Mystery as greenish-yellow goo falls from the sky in New York
21st January 2011
Daily Mail

The FAA has launched an investigation after a mysterious greenish-yellow goo fell from the skies and splattered homes in Snyder, New York on Tuesday.

Homes along Washington Highway and Berryman Drive are now coated in yellow or green icicles. Walls and pavements are splashed with a bizarre deep brown substance. 

Neighbours said the mystery substance appeared between the hours of 9am and midnight on Tuesday.

The colour and texture of the goo immediately sparked fears of 'blue ice' - that is, frozen human excrement known to fall from airplanes passing overhead, ABC News reported.

However the FAA swiftly launched an investigation and discarded that possibility.

A spokesman told ABC: 'The local flight standards inspectors investigated the situation and determined it was not from an aircraft.'

So what could it be?

The town waste engineer said they are looking in to it - and have already come across some rather distasteful theories.

'We received a call this morning from a woman who owns a house on the same street, Washington Highway. She gave us her explanation because it happened to her last year,' Lisa Kistner, a spokesman for the Amherst Town Supervisor's Office, told ABC.

'She said it's actually because the seagulls eat fast food at McDonald's, which upsets their digestive tract,' Ms Kistner explained.

The seagulls were eating leftover French fries out of paper bags discarded in the parking lots, the woman apparently claimed.

And, Ms Kistner said, as soon as the woman convinced fast food restaurants to clean up the rubbish in their parking lots, she no longer had that problem.

'She suggested that someone check the fast food parking lots because that is probably the root cause of this issue,' Ms Kistner said.

The woman's bizarre account may not be that far enough. Bird experts who have examined images of the goo actually agree they do resemble bird droppings - though seagulls were ruled innocent.

Instead, according to Cornell's Lab of Ornithology, the droppings may be from a large flock of birds often found in upstate New York in January - European starlings.

But with the town's engineers still doing tests, locals will, for now, simply have to wait a bit longer - and perhaps invest in a good umbrella or two.

SOURCE: Daily Mail

ToxicSkiesItalia | July 05, 2009 

Unsolved Mysteries The Blob
A Toxic Goo rains on residents of Oakville, Washington
May 8, 1997

Robert Stack: It came from the skies to wreck havoc on the earth.

It sounds like a bad science fiction movie, but for the little town in Washington there was nothing entertaining about the scourge that befell them in 1994. Six times it rained down from above, leaving dozens of local residents ill, and several pets and small animals dead. It all happened in Oakville, Washington, population 665. Here in Oakville, clouds fill the skies daily, bringing rain some 275 days a year. So, when it began pouring on the morning of August 7, 1994, no one was particularly concerned - until they realized it wasn't raining rain. It was raining tiny blobs of gelatinous goo. It came down in torrents, blanketing 20 square miles, and brought with it something of a plague.

Maurice Gobeil (local resident): I got sick, my wife got sick, my daughter got sick and everybody that lived here got sick.

Beverly Roberts (local resident): Everybody in the whole town came down with something like the flu, only it was a really hard flu that lasted from seven weeks to two or three months.

Robert Stack: The local police were among the first to report the perplexing precipitation. Officer David Lacey was on patrol with a civilian friend at 3am when the downpour began.

David Lacey (police officer): We turned our windshield wipers on, and it just started smearing to the point where we could almost not see. We both looked at each other and we said 'gee this isn't right'. We're out in the middle of nowhere, basically, and where did this come from?

Robert Stack: Officer Lacey pulled into a gas station to de-goo his windshield. As an added precaution, he put on a pair of latex gloves.