tell me to add several more zeros before the one, but hey, I’m a dreamer, not a statistician, and there’s always a chance, right?

Explanation Two: Aeroplane Toilets

This explanation is a great example of how the majority of these answers are going to go. It seems reasonable, until a major flaw is pointed out, which then makes it seem totally implausible. So here’s the reasonable bit.

A plane flies over the Oakville area, and people have been to the toilet on said plane. At some point, possibly by accident, the waste from the plane, which is mixed with various chemicals, is ejected into the sky where it freezes and falls to the ground as tiny blobs, covering a large area of Oakville, Washington and causing the deaths of small animals and the sickness of a large percentage of the population. The fact that bacteria found inside human guts were present in the blobs adds to the possibility that this was a fine mist of human excrement blanketing Oakville like a soft, Christmas Eve snow shower in a Hallmark movie.

Except that it wasn’t. Yes, there have been instances of frozen poopy meteorites falling from planes and causing damage to property and even injuring a couple of people, but this is definitely not what fell on Oakville. For one thing, the confirmed toilet projectiles have all been chunks of frozen waste, not confetti-like blobs covering a wide area.

For another thing, pilots aren’t in the habit of dumping their sewage tanks in mid-air, and this isn’t even possible on commercial planes. Pee pee and poo poo get sucked into a storage tank at the back of the plane, and that’s emptied out when the plane lands. If you’ve ever been to the toilet on a plane, apart from the alarmingly loud noise the vacuum flush makes, you’ve probably noticed that there is blue liquid in the bowl.

This is disinfectant, and the colouring means that any waste falling from the plane will also be blue in colour, hence the term “blue ice” to describe the few unfortunate incidents where leaking sewage tanks have created potentially fatal faecal bombs. Anyway, there was no mention of the Oakville Blobs being blue or smelling like disinfectant, so I think we can safely rule this one out.

Explanation Three: Jellyfish

One of the suggestions for what these jelly-like blobs could be was that they were bits of jellyfish. There are also two suggestions for what happened to these possibly hapless invertebrates — the first is that they were picked up in some sort of weather event, spun around like so much wet washing and dumped unceremoniously in millions of particles over Oakville. This kind of thing does have form; you may have heard of times when it’s rained frogs, for example. A tornado forms over water and is called a waterspout.

It can easily be strong enough to pick up small animals that happen to be in its path, such as a bunch of frogs. When it hits land and loses strength, it drops its load in the form of fish, frog or even worm rain. So this could have happened with jellyfish.

The other suggestion as to how a load of jellyfish happened to get splattered all over Oakville was that the military was involved. Apparently, the Air Force had been dropping live bombs into the Pacific, giving rise to the theory that jellyfish had been blasted out of the ocean and somehow hundreds of thousands of bits of them had made it into the atmosphere, where they then rained down upon the unsuspecting people of Oakville.

Do either of these theories sound plausible? Not really. The blobs were described as being about half the size of a grain of rice, with not even one tentacley bit found to give a hint as to what they might be.

If they had been jellyfish, they were all totally obliterated in the waterspout, which isn’t normally what happens to animals that have been picked up. Oakville is about 64km or 40 miles inland, and while animals in waterspouts have been known to travel great distances away from their original spots, it seems a weird distance for a bunch of jellyfish to be dropped without neighbouring areas reporting anything. It seems too far for the “blown up by the Air Force into the clouds” idea as well, as these bomb drops were being carried out at least ten miles further into the ocean, and, let’s not forget the biggest kicker of all in this story — it happened 5 more times over the following 3 weeks.

Either those are some unlucky jellyfish or something else was going on.

The few tests that were initially done on the blobs weren’t much help in identifying whether they were jellyfish or not. In the New York Times article titled “Mystery Blobs Were Once Alive”, Mike Osweiler is the key contact, and he worked for the hazardous material unit of the State Department for Ecology. The article states: “Osweiler said his laboratory staff found the cells had no nuclei, something human white cells do have. He said he had no idea what jellyfish cells look like.” Not exactly helpful there, then.

