CALDWELL SKY THREAD

Opening

On Sunday 2 August 1970, neighbours on Forest Avenue in Caldwell, New Jersey, noticed something that seemed to hang straight down out of the sky over the home of Mr. and Mrs. A. P. Smith at number 85. It was a thin line, silvery when the sun caught it, rigid enough to look like wire. The lower end dangled about 150 feet above the houses. The upper end simply disappeared into the sky.

Police tried to trace it and lost it in the clouds. Crowds came to stare. The line stayed up for weeks, through storms and wind, and local boys hauled down long lengths of it with fishing tackle. A chemical company said it was a kind of nylon with a hollow core, but nobody ever found where it came from. John Keel printed the story in his newsletter ANOMALY that October, under a line from Charles Fort: perhaps there is somebody up there fishing for us.

Timeline

Sunday 2 August 1970Neighbours report the line hanging over the Smiths' house. Mrs. Smith suggests it might be "a direct line from the Martians".

Monday 3 AugustThe line hangs about 150 feet above the houses on Forest and Hillside Avenues. Caldwell police follow it up Hillside and towards West Caldwell, then lose it in the clouds.

Tuesday 4 AugustPolice try again with no more luck. To Mrs. Smith and other watchers, the line seems limper and lower.

6 August 1970The local weekly, the Caldwell Progress, runs the story.

August 1970Sightseers gather in the street. Theories include a line trailing from a blimp seen cruising over the area. Boys in the neighbourhood snag lines with fishing poles and pull down long lengths, in one case working for an hour before the line caught and broke.

Afternoon of 31 August 1970According to Keel, Mrs. Smith hears a loud bang like a jet breaking the sound barrier, and finds that the line has fallen into her yard. Local police come to collect the material at 3:30 the next morning.

October 1970Keel reports the case on page 73 of ANOMALY no. 5.

January 1971The Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained, Ivan Sanderson's group based in New Jersey, publishes a report on the case in its journal, Pursuit. It says Keel first told them about it.

Key figures

Mr. and Mrs. A. P. Smith lived under the line, and Mrs. Smith was its most quoted witness, from the first day to the day it fell.

The Caldwell police tried twice to trace the line to its source, and later collected the material. The boys with fishing poles did the most practical research of anyone.

John Keel heard about the line, passed it on to Sanderson's group and put it in his newsletter. Sanderson's investigators did the most detailed work on the case, including finding that there was more than one line.

Physical and documentary trail

The sources: the Caldwell Progress report of 6 August 1970; Keel's account in ANOMALY; the Pursuit report of January 1971; and later retellings, including an interview in Weird NJ with a man who helped snag the line as a boy. Unusually for a sky mystery, the material itself was collected.

According to the Pursuit report, investigators found about half a dozen separate lines, not one. Police traced one of them out over Montclair to a meadow and never found either end. One line stayed taut for about a month through storms and high winds before one end gave way. Samples went to the DuPont company, which identified the material as a nylon, type 6 or a 6 and 66 copolymer, similar to fishing line, and said it was not made by them. A researcher named in the report, Dr. Vargas, found a fine hollow tube running through the line that at first looked empty, but after time in a vacuum jar held a solid substance that could not be analysed.

What is missing is the top. Nobody ever found where the lines were fixed, how high they went, or what was holding them up. No surviving sample is known to have been tested since.

Charles Fort once suggested that there's somebody up there fishing for us.

Things you might not know

• It was tough stuff. The line was described as rigid, with a breaking strength of about two pounds.
• The boys filled buckets. Accounts say the neighbourhood boys hauled in enough line to fill several buckets. Estimates of the total run from a thousand feet to far more.
• It was not the last. The Pursuit report lists similar lines from the sky at Elberton, Georgia, in June 1972, and Greensburg, Ohio, in September 1978.
• Keel corrected himself on the same page. Above the Caldwell note, Keel admits that a famous 1946 monster wave he had placed in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, actually happened in Lebanon, Indiana, adding that "we can and do make mistakes".
• It is a New Jersey legend. The Caldwell thread has a regular place in Weird NJ's collection of the state's strangest stories.

Competing explanations

Lines from a kite, balloon or aircraft. The material was ordinary nylon, similar to fishing line, and several lines were found. Lines tethered to a balloon, trailed from a blimp or snagged from a kite could hang and drift for a long time. The problem is that nobody found the upper ends, and a month aloft through storms is a lot to ask of a kite.

A hoax or prank. Someone could have strung lines from high points such as trees, towers or hills. But tracing one line over Montclair to a meadow, with both ends missing, makes a simple prank hard to picture.

Something unexplained. This is the Fortean reading Keel enjoyed: lines from nowhere, with a hollow core and a strange solid that appeared inside it. It rests mostly on the missing upper end and on lab details reported only in Sanderson's journal.

Later life of the case

The Caldwell thread became a small classic of American Forteana, retold in books of unexplained mysteries and in New Jersey folklore. It has never been solved, partly because it was never treated as anything more than a local oddity: the police looked twice, a company looked once, and then the line came down.

Finding

For about a month in the summer of 1970, real nylon lines hung over the houses of Caldwell, New Jersey, high enough that police could not trace them to their source. They were seen by many people, reported in the local paper, pulled down by boys with fishing rods and tested by a chemical company. The strongest reading is that they were tethered to something, a balloon, a kite or a structure, that nobody ever identified.

What still will not resolve: what held the top of the lines, and what the solid was that appeared inside the hollow core.