“Say what?” you may say. “It’s too early for you to be joking with me in this way, Paranormal Geek.”
For this story, I only wish I was joking cause this one ain’t pretty. The more I really think about it, I guess I wasn’t actually being 100% truthful when I typed the title in present tense because this whopper of an event happened on August 7, 1994.
I actually found out about this during a recent episode of, “Files of the Unexplained” on Netflix (season 1, episode 7 if you want to check it out). Until then, I was completely in the dark about this story (and kinda wish I still was, truth be told).
On that fair August, summer day, the residents of Oakville, Washington witnessed a translucent, jelly-like substance fall from the sky during what they thought, was only a typical Washington rain shower.
Photo by 🇻🇪 Jose G. Ortega Castro 🇲🇽 on Unsplash
Reportedly, people and animals who touched the blobs became ill.
During the show I watched, a resident by the name of Sunny Barclift tells her story about how she and her mother were witnesses to the blobs and about how her mother was one of the residents that fell ill. Sunny talks about how she and her brother actually donned some gloves and gathered some of the blobs for testing. The gloves seem to have protected them because her mother, who touched the blobs with her bare hands, became ill. (She also mentions that her kitten was found dead. This made me even more unhappy.)
To add insult to injury (and even more intrigue), the blobs fell three more times over a period of three weeks.
Here’s where it gets even more weird…Sunny and her brother sent their collected samples to the Department of Agriculture and Department of Ecology, along with the USA Weather Service. Initially, no one took them seriously because I can only assume people thought the townsfolk were out of the minds.
Apparently however, people becoming sick forced their hands because they ran tests on the samples. It was reported that a lab technician at the local hospital found white blood cells in the blobs. (I’m not quite certain as to whether I am intrigued or disgusted by this knowledge.)
The Department of Ecology surmised that the blobs seemed to originate from a living organism due to the white blood cells. (Again…intrigue or disgust? I don’t know.)
Of course, people began to catch wind of the story and as is the case with most oddities, began to speculate:
The blobs were waste from a commercial plane toilet (this only adds legitimacy to my feelings of disgust)
The blobs were particles of deceased jellyfish that had evaporated and been incorporated into a rain cloud
The blobs were a biological experiment of some kind
Whatever they were, it appears that some kind of “Men in Black” visited the town. Here, any of us can speculate. Washington is home to several military bases. It is (and was then as well) widely known that testing exercises took place over the water. Were these blobs due to some kind of fallout that occurred during a military training exercise? Did the military run some kind of “test” on this small town? Were the blobs perhaps extraterrestrial in nature?
At this point, all of the remaining blobs were used for testing and no longer exist. As a result, we may never know.
What are your thoughts? Drop a like below and let me know!
Sources:
Google AI Overview (March 10, 2025).
DiscoveryUK (https://www.discoveryuk.com/mysteries/what-were-the-oakville-blobs-and-what-caused-them/)
imdb (https://www.imdb.com/news/ni64517859/)
Film Fugitives (https://fugitives.com/files-of-the-unexplained-episode-7-bizarre-blobs-of-washington-recap/)
I saw that episode as well and those incidents were just plain weird.
Very interesting