On March 3, 1876, Mrs. Allen Crouch was outside her home near Olympia Springs, in Bath County, Kentucky, making soap, when what looked like pieces of meat started falling from the sky. The sky was clear. The shower lasted a few minutes and covered a patch of ground reported at about 100 yards long and 50 yards wide.
Most of the flakes were a few inches across. Some stuck to fences, and others lay on the ground. A few locals are said to have tasted them, and one reported that it tasted like mutton or venison.
The Kentucky Meat Shower is a real and well-documented oddity. Newspapers reported it, samples went to scientists, and the findings were published. It is a good example of how people in the nineteenth century tried to make sense of something strange. It also shows how often the most likely answer turns out to be less mysterious than the question.
The first reports
The story moved through regional and national newspapers. The New York Times covered it in March 1876 and described the meat as falling "like large snowflakes."
People came out to look at what was left. Samples were preserved in glass jars and sent off to scientists and collectors, some of them at universities and natural history societies.
What the scientists found
Several people examined samples and published what they concluded, and they did not all agree.
- Nostoc. One early suggestion, published in a scientific journal, was that the material was Nostoc, a type of cyanobacteria that can form jelly-like masses after rain. Critics pushed back on that idea quickly, since the sky had been clear and the material appeared to be animal tissue.
- Lung tissue. Dr. Allan McLane Hamilton reported, on the basis of microscopic examination, that the samples looked like lung tissue from a horse or from a human infant.
- Several tissue types. Leopold Brandeis, writing in the Sanitarian, described his own examination of samples and reported finding lung tissue and muscle, and cartilage.
Samples examined later were likewise identified as lung tissue, cartilage and muscle fiber. Among those who actually looked at the material, the consensus was that it was real animal tissue.
How could meat fall from the sky?
The leading explanation at the time, and still the one given most often, is that vultures vomited it.
Dr. L. D. Kastenbine of Louisville put this idea forward. Vultures are known to throw up the contents of their stomachs when threatened or startled, possibly to lighten the load for a quick takeoff or to distract a predator. Black vultures and turkey vultures are both common in Kentucky. If a group of them flying overhead were startled and all vomited at once, the result could look like a short shower of meat.
Local people reportedly leaned toward this explanation as well.
It has never been proven. Nobody reported seeing vultures that day, at least in the accounts that survive. Even so, it fits the evidence better than the alternatives do. The meat was real, it was a mix of tissues consistent with partly eaten carcasses, and it came down over a small area in a short time.
Other theories
Over the years, people have offered other explanations:
- A meteorological event, such as a whirlwind picking up remains somewhere else and dropping them here. There is no evidence of a storm, and witnesses described the sky as clear.
- A hoax. That is possible in principle. But the reports were consistent, several scientists examined the samples, and no one had an obvious motive.
- Something supernatural or religious. Some newspapers and readers took it as a sign. There is no reason to take that seriously today, though it does show how people reacted at the time.
Where the samples are now
Some of the original samples survived. One jar was held at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, in the collection of the Monroe Moosnick Medical and Science Museum. The university and the local press have both displayed it and written about it.
Strange showers in history
Reports of odd things falling from the sky go back centuries. Fish and frogs coming down with the rain are the best-known examples. In many of those cases the likely explanation is a waterspout or a strong updraft that lifted small animals out of a pond or the sea and dropped them somewhere else.
In the early twentieth century, the writer Charles Fort collected hundreds of these reports in books such as The Book of the Damned (1919). He cared more about the reports themselves than about explaining them. The word "Fortean" is still used today for odd, unexplained phenomena.
The Kentucky Meat Shower stands out among these stories for two reasons. It was studied closely at the time, and it has a plausible explanation that does not depend on a storm.
How to read a strange story like this
- Check the contemporary sources. For 1876, that means the newspapers and scientific journals of the day.
- Look for physical evidence. In this case, samples were kept and examined.
- Separate observation from interpretation. The falling meat is the observation. The vultures are an interpretation.
- Prefer the explanation that fits the most evidence with the fewest extra assumptions. Vultures fit. Storms do not.
What the record supports
- The date, place and event are well documented in newspaper reports from March 1876.
- The material was animal tissue, according to several examinations published at the time.
- The vulture theory is the most widely accepted explanation, although nobody reported seeing the birds.
- The tasting comes from newspaper accounts and should be read with that in mind.
Sources
- "Flesh Descending in a Shower," The New York Times, March 10, 1876.
- Leopold Brandeis, report on the Kentucky shower, The Sanitarian, 1876.
- Transylvania University, Monroe Moosnick Medical and Science Museum, materials on the Kentucky Meat Shower specimen.
- Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned (Boni and Liveright, 1919).
- Smithsonian Magazine, coverage of the Kentucky Meat Shower specimen.