01x07 - File: Bizarre Blobs of Washington

[bunniefuu]

[crowd chattering indistinctly]

[gentle magical music plays]

[man 1] There are stories

in this world we live in

that certainly need to be exposed.

We got all the big ones,

you know, like Roswell

and Area 51, I know about that.

But do you know about the blobs

that fell over Washington state?

The show I do is Ground Zero Radio,

talking about the paranormal,

the parapolitical,

and all things strange and peculiar.

And I found this story outta the 1990s

about Oakville, Washington.

These blobs were falling outta the sky,

and I'm a B-movie guy,

so it reminded me of the movie The Blob.

[projector whirs]

[people scream in film]

You know, when I watched The Blob,

I thought it was a funny idea,

"Attack of the k*ller Jell-O."

Then after reading

about what had happened in Oakville,

I was completely just baffled.

It was definitely a topic

that people remember,

right up there

with Mount St. Helens blowing up.

It was raining, and then people saw

these little pellets of weird goo.

[woman 1] We were pokin' 'em with sticks

and, like, tryin' to, like, pick 'em up,

and my parents had told us

not to touch them.

[woman 2] It felt so surreal

and weird and strange,

and it made me wonder,

is there something more going on here

that we don't know about?

[man 2] The thing

that was most peculiar about it

is it wasn't just one episode

of blobs fallin' from the sky.

I think this happened

over a series of rain events.

[woman 3] There were hundreds,

if not more.

Just these little blobs.

It's a mystery.

And it's weird. [chuckles] Still weird.

[man 1] It's one of those stories

that needs to be looked into.

And me telling the story,

it doesn't do it justice

until you meet the people

that it affected,

till you get deep into the roots of it.

This is where you find the truth.

[theme music plays]

[curious music plays]

[narrator] On August 7th, 1994,

small gelatinous blobs rained down

on the small town of Oakville, Washington.

It was an event that would forever change

those who experienced it

and confound all who tried to explain it.

I lived in Oakville from 1993 until 2001.

[woman] Thank you so much.

Have a great day.

[Sunny] I moved from Phoenix, Arizona.

The allure of living out in a rural area

and being able to walk

down to the river and fish

really interested me.

And I also wanted

to spend time with my mother,

who had a really beautiful farm there.

[Dotty] First of the crew came down

and started mowing the field.

[Sunny] We had chickens and we had goats.

[Dotty] I baked six fresh peach pies.

[Sunny] My mother did canning,

and and her garden was just amazing.

You know, she really enjoyed

the farm life.

[Dotty] Probably gonna rain

some more. Yeah.

I notice those clouds are getting darker

and heavier as they're coming in.

[Sunny] My mother loved weather.

She really loved weather.

[thunder rumbles]

[suspenseful music plays]

And one day in 1994,

we had a very severe storm.

[thunder rumbles]

[lightning crashes]

And I remember rain was falling

against some of the windows,

and it looked like the rain was thick.

Shortly thereafter, it just blew over,

and my mother

took her little dogs outside.

[dog yaps softly]

And when she came back in, she said,

"There's something strange

all over the top of the wood box."

"It looks like hail,

but I touched it, and it's soft."

And we could see

that there were transparent,

gelatinous blobs everywhere.

My background at the time

was in the

Occupational Safety and Health Department.

And I feel

that having worked in that field

made me more interested in this substance

and wanting to know what it is.

[gloomy intriguing music plays]

And I thought it was very important

to keep some sort of record.

So, I documented.

"At 4:30 p.m. of August 7th, 1994,

my brother and I collect

samples of the goo."

My brother was a paramedic,

and both of us are safety-oriented people.

So, we put gloves on before we handled it.

"Between 5:00 p.m. and 6:30 p.m.,

I conducted tests."

"It floats in water."

[reading]

Nothing like this

had ever happened in my life before,

and so, I made phone calls.

And I was concerned

because it had fell on food.

So, I contacted

the Department of Agriculture.

And they really didn't seem

to be concerned about it at all.

I called the Department of Ecology.

I called the US Weather Service.

No one was able to tell me

what the substance was.

[gentle music plays]

[man] I've worked for a member of Congress

who represented the town of Oakville.