Osweiler is also quoted in another article from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer titled: “Blobs From Space! They’re Strange, They’re Gooey, They’re Falling From the Sky”. In this one, he says: “That’s a long way for jellyfish to travel…unless they’re shooting them in from the coast. This is a head-scratcher.”

I think what we can deduce from this is that the blobs were not jellyfish. However! Enter Kathy and Jim Belanger, a couple camping by the beach shortly after the initial occurrence of the blobs. According to a piece from the Palm Beach Post called “Blobs that fell on Wash. house once alive”, Kathy and Jim reported that they heard blasts out to sea, and once they made it down to the beach, they found it littered with dead crabs “and globs of jellyfish or clear gel dotting the shoreline.”

As per the article: “I thought at first it was jellyfish, but they didn’t look like jellyfish up close,” Kathy Belanger said. She noted that she handled the blobs and that their dog had run on the beach that day. The next day, she said, both she and the dog became ill. The couple didn’t think the blobs and crab deaths were connected until they read about the blobs of Oakville.

“Makes you wonder,” said Jim Belanger.

The Belangers didn’t take any samples of the blobs they found on the beach, so no comparison with the Oakville Blobs could be made. But this kind of makes it seem like jellyfish bits have potentially entered the frame again, or at least something blown out of the ocean.

Explanation Four: Star Jelly

What if, and bear with us here for a minute, what if the blobs didn’t rain down from the sky but were actually here all along? Now we’re talking “star jelly”, a term that seems to cover a lot of possible ways for various jelly-like substances to be found on the ground. Basically, this explanation posits that the Oakville Blobs did not rain down from the sky; rather, they were formed on the ground, and the rain was just normal rain happening at the same time and might have brought this jelly to light, but was otherwise unrelated.

Star jelly, also known as astral jelly, refers to gelatinous blobs that have been recorded in various places for hundreds of years. Originally named because people used to think it fell from passing meteors, star jelly has since been explained as being things such as types of algae, slime moulds or fungus. To get even more detailed, some examples have been confirmed as being toad or frog spawn that had been eaten by predators and then regurgitated out again. Other specimens of star jelly have also been identified as the remains of frogs, specifically, part of their reproductive systems, which go uneaten and can swell up when they come into contact with moisture.

While these explanations could be plausible if a small amount of blobs were found, the Oakville Blobs settled over a large area and were found on raised surfaces as well as the ground, which would mean a heck of a lot of dead frog guts. In pictures I’ve seen of some of these other types of star jelly, they are all too big or lumpy to fit the description of the “half a grain of rice” sized squishy pellets that sickened a town back in 1994. And while these suggestions have been from the natural world, there is another idea that is more man-made.

Explanation Five: A Common Chemical

Another contender for the Oakville Blobs is a substance called sodium polyacrylate. This is a super absorbent salt that can absorb up to 1000 times its own mass in water. Commonly found in things like baby nappies, wound dressings, sanitary pads and cold gel packs, it’s also used as a thickening agent, and is used in the construction industry as a drilling fluid and to control waste liquid. It’s also used in artificial snow, so that would be an easy answer as to what was blasted all over Oakville; it was just a ton of fake snow.

This first happened in August, though, so it was unseasonal to say the least. And if a shipment of fake snow had accidentally been dumped all over town, this would have made quite a fun piece for the local news outlets, and the matter would have been put to bed straight away.

A more believable explanation comes from the fact that sodium polyacrylate is used in agriculture for retaining moisture in the soil, and there are farms or farmland around Oakville. Could it be that some of this material was lying on the ground and absorbed water from the rain shower, growing in size and resembling the rice-like blobs we all now know and love? Well, sure, this could have happened, and indeed it did happen in Bournemouth, England, in 2012.

In a delightfully English article about it on the BBC titled “Bournemouth resident mystified by ‘blue sphere shower’”, the man in question, one Steve Hornsby, found lots of small, gelatinous balls in his back garden following a hailstorm. According to the article, Steve said:

“[They’re] difficult to pick up, I had to get a spoon and flick them into a jam jar.”

It didn’t take long for scientists at Bournemouth University to identify the substance, however. In an article by the Guardian, clickbaitingly called “Blue Balls Mystery Solved By Scientists”, it states, “Spherical objects discovered in Bournemouth garden found to be sodium polyacrylate, an absorbent polymer used in nappies.”

