OAKVILLE BLOBS

Opening

On 7 August 1994, during a rainstorm over Oakville, a small logging and farming town in Grays Harbor County, Washington, people said the rain came down wrong. Instead of running off, it left clear, jelly-like blobs, about the size of grains of rice, on roofs, cars and fields. Over the following three weeks it was said to happen several more times, across an area of around twenty square miles.

Then people started getting sick. A woman who handled the blobs ended up in hospital with dizziness and nausea, a police officer felt ill after touching them, and residents spoke of a flu that went round the whole town and of pets that died. A hospital lab said the blobs held human white blood cells. The state's labs disagreed with the hospital and with each other. A private lab paid for by a newspaper reporter found something duller and stranger: a man-made chemical. No sample survives, and nobody has ever said where the blobs came from.

Timeline

7 August 1994The first fall. Accounts give six falls in all over about three weeks.

August 1994Sunny Barclift finds the blobs on a black asphalt roof on her family's 29-acre farm. Her mother, Dotty Hearn, falls ill with dizziness and nausea and is treated in hospital. The family's kitten collapses and dies. Barclift sends samples to the authorities.

August 1994Officer David Lacey, on patrol in the rain, sees the water smear across his windshield instead of clearing. At a petrol station he touches the goo, and later he feels ill with tiredness and nausea.

August 1994Tom Paulson of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer goes to Oakville. While he is interviewing two residents at their home, blobs fall in the rain. He calls the Federal Aviation Administration and McChord Air Force Base, and neither claims them.

19 August 1994Paulson's story runs, carried in other papers including The Lewiston Tribune.

Autumn 1994The state Department of Ecology and the Department of Health test samples and come up with conflicting answers. Paulson pays about $100 for a private lab test.

1996NBC's Unsolved Mysteries tells the story to a national audience.

8 April 2025A woman in Rochester, about eight miles from Oakville, reports palm-sized clear blobs falling over her home. They melt in a jar at room temperature.

Key figures

Sunny Barclift and Dotty Hearn are the family at the centre of the story. Barclift collected the samples, and Hearn's illness is the reason anyone tested them.

David Lacey is the police officer whose account gave the story weight. He rarely spoke about it outside the television programme.

Tom Paulson broke the story, and three decades later still calls it the most long-lived of everything he ever reported.

Mike Osweiler of the Department of Ecology and the microbiologist Mike McDowell at the Department of Health handled the official tests.

Physical and documentary trail

The record: Paulson's newspaper reports from August 1994, the residents' accounts, the television episode, and later interviews. The test results survive only as people described them.

And the descriptions do not agree. A hospital lab technician reported human white blood cells in the goo. The Department of Ecology said the cells lacked nuclei, so they could not be human white blood cells, and Osweiler said the material had come from something once alive. The Department of Health found two common kinds of bacteria, Pseudomonas fluorescens and Enterobacter cloacae. By Paulson's account, Ecology called the blobs inorganic and Health called them organic. Then his own private test identified polyacrylamide, a synthetic chemical used in water treatment, to hold soil against erosion, and to soak up spills.

What is missing is the evidence itself. McDowell said the samples disappeared from his lab, and none is known to exist today. There is also no medical record in public showing that anyone's illness was caused by the blobs, as opposed to coinciding with them.

So the testing resolved nothing.

Things you might not know

• The reporter saw it fall. Paulson was in a residents' home doing an interview when the blobs came down outside.
• He thought it was a joke at first. Paulson has said he went expecting a light story, and his first guess was waste from an aircraft toilet.
• Aircraft toilet waste is blue. The FAA rejected that theory because the chemicals used in aircraft toilets dye the waste blue, and the blobs were clear.
• Bombing practice was blamed too. One theory held that Air Force bombing practice over the ocean had shredded jellyfish into the clouds, though the practice area was 40 to 50 miles away.
• The coast had its own goo. Around the same time, a couple on the Washington coast reported dead crabs and a clear gel, and said they and their dog fell ill after touching it.
• It came back in 2025. The new Rochester blobs had no smell and melted at room temperature. Nobody has published a test of them.

Competing explanations

A synthetic gel. Paulson's private test found polyacrylamide, and absorbent polymers of this family swell into clear jelly when wet. It may have already been on the ground or roofs and swelled in the rain, or have been dumped or sprayed. This fits the test best, but it does not explain the reports of the blobs actually falling, or the biological findings.

Something once alive. The Ecology and hospital findings point to biological material, perhaps marine life such as jellyfish broken up and carried inland by weather. Nobody has shown how that could happen over a town miles from the sea.

A secret military test. Some residents reported military activity at the time and suspected a biological or chemical trial. The military denied involvement, and no evidence has surfaced.

Illness by coincidence. A summer flu, a woman in hospital and a few dead animals may have been linked to the blobs after the fact. That would explain the illness, not the blobs.

Later life of the case

The Oakville blobs became a staple of strange-weather lists and podcasts, often with dramatic additions such as a whole town struck down and the samples spirited away. The 2025 reports from Rochester sent reporters back to the story and to Paulson, who said the polyacrylamide answer was a boring one, and that he still did not know how it came to fall from the sky.

Finding

Something gel-like turned up in Oakville in August 1994, a reporter saw it fall, and several people fell ill around the same time. The tests disagreed with each other, and the one clear result, polyacrylamide, points to a man-made chemical rather than anything biological, though it does not say how it got there. With no samples left and no medical link shown, the strongest reading is a real but ordinary substance whose arrival was never traced, wrapped in illnesses that may have been coincidence.

What still will not resolve: where the gel came from, and whether any of the 1994 samples or test reports still sit in a state archive.