As with any member of Congress,

the calls come in sort of fast and furious

from all the communities in the district.

In this case,

this bizarre phone call came in.

Something about blobs

falling from the sky.

I thought it was a prank call.

You'd think, "Okay, people are nuts."

But this wasn't just one person.

So often, uh, people expect

the elected official to have the answer.

Uh, the elected official's job

really is to find an answer,

to get the experts to do the research.

At the time, no one was hurt.

All I could say was,

"We're tryin' to get to the bottom of it."

[Sunny] The following day,

I noticed my mother was missing.

[mysterious music plays]

I went to find her, and, as it turned out,

she was in her bathroom

laying on the floor.

She was barely conscious,

and very pale,

very diaphoretic, cold sweat.

And I ask her what was wrong,

and she said

that everything started spinning,

and she became very nauseated.

My brother and I called 911.

And as we were leaving for the hospital,

it just dawned on me

that she was the only one

of the three of us

that touched the substance.

And I decided to take

a sample of the blobs to the hospital.

[man] I first heard about the material

that fell out of the air

at about the same time

as I met a member of the community

who brought in a sample.

[mellow pulsing music plays]

The sample was in a translucent container

and appeared to contain some, uh, grass.

At that time,

our lab technician put

some of the material under the microscope

and reported that she saw

what looked to be,

in her words, "human cells."

White blood cells,

in particular, in this material.

But, uh, the expectations

that we would be able

to tell composition or origin,

that's well beyond the scope

of what most hospitals' clinics, uh, do.

[Sunny] The fact that this substance

contained a human white blood cell

was quite unexpected.

It really encouraged me

to send it out and have it tested further.

[narrator] Sunny shipped a sample to

the Washington State Department of Health,

and then personally delivered

another sample

to the Department of Ecology.

She thought if anyone

could provide her with answers,

it would be one of these agencies.

[kettle whistles]

But once they were out of her hands,

all she could do was wait

and monitor her mother's health.

[gloomy music plays]

[Sunny] My mother was hospitalized

for about four days.

Her discharge diagnosis was

"some kind of virus."

To this day, I feel pretty confident

that my mother became ill

because of the substance.

[narrator] And Sunny's mom wasn't alone.

That same week,

a number of Oakville residents became ill,

many with similar symptoms.

[Sunny] Four days after the first fallout,

during the time

when my mother was still in the hospital,

my brother and I found

our little kitten on the deck,

and it was it was dead.

And we heard stories

that there were other animals

that have died.

And that was one of the reasons

why I was so anxious

to identify the substance.

Shortly thereafter,

the reports from these agencies

started coming back to me.

Department of Ecology discovered a cell

that indicated

that it came from a living thing.

[gloomy music intensifies]

But it was not human white blood cells.

I was very surprised

that the speculation

was that it was jellyfish.

[mysterious music plays]

[narrator] News quickly spread

that the blobs may be pulverized jellyfish

falling from the sky.

But if that were true,

how did they get up there

in the first place?

[Bill] As the communications director,

when all the media calls came in to me,

we needed to come up with an answer,

so that was the mad scramble.

"What do we know?

What have we heard about?"

"What about the fishing community?

You seeing anything out in the ocean?"

[woman] Back in 1994,

my husband and I were camping

on the beach in Kalaloch.

And, one day,

we were walking along the shore,

and we just noticed

hundreds of dead crabs.

And along with them

were these little blobs.

Within the next day or two,

my husband read an article

about the Oakville blobs,

wondered if there was a connection.

[Bill] Dead crabs on a beach

is not an anomaly,

but when there are hundreds

of dead crabs on a beach

and gooey biological material

falling from the sky

and all of these things happening

essentially at one period of time,

you can't help but make the connection.

We remembered the day before,

there were b*mb blasts

that we thought possibly there was

some bombing activity going on, testing.

[intriguing music plays]

[Bill] Washington has

a number of military bases.

And people had been very concerned

about, uh, the military

using the ocean as target practice.

Back then, the West Coast salmon fishery

had essentially crashed,

and we were stunned,

I think, that there could be,

sort of, a level of insensitivity,

uh, by the military.