It turned out that the substance had not fallen with the hail, rather that some of the material had been in Steve’s back garden already and had swelled up after absorbing the water. Could the same thing have happened in Oakville? I don’t think so. There was so much of the stuff, it seems unlikely that so much sodium polyacrylate would be lying over the entire town.

No one mentioned a chemical spill or crop spraying, and surely this would have been raised as an answer at the time. Also, the Bournemouth blue balls were, well, blue. The Oakville blobs were white or colourless. They were also much, much smaller than the Bournemouth balls, despite there also being a rainstorm the first time they appeared.

Steve Hornsby kept some samples, and they lasted for ages, long enough to be tested, and he said they didn’t melt, whereas the Oakville blobs all just melted away. One other point against the “already there and didn’t come down in the rain” theory is that there were witnesses to the blobs actually coming down in the rain. I saw many references to a police officer called David Lacey, who was in his car when it started raining, and the gelatinous blobs were smearing all over his windscreen when he turned the wipers on. Unless his windows were already coated with something, and I’m not sure why they would be, this does seem to indicate that the blobs were indeed coming from the sky.

As we’re debunking as we’re going, though, I think it’s worth adding this tidbit from that font of all knowledge, Reddit. On a thread about the Oakville Blobs, one redditor wrote: “I came here because the rain in Vancouver yesterday was oddly thick and gelatinous. When my windshield wipers shut off, they’d leave a thick line of water on my windshield that was there even the next day after sitting for 10 hours. So weird.”

Hmm, so far, so Oakville-esque; however, there was an update:

“Edit: ignore me lol. Seems my wiper fluid is the culprit. But now I have to diagnose why my wiper fluid is thickening.”

Did Officer Lacey just happen to have an issue with his wiper fluid that was totally unrelated to all blob activity? Quite possibly, but we can’t go back in time and check this now.

Actually, we’re immediately going to shout out Reddit again, and no, I don’t usually get all of my research from this platform, but when there’s a still unsolved mystery on the books, it can be a good source for less popular ideas. Also on this thread about the blobs, a redditor called “cinema104” mentioned that they could be silica.

“Not so common in 1994, but def used to keep ammo, food, and other military supplies dry in wet weather. It’s also toxic to ingest, does not dissolve in water or alcohol and does not react to fire (…). They also can be so small, hard, and clear that no one would notice if they accidentally rained down on a dry day in (Washington), at least not until it rained and caused the silica beads to swell into significant gelatinous blobs.

Silica base can be collected on the beach and ground down in the process of forming these beads, it wouldn’t be a shocker if jellyfish DNA ended up in a sample of silica. Aside from that, it wouldn’t be easy or obvious or intuitive to any scientist studying this material that this was silica.”

This seems like a pretty good shout to me, the only downside being that, according to discoveryuk.com, “Over the next three weeks, there would be five more occasions of reports of raining blobs over an area of some twenty square miles.”

Was silica being dumped in multiple flights over the area? If so, why? Or was so much deposited the first time that it was still swelling up weeks later? Unfortunately, these questions are rhetorical as we have no idea if we’re on the right track here or not.

Anyway, it’s finally time to stop pussyfooting around and get to the good stuff.

Explanation Six: Military Involvement

We’ve already mentioned planes flying over and not dumping their sewage on the town, and also the military dropping bombs off the coast, so how about we put those two ideas together into the one mega conspiracy theory that Oakville was the intentional, or unintentional, site of a military experiment into some sort of bioweapon. Here are the main pointers that this is a viable answer:

The blobs were seemingly scattered from above and were uniform in shape and size. People who touched them became sick, and small animals that possibly ingested them died. Scientists who looked at samples didn’t have time to run thorough tests on them as either the blobs had melted, been used up in the primary round of tests, or they were allegedly taken from the labs by men in black.

