Chubby rain

Clouds grew dark and the soft pitter-patter of what the people of Oakville, Washington believed to be rain could be heard tapping against windows and dancing across rooftops. A summer storm was underway, and no one thought much of it… at first.

But there was something off about this “rain.”

When the clouds rolled back August 7, 1994, and the sun again shown down on Oakville, townspeople were shocked to find a gooey white substance clinging to blades of grass, tree limbs, and clumped piles in neighbor’s drainpipes. The substance appeared to rain down over the area in flecks smaller than a grain of rice. According to local reports, the chubby rain did not fall in any other nearby locations.

Over the next few weeks residents reported seeing mysterious blobs falling on about six separate occasions. Soon after, the sickness came.

The townspeople of Oakville began coming down with flu-like symptoms not long after the mysterious substance fell. Some individuals remained ill for several weeks to a couple of months after the first incident.

Authorities began scouring national weather reports, searching for any similarly reported incidents in the area and finding none. The only incident reported to be remotely close to what Oakville residents were experiencing, had happened earlier in the month when a National Weather Service employee reported receiving a call from an unidentified male. The man described metallic particles falling from the sky, and claimed the flecks were burning holes in his children’s trampoline.

When attempting to find similar weather incidents largely proved to be a bust, many theories were advanced to explain the cause of the gelatinous blobs. One explosive theory related to the army and jellyfish.

At the time, bombs were being dropped on the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Washington by the 354th Fighter Squadron. The Oakville Chief of Police Gary Greub received an alert the army may have bombed a school of jellyfish, which could be the source of the strange “rain.” However, residents reported the blobs falling at least six times in the area, making the possibility of jellyfish bits remaining in the air for such a length of time implausible.

An analysis of the blobs was conducted by the Washington State Department of Ecology, and the results were released August 20, 1994. Scientist Mike Osweiler tested the Oakville Blobs and said his team found “a number of cells of various sizes,” leading to claims the blobs were once alive.

Results revealed the cells had no nuclei, which is necessary for both human white cells, and jellyfish. According to microbiologists, life lacking nuclei would be made up of prokaryotic cells, found in bacteria and archaea. The culture taken from the blobs showed the presence of two kinds of bacteria; Pseudomonas fluorescens and Enterobacter cloacae, found in the digestive tracts of humans and other mammals. Bacteria can be left behind in the environment by waste, travel in water and aerosols, and is known to cause illness. For this reason, some scientists theorized the material could be some type of carrier system created by the military, fostering rumors of biological weapons testing, even though such experimentation would violate international treaties. In a predictable plot twist, the samples mysteriously disappeared, and no further testing could be performed.

Do you think Oakville’s chubby rain was alien related, military, or advanced testing of a gelatinous form of COVID? Was Oakville another example of our government’s testing gone wrong, such as in the case of its 1932 Tuskegee [secret] Syphilis testing?