But, on top of that,

it all seemed to make sense

that perhaps it was

a detonation of some sort

and all sorts of biological material

was being pulverized and sent aloft.

[man] It is plausible that something

the size of portions of a jellyfish

could be pulled up into the atmosphere

and could be then redeposited

after a storm passes an area.

Oakville is inland, in a sense,

but it's still fairly coastal.

We're in the Pacific Northwest,

and for anybody who ever associates

anything with the Pacific Northwest,

one of those things is rain.

And so, what we get

in this kind of an area

is strong storms coming off of the ocean,

bringing air currents

that are extremely strong.

And they can then pull organisms

up outta the water,

bring them aloft into the air.

It's been reported a number of times,

animals being dropped

out of thunderstorms,

dozens of miles to 50, 80 miles inland.

So those kinds of things

make it very simple,

where we've got

the right atmospheric conditions

to get these things aloft,

and keep them there

until they fall back down to the earth,

in the example of the blobs

that happened at Oakville.

[Sunny] After the first fallout,

about a week later,

some reporters came down to the farm

and wanted to do an interview.

And while they were there

[fascinating music plays]

it fell out of the sky again.

I was quite amazed.

It didn't last very long,

but they were exactly the same

as the first fallout.

So, the jellyfish theory

didn't feel right to me.

Because there was not just one fallout

of gelatinous goo.

There were six [chuckles]

over a three-week period of time.

So the jellyfish

would've had to have been up there

for quite some time before it fell.

It didn't seem very likely.

It happened many times.

Apparently, six storms brought that stuff.

And still no answers.

What is it that Sherlock Holmes said?

Something like, he said,

"When the simple is not the explanation,

you have to go for the extraordinary."

[captivating classical music plays]

[Sunny] The most significant testing

that was done

was when I sent it to Mike McDowell

with the State Health Department.

The result that they got

yielded something quite unexpected.

[man] This is my dad.

[chuckles] I think this was, maybe,

the last year he was alive.

So, it'd be like 2019.

[Dan] He's sitting on the deck

he built with his own bare hands.

As kids, we went

to the State Health Department a few times

and we got to see the tests

and what he did.

[Dan] Every once in a while,

uh, military vehicles would come

pick him up

during the anthrax outbreaks,

you know, in 2000.

He was just one of the guys

they would call.

What I remember about the blobs

is when people started gettin' sick

and a bunch of cats

and a bunch of cattle died from it.

And then, when Unsolved Mysteries hit,

everybody was calling, you know,

and being like,

"Man, I saw your dad on TV."

[host] The goo was promptly forwarded

to the Washington State

Department of Health

for further analysis.

It was very uniform.

There was no structure

that we could see visibly

or or with a microscope.

Uh, I set it up

on various microbiological media

and attempted to isolate, uh, bacteria.

[Sunny] Mike McDowell did probably

the most research on the blobs.

I heard that the sample that I sent

was kept in a medium containment facility.

[walls clanking]

And I'm assuming that's because

the Health Department considered

that it was a type of biological hazard.

And this was the lab report.

And here it clearly states

[reading]

My understanding is

that bacteria lives in the gut,

and that really sent up some red flags.

[chiming music plays]

[narrator] Mike McDowell's research

once again forced the scientific community

to rethink the blobs' origin,

causing some to look

to the sky for answers.

There was a theory

about the Oakville blobs

being human waste,

being dropped from aircraft.

[intriguing music plays]

[David] These days,

I don't know if it happens as much.

But back then, I had heard stories

of "blue ice," uh, falling

through a person's roof.

Blue ice is kind of a slang term

referencing waste

from the the toilets in an airplane.

[water whooshing]

It's got a blue coloring,

and it's also got an antifreeze

mixed in with it,

which can be quite toxic.

[Sunny] When I contacted the FAA,

they said that

they didn't think that it was possible.

Well, the FAA said many times

they don't drop their human waste

from planes over populated areas.

They usually clean out the planes

at the airports.

Now, mistakes can be made, of course,

and something can drop,

but, um, it's blue.

The ice is blue.

Uh, these blobs were not blue.

They were clear and gelatinous.