Let’s go back to microbiologist Mike McDowell for a minute, who worked for the Washington State Public Health Department. He was also featured in an episode on the blobs for Unsolved Mysteries that aired in 1997. He wrote the report that people have quoted as saying there was human gut bacteria found in the blobs, which has kind of extrapolated out to people saying that there was human DNA in the blobs or that the blobs contained human cells, making the whole thing seem really creepy. If you look at McDowell’s full notes, however, it becomes clear that that isn’t exactly the case. His initial findings in his lab report stated:

“When cultured, the unidentified substance grew out the following microbes: 1. Pseudomonas fluorescens 2. Enterobacter cloacae. [The first microbe is] Found in soil and water. Commonly associated with spoilage of foods (eggs, meat, fish and milk). Often isolated from clinical specimens. In addition, some biovarieties have been isolated from diseased plants.

[The second microbe is] Found in water, sewage, soil, meat, hospitable environments and on the skin and in the intestinal tract of man and animals as a commensal”.

By the way, a medical definition of “commensal” is: “Living in a relationship in which one organism derives food or other benefits from another organism without hurting or helping it.” Sounds like I have a case of commensal children but anyway, from the full note, we can see that while the bacteria found in the blobs does exist in human intestinal tracts, it also exists in a whole lot of other places and is probably spread through animal poo as they don’t flush anything away, so it just finds its way into water and soil naturally through their excretions.

Here’s a bit more info that McDowell, who died in 2020, disclosed. Apparently, he had concluded that the blobs were man-made and in notes left behind, he called them variously an “envelope”, “matrix”, “delivery system” and “carrier system” that could potentially house a virus or germ. McDowell was very well respected and not seen as a crank in any way. He was interested in looking into the blobs further when the incident with the men in black happened, and his receptionist told him the blob samples had been taken away.

If you recall, his boss’s response to the removal was “do not ask.” While McDowell did apparently bemoan his truncated research into the blobs in later years, there wasn’t really much he could do about it at the time.

So what do we think of the blobs-as-germ-warfare idea? It certainly fits as something the US military might do and then cover up. Or it may have been a totally accidental spill of something that was being flown over Oakville, but nobody ever claimed responsibility. We can’t really take that accidental spill thread any further, though, and it’s not as fun to talk about, so let’s go back to the military.

Could the US military have been developing some sort of biological or chemical agent, inserted into these little delivery blobs? Was Oakville, a small community, ground zero for testing such a weapon? Were the blobs intended to be smaller than they were but increased in size because of the rain, becoming more visible and thus drawing attention to themselves?

Were they a mild strength version just to see what would happen to a test population? We know Dotty Hearn was hospitalised and later released with the vague “some kind of virus” diagnosis, but was that the truth or just something the medical team wrote because they had no real idea what had actually caused the illness? We can, of course, poke holes in this theory too.

The town getting sick might have had nothing to do with coming into contact with the blobs; it might just have been a standard virus going around town, and its timing was just coincidental. Small animals died, and yes, maybe they did eat the blobs, which caused their deaths. As far as we know, no humans ate the blobs themselves — it’s probably not a good idea to eat random stuff you find on the ground — so if they were superabsorbent chemical salts or some other kind of man-made chemical compound, it’s not really surprising that eating it resulted in small animal deaths.

We know that governments in many countries have conducted experiments on unwitting communities over the years, but this shouldn’t have been happening in the mid-1990s, as it would have violated the treaty President Nixon created in 1969 against biological and chemical weapons. Well, it shouldn’t have been happening, but could it have happened? Sure, why not. Another point against this idea, though, comes courtesy of Biological Warfare Expert Mark Kortepter. In the Files of the Unexplained episode about the Oakville Blobs on Netflix, he says:

“If someone’s using bioweapons, an attack is silent. The organism is not even visible to the naked eye, you don’t smell it, you don’t know it’s coming around you, so I think it’s highly unlikely that something like that was done by the government.”

Hmm, Mark thinks this is too amateurish to be a government jam. I’m not sure what I think, to be honest. According to an article called “The Mysterious Disappearance of the Oakville Blobs” by Muhammad Ali, probably not that Muhammad Ali, David Lacey, the police officer with the possibly suspect wiper fluid, has been investigating the blobs ever since his 1994 encounter with them. In a frustratingly vague part of the article, it says:

“Recently, David discovered new information that may shed light on the case. He received an anonymous letter from someone claiming to have witnessed the incident and who had worked on a secret military project. According to the letter, the Oakville Blobs were a result of a government experiment gone wrong, and the military has been covering up the incident ever since.

