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The Book of the Damned - Charles Fort

"The Kentucky Phenomenon."

So it was called, in its day, and now we have an occurrence that attracted a great deal of attention in its own time. Usually these things of the accursed have been hushed up or disregarded—suppressed like the seven black rains of Slains--but, upon March 3, 1876, something occurred, in Bath County, Kentucky, that brought many newspaper correspondents to the scene.

The substance that looked like beef that fell from the sky.

Upon March 3, 1876, at Olympian Springs, Bath County, Kentucky, flakes of a substance that looked like beef fell from the sky--"from a clear sky." We'd like to emphasize that it was said that nothing but this falling substance was visible in the sky. It fell in flakes of various sizes; some two inches square, one, three or four inches square. The flake-formation is interesting: later we shall think of it as signifying pressure--somewhere. It was a thick shower, on the ground, on trees, on fences, but it was narrowly localized: or upon a strip of land about 100 yards long and about 50 yards wide. For the first account, see the Scientific American, 34-197, and the New York Times, March 10, 1876.

If we think of how hard the exclusionists have fought to reject the coming of ordinary-looking dust from this earth's externality, we can sympathize with them in this sensational instance, perhaps. Newspaper correspondents wrote broadcast and witnesses were quoted, and this time there is no mention of a hoax, and, except by one scientist, there is no denial that the fall did take place.

In the _Scientific American Supplement, 2-473,
 Dr. A. Mead Edwards, President of the Newark Scientific Association, writes that, …..Dr. Hamilton, who had a specimen …. had declared it to be lung-tissue. Dr. Edwards writes of the substance that --"It turned out to be lung-tissue also." He wrote to other persons who had specimens, and identified other specimens as masses of cartilage or muscular fibers. "As to whence it came, I have no theory." Nevertheless he endorses the local explanation--and a bizarre thing it is:

A flock of gorged, heavy-weighted buzzards, but far up and invisible in the clear sky--

They had disgorged.