I don't understand how that could've been

human waste falling from a plane.

[Paul] A couple things

are sort of interesting about it. Yes,

there were these bacteria present

in all these samples,

and it is a normal part

of the digestive tract for humans

and actually most mammals,

but it also can be found environmentally,

because, uh, of course [chuckles]

animals don't have flushing toilets.

And so you get bacteria

that gets mixed into the soil.

You also get it in the water,

and then it can be aerosolized.

That's just nature.

Whatever it was that happened in Oakville,

it made me question more,

and it made me feel

like there was a darker element

that has not been talked about,

that the media ignored.

I think there was

something more sinister involved.

[tense ethereal music plays]

[music intensifies]

[Sunny] For several months

before the fallout of the blobs,

fairly frequently,

at least once or twice a week,

we would have flyovers

of big black helicopters.

[helicopter whirring]

[Dotty] That is a black helicopter

flying over.

Wanna get him on, uh, tape.

They say there is no such thing,

but there is.

[Sunny] And then, I think it was in 1997,

when I was working at the soda fountain,

a group of men came in

[menacing music plays]

strangers, not from the Oakville area,

and ordered milkshakes.

And then the lead guy

started questioning me.

"Isn't this the town

where the blobs fell?"

And I said, "Yes."

"And is it true

that someone saw black aircraft?"

And I just felt very uncomfortable.

And they finally left,

and I ran over to the window

to write down their license plate number,

and one of my customers said to me,

"I already have it."

And she goes,

"I don't know who those guys were,

but," she says, "the hair is standing up

on the back of my neck."

The license plate number came back

registered to Fort Hood, Texas.

I spent many years

researching what happened in Oakville,

and I found

that Mike McDowell called it a matrix.

He said it was a substance

that was like an envelope

that something could be inserted into,

like a germ or a virus.

He thought it was a delivery system.

Like a c carrier system.

He did say that.

He goes He goes, "Think"

He goes, "I don't have any proof,

but it does look like

it was for, like, carrying something."

Based on what I know now

that I didn't know then,

I think it was a military exercise.

I really do.

You know,

it's happened throughout history,

where they have done types of experiments

on people without their permission.

[narrator] Could the US military

be to blame for the blobs?

And if so, why?

What would they gain

by infecting their own people?

[archival narrator 1] The time has come

when everyone in the Navy

must face up to the threat

of biological warfare or "BW."

[suspenseful music plays]

In 1943, the United States was concerned

about the potential for a bioweapon attack

from either Germany or Japan,

because they were afraid

that those countries were developing

their own weapons programs.

[archival narrator 2] Biological warfare

could be used to seek out personnel

in areas where there is cover.

[Mark] So, the US conducted

a number of open-air tests.

Some of those were on military bases,

some of those

were over civilian populations.

San Francisco,

San Diego,

Honolulu,

Panama City, Florida,

Norfolk, Virginia

There were over 200 tests conducted.

[Clyde] They've been doing

gain-of-function exercises since the '50s,

and, uh, this is done

for national security reasons.

They did it in San Francisco

to figure out if the Bay Area would be

a great place for a biological attack.

Operation Seaspray had spray devices

on barges off the coast of San Francisco.

They released simulant organisms,

which were deemed to be non-pathogenic.

But they were also deemed

to be very similar

to agents like anthrax,

as a way to compare

what would happen,

you know, with something like anthrax.

And what they found was,

under the right weather conditions,

a significant portion

of the population of San Francisco

would've been exposed to these organisms

if it had been a bioweapon attack.

Around the time

Operation Seaspray was run,

there was a case report

of around 11 people who were infected

with Serratia marcescens.

[narrator] At the time,

the bacteria Serratia marcescens

was believed to be harmless to humans.

The pink slimy substance

is found in humid environments,

but is now known to cause

certain types of infections,

and in some cases, pneumonia.

[Mark] In fact, one individual died.

But there's been a lot of conjecture

about whether that had anything to do

with the actual open-air testing or not.

They don't think twice

about exposing people to this

if they can get some data.

I mean, going back to Oakville,

were they experimenting

on the people of Oakville?

I think chances are, yeah.

