The Kentucky Meat Shower

Today's forecast: meat

The Crouch family lived near Olympia Springs in Bath County, Kentucky.

Late that morning, Rebecca Crouch was outside when pieces of fleshlike material began falling onto the property.

Contemporary reporting described the sky as clear.

The pieces varied in size. Most were relatively small, though reports described some several inches across. The material covered a substantial strip of ground around the farm. A neighbour who visited afterward reported seeing pieces scattered across the property and caught on fences.

Then, because 1876 apparently required additional commitment to the investigation, people tasted some of it.

Contemporary reports said two men thought it resembled mutton or venison.

Samples were collected.

That is where the mystery became scientifically interesting.

Early explanations competed with one another. One proposed that the material was Nostoc, a gelatinous cyanobacterium historically associated with strange substances appearing after rain.

Microscopic examination complicated that idea.

Arthur Mead Edwards reported in Scientific American that specimens he examined contained recognizable animal tissues, including lung tissue, cartilage and striated muscle fibre.

So the material really did appear to include animal tissue.

The question remained:

How did animal tissue fall from a clear Kentucky sky?

One contemporary physician, Dr. Lewis D. Kastenbine, proposed what eventually became the leading natural explanation: vultures.

Vultures are capable of regurgitating recently eaten material, and Kastenbine argued that a group flying overhead could account for both the variety of tissues and their distribution over the property.

It is a persuasive explanation.

It is not a demonstrated one.

No observer reported seeing vultures release the material, and the event cannot now be reconstructed with enough evidence to establish a definitive cause.

One specimen associated with the event survives in Kentucky, which means that a mystery from 1876 has achieved the unusual distinction of still having physical evidence while remaining unresolved.

So the safe conclusion is not that Kentucky once experienced supernatural weather.

It is simply that on one Friday in 1876, identifiable animal tissue fell onto a farm from somewhere above it.

History has occasionally provided worse evidence.

It has rarely provided stranger precipitation.