Gelatinous blobs reportedly rained down on the timber town of Oakville back in the summer of 1994, kicking off a mystery that would come to be known as the Oakville Blobs. Exactly what the jelly rain consisted of had residents spooked, with several reporting that they became unwell and animals died as the Oakville Blobs rained down.

So, what were the Oakville Blobs, and where did they come from?

Oakville Blobs: What happened?

On August 7, 1994, the Oakville Blobs first arrived. They rained down from the sky in flecks of goo smaller than a grain of rice, but at such a high volume that they became visible across the ground and on shed roofs, including that of Oakville resident Sunny Barclift.

On August 19, 1994, Seattle Post-Intelligencer Tom Paulson wrote about the Oakville Blobs for The Lewiston Tribune, stating: “Twice in the past two weeks when it has rained, small blobs of clear, gelatinous goo have fallen on and around the home [Sunny] Barclift shares with her mother, Dotty Hearn, on a 29-acre [12-hectare] farm.”

“There have been no other confirmed reports of mysterious blobs, officials with several agencies said. But a National Weather Service employee in the area received a call from an unidentified man in early August describing hot, metallic particles from the sky that burned holes in his children's trampoline.”

Oakville Blobs: What were they?

A hospital reportedly looked at the Oakville Blobs under a microscope, stating they contained some human white cells. This prompted the suggestion the Oakville Blobs were concentrated fluid waste from an airplane toilet, but a Federal Aviation Administration spokesperson said this was unlikely as toilet fluids are typically dyed blue, giving it the nickname “blue ice”.

A second, more intriguing theory to explain the Oakville Blobs is that it had something to do with blowing up jellyfish. Bombs were being dropped in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Washington by the 354th Fighter Squadron at the time, and the Oakville Chief of Police Gary Greub received a tip-off that detonating a school of jellyfish might be the source of the Oakville Blobs.

In the Netflix series Files Of The Unexplained (FOTU), Paul Johnson, Associate Professor of Biology at the University of North Georgia, said that it was plausible that something the size of portions of a jellyfish could be pulled up into the atmosphere and redeposited during a storm. Raining animals is nothing new, but Barclift reported six events of Oakfield Blobs raining down from the sky, making it harder to imagine jellyfish particles were floating in the air for so long.

On August 20, 1994, The New York Times reported that the “Mystery Blobs Were Once Alive” following an analysis by the Washington State Department of Ecology. Agency scientist Mike Osweiler who tested the Oakville Blobs said they found “a number of cells of various sizes.”

These results would appear to blow the human white cell story out of the water, as they revealed the cells had no nuclei – something that you would see in human white cells – taking the jellyfish theory with it. As multicellular organisms from the phylum Cnidaria, jellyfish are made up of eukaryotic cells like other animals, which contain nuclei along with other membrane-bound organelles.

The kind of life that would lack nuclei would be made up of prokaryotic cells, found in bacteria and archaea. That ties in with the findings of Washington State Public Health Department (WSPHD) microbiologist Mike McDowell who appeared on the TV series Unsolved Mysteries in 1997 to talk about the testing he did on the Oakfield Blobs.

“It was very uniform,” McDowell says in a clip shown in FOTU. “There was no structure that we could see visibly or with a microscope. I set it up on various microbiological media and attempted to isolate bacteria.”

A report from the WSPHD presented by Barclift in the episode states the culture yielded two kinds of bacteria: Pseudomonas fluorescens and Enterobacter cloacae, both normal residents in the digestive tracts of humans and other mammals. They can also be found environmentally when waste has been deposited, and can travel in water and aerosols. 

According to McDowell's sons, he believed the goo might be some kind of carrier system, but also said he didn’t have any hard evidence to support the claim. The suggestion has prompted theories of biological weapon testing, but such activity by the US military would violate international treaties. Unfortunately, McDowell was never able to get to the bottom of the mystery as his samples went missing before he could finish his work.

Oakville Blobs: Did people really get sick?

Several Oakville residents became ill with similar flu-like symptoms after coming into contact with Oakville Blobs, including Barclift’s mother. Though if they were a direct consequence can't be known for certain.

“After the first blob shower on Aug. 7, Hearn went to the hospital suffering from dizziness and nausea,” wrote Paulson. “Barclift and a friend also had minor bouts of nausea and fatigue after collecting and touching the mysterious goop. A newly adopted kitten, which lived outside, died days later after a struggle with severe intestinal problems.”

At the time, Barclift acknowledged that the illnesses might have been a coincidence, but speaking on FOTU, she maintains that something unusual was going on with the Oakville Blobs. As Johnson explained, the incident is made all the most intriguing by the apparent association of ill-health.

“I was looking at this again and found a few other cases where people said something similar, but there was very little detail largely because I don’t think anybody got sick. So that’s where nobody sort of cared,” he said.

“What happened in Oakville was unusual, it’s called the sort of Swiss Cheese model. Finally had enough things that came together, enough of those holes lined up, that we got just the right magic bullet to get through there to give us a one-off unusual story.”