David shared the letter with local authorities and investigators, but they dismissed it as hearsay and refused to investigate further. Undeterred, David continued to work on the case, convinced that the truth was still out there.”

Unfortunately, there isn’t any further detail on this experiment, so who knows if the letter was citing a genuine incident or not. If it was, it’s case closed, but we don’t have any evidence that this was even a real letter, let alone a real incident.

The Oakville blobs were not a one-and-done incident anyway. They were recorded as falling several times over a couple of weeks. If they were dropped by accident, once is kind of forgivable, but five times? Now it’s just careless or maybe deliberate. According to the Unsolved Mysteries wiki about the case, it states:

“While the Air Force confirms that they were doing practice bombing runs over the Pacific Ocean in August 1994, they deny knowledge of the substance or any involvement in creating or dispersing it. Oakville residents are skeptical of this; prior to it, many noticed a significant — almost daily — amount of slow-moving military aircraft in the skies above.”

Sunny Barclift, who had originally gathered the blob samples, also states in the Netflix show that for months in the run-up to the blobs falling, large black helicopters would fly over Oakville at least once or twice a week. Her mother, Dotty, recorded a video of a large helicopter flying over her land.

The cover-up theory got another shot in the arm when Sunny said she was questioned by some men at her new workplace at a soda fountain in Oakville, a couple of years after the blobs fell. Nobody in the shop recognised them as locals, and they gave everyone a feeling of unease. The men asked if this was the town where the blobs had fallen and whether it was true that black helicopters had been spotted around at the time.

Sunny agreed but didn’t offer much more information, probably because she didn’t have much more to give. A customer had written down their car’s license plate, and they managed to trace this back to Fort Hood, which was temporarily renamed Fort Cavazos in 2023, but I just found out it was changed back to Fort Hood again in 2025, albeit supposedly named after a totally different Hood than the first time.

Anyway, I thought this sounded pretty sketchy at first, but now I’m second-guessing it. Fort Hood is in Texas, over 2000 miles away from Oakville, Washington. Would government goons really drive all the way across the country in a military-badged vehicle just for an interview that lasted a few minutes? Wouldn’t it have been easier to fly in and use a rental car, or just get people from a nearer military base to go? Maybe they were doing road-trip buddy movie research for the next instalment of the Men In Black film franchise, but really, for the information Sunny didn’t give them, this should have been an email.

The multi-event aspect also shuts down the jellyfish angle if you ask me. How many jellyfish are going to be repeatedly blasted up into the clouds? Each incident did not coincide with military bomb testing, so while that might have explained the original instance, it doesn’t explain the rest. There were also no reports of people noticing a smell of rotting animals, which would probably have been quite evident given the amount of blobs that fell.

I don’t know if the couple finding all those dead crabs had anything to do with it. A few years ago, I went to the beach, and there were just hundreds of large shrimp-type things all over the place; you had to pick your way between them. Mass strandings of things aren’t uncommon, so the crabs might not have been blasted out along with some obliterated jellyfish; it might be yet another coincidental timing thing.

Conclusions? Help Me Out Here, Simon

The Oakville Blobs are still touted as an unsolved mystery, with no definitive explanation as to what they were made of and how they got all over Oakville. Jellyfish seem unlikely. Existing things such as silica and sodium polyacrylate wouldn’t disappear over a couple of days, and surely other examples of these common substances coming into contact with rain or just regular water would have happened loads of times before, so would be easily recognised.

I suppose it’s possible that tests for these particular substances weren’t done at first, due to the whole “human cell” excitement, and then all the available blobs got used up in those first few tests, leaving none for a more in-depth analysis. There aren’t any more samples left, and any records of the blobs, for example, after they were removed from MacDowell’s lab, have been lost.

In the Files of the Unexplained show, a radio host called Clyde Lewis paraphrases Sherlock Holmes by saying: “When the simple is not the explanation, then you have to go for the extraordinary.”

