There’s a saying in Kentucky that if you don’t like the weather, just wait five minutes…it will change! On Friday, March 3rd, 1863 in Olympian Springs in northeastern Kentucky…the weather took a turn for the weird. A shower of meat started to rain down on a small farm in Bath county.
According to a New York Times article published the following week, the phenomenon happened near the home of Allen Crouch, whose wife was outside making soap when the meat shower happened. “The meat, which looked like beef, fell all around her. The sky was perfectly clear at the time, and she said it fell like large snowflakes.”
While its not recommended that you put strange pieces of meat that fall from the sky into your mouth, two men did a taste test of the mystery meat. the two men thought that it might be mutton or venison. The New York Daily Herald interviewed local butcher L.C. Frisbe who described a “milky, watery fluid” that oozed out of the meat, and had a “fleshy feel”.
So what was it? There are lots of theories. In an article published in The Louisville Medical News, Leopold Brandeis suggests that the so-called showers of flesh were merely the rapid development of a species of Nostoc, a type of cyanobacteria that expands into snotty, gelatinous clumps when there’s excessive moisture on the ground. However, lab tests confirmed the meat shower was actually pieces of muscle, cartilage and lung.
The most plausible theory from several members of the scientific community is that the meat shower was caused by a flock, or kettle, of vultures flying overhead. Both black vultures and turkey vultures are native to Kentucky and sometimes vomit when they are scared or threatened and need to make a quick getaway.
I talked to Kurt Gohde, professor of art at Transylvania University in Lexington about the vulture theory
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