The Oakville Blobs: When Mysterious Gel Rained from the Sky

On August 7, 1994, the small town of Oakville, Washington — population roughly 700 — experienced something that no meteorologist, no biologist, and no government agency has ever been able to fully explain. Instead of rain, a translucent, gelatinous substance fell from the sky, blanketing an area of roughly twenty square miles.

It happened not once, but six times over a three-week period.

Within hours of the first fall, people started getting sick. Within days, animals started dying. And when a local hospital ran tests on the substance, the results only deepened the mystery.

What Fell from the Sky?

Residents described the blobs as roughly half the size of grains of rice — soft, translucent, and slightly mushy to the touch. They weren't like hail or sleet. They didn't melt. They sat on surfaces like tiny jellyfish that had materialized out of thin air.

Officer David Lacey of the Oakville Police Department was on patrol when the substance coated his cruiser's windshield during a predawn rainfall. When he used his wipers, the material smeared across the glass in a thick, opaque film. By the afternoon, Lacey was in the hospital, severely ill with nausea, vertigo, and difficulty breathing.

He wasn't alone. Across Oakville, residents who had come into contact with the blobs reported intense flu-like symptoms — extreme fatigue, nausea, blurred vision. Beverly Roberts, a local resident, found the blobs scattered across her porch. Her cat, which had walked through the substance, became lethargic and died the following day. Several other animals in the area suffered similar fates.

The Lab Results Nobody Expected

Here's where the story takes a turn that no one has been able to walk back.

Sunny Barclift, whose mother fell seriously ill after handling the blobs, collected a sample and brought it to a hospital in Olympia. A technician named Mike McDowell placed the sample under a microscope and found something that should not have been there: the substance contained human white blood cells.

Not animal cells. Not plant cells. Human white blood cells.

McDowell ran the analysis twice to confirm. The blobs appeared to be biological in nature, containing cells from two distinct types of bacteria, and the unmistakable presence of eukaryotic cells consistent with human leukocytes.

A second sample was sent to the Washington State Department of Ecology's lab in Olympia. Microbiologist Mike Osweiler confirmed the presence of living cells within the material but couldn't identify the substance itself. Before further testing could be completed, the sample reportedly went missing.

What Could It Have Been?

The few explanations that have been offered raise more questions than they answer.

Military Waste

Some have speculated that the blobs were connected to military activity. In 1994, the Air Force was conducting bombing runs over the Pacific Ocean, roughly fifty miles from Oakville. Could the explosions have aerosolized ocean matter — jellyfish, perhaps — and deposited it over land?

But jellyfish don't contain human white blood cells. And no military bombing exercise has produced a similar phenomenon before or since, at any location on Earth.

Atmospheric Jellyfish

The jellyfish theory has been proposed more broadly: that waterspouts or strong updrafts could have lifted marine organisms into the upper atmosphere, where they eventually fell over land. This phenomenon does have precedent — rains of fish and frogs have been documented for centuries.

Yet the blobs didn't resemble any known marine organism. They were uniform in size, lacked any visible structure that would suggest a living creature, and again, contained human white blood cells. If a waterspout deposited sea life over Oakville, it would have been a recognizable mess of marine debris, not a uniform, translucent gel.

Waste from Commercial Aircraft

Commercial aircraft do occasionally release waste, but federal regulations require lavatory waste to be sealed and collected on the ground. More importantly, aircraft waste is chemically treated blue liquid, not translucent gel. And it doesn't contain white blood cells.

Biological Weapon Testing

This theory persists because of what happened to the lab samples. The Washington State Department of Ecology's sample disappeared before comprehensive testing could be completed. Residents reported seeing unmarked black helicopters in the area both before and during the falls. And the military was actively operating nearby.

No government agency has ever claimed responsibility, and no official investigation was ever launched. The lack of interest from federal authorities, given that a biological substance of unknown origin was making American citizens sick, strikes many as conspicuous.

The Samples Are Gone

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the Oakville Blobs is that meaningful analysis is now impossible. The hospital samples were eventually discarded. The state lab sample vanished. Residents who saved portions in their freezers found that the material degraded into a milky liquid within weeks.

Whatever fell on Oakville, the physical evidence is gone. All that remains are lab reports, medical records, and the testimony of dozens of people who were there.

What Witnesses Say

The residents of Oakville don't disagree about what happened. They disagree only about what it means.

"It wasn't rain," Officer Lacey told reporters. "I've been a cop for years. I've driven through every kind of weather. This was something different."

Beverly Roberts, who lost her cat and watched her mother spend three days in the hospital, put it more bluntly: "Something was dropped on us. Whether it was on purpose, I can't say. But normal rain doesn't put people in the hospital and kill animals."

The town's experience was featured on an episode of Unsolved Mysteries in 1997, which brought national attention but no answers. In the decades since, no researcher or agency has offered an explanation that accounts for all the evidence — the human cells, the illness, the animal deaths, and the repeated falls over three weeks.

The Question That Lingers

A single anomalous rainfall might be dismissed as a freak event — an atmospheric oddity, a contaminated cloud. But the Oakville Blobs fell six times. The substance made people sick. It killed animals. It contained human biological material. And then the evidence disappeared.

If this was a natural phenomenon, it is one that science has never documented before or since. If it was man-made, no one has ever come forward to explain it. And if it was something else entirely — something outside the categories we use to sort the world into known and unknown — then the skies over a tiny Washington town offered a glimpse of it, briefly, before the evidence dissolved and the questions were left to hang in the air like fog.

To this day, no one in Oakville has ever received an answer. And no one has ever seen the blobs fall again.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Were the Oakville Blobs ever identified?

No. Despite analysis at two separate laboratories, the substance was never conclusively identified. It contained human white blood cells and bacteria, but its origin and composition remain unexplained. All known samples have since been lost or degraded.

Did people actually get sick from the blobs?

Multiple residents reported severe flu-like symptoms after contact with the substance, including nausea, vertigo, and breathing difficulties. Officer David Lacey was hospitalized. At least one cat died after walking through the material. Medical records from the time confirm the illnesses, though no direct causal link was ever formally established — largely because the samples vanished before that work could be done.

Why did the lab samples disappear?

No satisfactory explanation has ever been given. The Washington State Department of Ecology's sample was reportedly lost before comprehensive testing could be completed. Hospital samples were eventually discarded per standard protocol. Whether the disappearance was negligence, protocol, or something more deliberate is a question that has never been answered.

Could jellyfish explain the blobs?

The jellyfish hypothesis has been suggested but fails to account for several key findings: the presence of human white blood cells, the uniform size and consistency of the blobs, the absence of any recognizable marine structures, and the fact that no similar event has occurred at any other coastal location.

Has anything like this happened elsewhere?

Reports of anomalous substances falling from the sky date back centuries — "star jelly" has appeared in folklore across Europe since the Middle Ages. However, no other modern case involves a substance that was biologically analyzed, found to contain human cells, made people ill, and then vanished from laboratory custody. The Oakville incident stands alone.