Not to be “that guy”, but the actual phrase is “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.” I think Clyde more or less got there. So what does that leave us with?

In my own humble opinion, the whole military or government angle does seem the most likely, especially with the appearance of our old faves, the men in black. If it were just one person who mentioned them, we might be able to write it off as exaggeration or made up after the event, but because Mike McDowell, or his colleague at least, and Sunny Barclift and her customer all allegedly had interactions with them, it makes it seem more believable. Maybe the blobs were a test substance gone wrong and accidentally dropped on a populated area.

Maybe they were dropped intentionally. The fact that they all disappeared, leaving no samples to work with, is infuriating but also par for the course with an experimental compound. The samples that made it to the labs were either all used up in the testing procedures, or maybe the other labs were also told not to research them further, and any remaining blobs that fell on Oakville just became too small for the naked eye to notice.

The fact that many people in Oakville became ill is the reason that we’re even talking about possible military involvement, so really, unless we can definitively pin the sickness on the blobs, which now, over thirty years later, we can’t, there’s not a concrete reason to suspect them. If the sickness was just some bad virus spreading throughout the town, all we’d have would be some weird jelly blobs that might have made the local news, but wouldn’t have become an enduring mystery.

Paul Johnson, an associate professor of Biology, also pointed out the now impossible task of working out what happened in Oakville. In the Netflix episode, he says: “The records seem to have gone missing. These samples seem to have gone missing. Unfortunately, the people who handled a lot of this have passed. And so we’re looking at largely an oral tradition now.”

This is true because the whole “black suits came and took it” line we got from Mike MacDowell’s receptionist wasn’t shared by her or by MacDowell; it was being told to Netflix by his sons, who had asked their dad about the whole blob thing years after it had happened. We know that MacDowell was interested in what they were, but now there’s only anecdotal second-hand information about what might have happened to them.

Maybe we will find out more in a random declassified file sometime in the future, and if that does happen, please tag me immediately.

Frequently Asked Questions

What were the Oakville Blobs?

The Oakville Blobs were small, jelly-like substances that fell from the sky over Oakville, Washington, on August 7, 1994. They were about half the size of a grain of rice and covered the ground and nearby structures.

What happened to the people and animals in Oakville after the blobs fell?

Many residents, including Dotty Hearn, experienced severe nausea, vertigo, and other flu-like symptoms. Several small animals, including Dotty’s kitten and local birds, were found dead.

What initial tests were conducted on the blobs?

Sunny Barclift, Dotty Hearn’s daughter, conducted basic tests and found that the blobs floated in water, did not dissolve in alcohol, and were not flammable. Dr. David Little’s lab technician initially thought they resembled human white blood cells.

What did the Washington State Department of Health find in the blobs?

Microbiologist Mike McDowell found at least two types of bacteria in the blobs, one of which was found in the intestinal tract of humans. However, the samples went missing before further tests could be conducted.

Were there any other instances of the blobs falling?

Yes, there were five more instances of the gelatinous rain in the same area over the next three weeks.

What was the official diagnosis for Dotty Hearn’s illness?

Dotty Hearn was discharged from the hospital with an official diagnosis of ‘some kind of virus’.

What was the response from the Department of Ecology and the Department of Agriculture?

Neither the Department of Agriculture nor the Department of Ecology showed much interest or provided helpful information when Sunny Barclift contacted them.

What did the New York Times article ‘Mystery Blobs Were Once Alive’ reveal?

The article stated that the blobs did not have nuclei, meaning they couldn’t be human white blood cells. Mike Osweiler from the hazardous material unit mentioned that his unit was not equipped to identify biological cells.

What happened to the samples at the Washington State Department of Health?

The samples went missing from Mike McDowell’s lab, and his receptionist allegedly told him that ‘black suits came and took it’. When he inquired with his supervisor, he was told ‘Do not ask’.

What was the involvement of the military in the Oakville Blobs incident?

There were suspicions of military involvement due to the presence of black helicopters and military aircraft over Oakville before and after the blobs fell. Sunny Barclift was questioned by men in a car registered to Fort Hood, a military base in Texas.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: The Mystery of the Oakville Blobs.
• Hero image source by OceanLoop / openverse, by-sa.