I have decided

that the United States of America

will renounce the use

of any form of deadly biological weapons

that either k*ll or incapacitate.

[somber music plays]

[Mark] President Nixon closed

the military's offensive

biological warfare program in 1969.

There was significant

increasing international pressure

to establish new treaties

to ban the use

of chemical and biological warfare agents.

So, in the case of the Oakville situation,

if we were actually doing

that type of testing

of a potential bioweapon agent,

that would be

in violation of international treaties.

Number two, um,

really, if someone's using bioweapons,

an attack is silent.

So, the organisms is

is not even visible to the naked eye.

You don't smell it.

You don't know it's comin' around you.

Uh, and so, I think it's highly unlikely

something like that

was done by the government.

[thunder rumbles]

[tense music plays]

[James] We were just waiting

for the doctor to come and run some tests,

and I just asked my dad, I was like,

"Hey, you know, remember that story

you did on Unsolved Mysteries?"

"You never told us the answer to that."

Like, "What did you find

in those, uh, blobs?"

And he told me, he goes, "I never got

to finish, and that really frustrated me."

"Before I could finish what I was doing,

someone came and grabbed it."

[Sunny] According to Mike,

he went to work,

and he was going to get the sample,

and it was missing.

He was very distraught,

because he had worked there for decades

and he had never lost a sample.

And when he approached his supervisor

and said that the sample was missing,

his supervisor advised him

to not ask any questions.

My dad did say, "Suits came in."

And I was like, "Suits?"

And he was like, "Yeah." He d

he didn't know if it was government,

but he said "black suits."

That's what the lady

at the front desk told him,

that black suits came and took it.

[Dan] I remember one time

talking about it, you know,

like, in a living room

at my uncle's house or somethin',

and and he started gettin' emotional

that he never got to finish it,

'cause it would've been,

you know, a big finding in his career.

[footsteps receding]

[Paul] The records seem

to have gone missing.

The samples seem to have gone missing.

Unfortunately, the people who handled

a lot of this have passed,

and so we are looking

at, largely, an oral tradition now.

[Sunny] Eventually,

the samples were consumed by testing

until we just simply ran out.

We would never be able

to identify the substance.

[melancholy classical waltz plays]

[narrator] In 1994, the blobs fell.

And since then,

their origin has been debated.

Yet, after all the theories

and speculations,

only one truth has emerged,

some mysteries are destined to endure.

[Paul] I was looking into this again

and found a few other cases

where people said something similar,

but there was very little detail,

largely 'cause I don't think

anybody got sick.

So, that's where nobody sorta cared.

What happened in Oakville was unusual,

and we s call it the

sort of the Swiss Cheese model.

Finally had enough things

that came together,

enough of those holes lined up,

that we got just the right magic b*llet

to get through there

to give us a one-off unusual story.

[Sunny] One of the things

that was the most important to me

was to make people aware of it.

I spent a lotta time,

you know, researching,

tryin' to figure it out,

because in my reality,

blobs don't fall out of the sky.

[Clyde] I think

what Sunny has done is important,

because she's kept

the investigation alive.

I wish more people were behind her,

because the more we talk about it,

the more we get down

to the bottom of what happened.

[Bill] You wanna recognize

that there's

a rational explanation for it,

and even the most rational,

science-based explanation

is still gonna be a wild one.

[David] My view is

that blue ice is the, uh, cause

of this, uh, deposition.

[Dan] It has to be man-made.

That that's where my mind goes, but

It's like, "Why?

What's the purpose? What's the point?"

[Clyde] I mean,

look where we are now with COVID.

I mean, we know all about what it's like

to be subjected to a scary disease,

you know, where you don't

even wanna go outta your house.

You you you don't even wanna

do anything 'cause you're so terrified.

Well, these people were terrified

to leave their homes,

because there were gelatinous goop

everywhere that was making them sick.

I mean, how how do you deal with that?

[Sunny] Some people

just didn't necessarily believe it,

because they didn't experience it.

And that's okay.

I know that I was there,

and experienced it.

My mother experienced it.

That's good enough for me.

[Dotty] Well, what you're lookin' at here

is a beautiful sunset.

See you later. Bye for now.

[suspenseful music plays]