There are stories in this world we live in
that certainly need to be exposed.
We got all the big ones, you know, like Roswell
and Area 51, I know about that.
But do you know about the blobs that fell over Washington state?
The show I do is Ground Zero Radio,
talking about the paranormal, the parapolitical,
and all things strange and peculiar.
And I found this story outta the 1990s
about Oakville, Washington.
These blobs were falling outta the sky,
and I'm a B-movie guy,
so it reminded me of the movie The Blob.
You know, when I watched The Blob, I thought it was a funny idea,
"Attack of the Killer Jell-O."
Then after reading about what had happened in Oakville,
I was completely just baffled.
It was definitely a topic that people remember,
right up there with Mount St. Helens blowing up.
It was raining, and then people saw these little pellets of weird goo.
We were pokin' 'em with sticks and, like, tryin' to, like, pick 'em up,
and my parents had told us not to touch them.
It felt so surreal and weird and strange,
and it made me wonder,
is there something more going on here that we don't know about?
The thing that was most peculiar about it
is it wasn't just one episode of blobs fallin' from the sky.
I think this happened over a series of rain events.
There were hundreds, if not more.
Just these little blobs.
It's a mystery.
And it's weird. [chuckles] Still weird.
It's one of those stories that needs to be looked into.
And me telling the story,
it doesn't do it justice
until you meet the people that it affected,
till you get deep into the roots of it.
This is where you find the truth.
On August 7th, 1994,
small gelatinous blobs rained down
on the small town of Oakville, Washington.
It was an event that would forever change those who experienced it
and confound all who tried to explain it.
I lived in Oakville from 1993 until 2001.
Thank you so much. Have a great day.
I moved from Phoenix, Arizona.
The allure of living out in a rural area
and being able to walk down to the river and fish
really interested me.
And I also wanted to spend time with my mother,
who had a really beautiful farm there.
First of the crew came down and started mowing the field.
We had chickens and we had goats.
I baked six fresh peach pies.
My mother did canning, and-- and her garden was just amazing.
You know, she really enjoyed the farm life.
Probably gonna rain some more. Yeah.
I notice those clouds are getting darker and heavier as they're coming in.
My mother loved weather.
She really loved weather.
And one day in 1994,
we had a very severe storm.
And I remember rain was falling against some of the windows,
and it looked like the rain was thick.
Shortly thereafter, it just blew over,
and my mother took her little dogs outside.
And when she came back in, she said,
"There's something strange all over the top of the wood box."
"It looks like hail, but I touched it, and it's soft."
And we could see
that there were transparent, gelatinous blobs everywhere.
My background at the time
was in the Occupational Safety and Health Department.
And I feel that having worked in that field
made me more interested in this substance and wanting to know what it is.
And I thought it was very important to keep some sort of record.
So, I documented.
"At 4:30 p.m. of August 7th, 1994,
my brother and I collect samples of the goo."
My brother was a paramedic, and both of us are safety-oriented people.
So, we put gloves on before we handled it.
"Between 5:00 p.m. and 6:30 p.m., I conducted tests."
"It floats in water."
Nothing like this had ever happened in my life before,
and so, I made phone calls.
And I was concerned because it had fell on food.
So, I contacted the Department of Agriculture.
And they really didn't seem to be concerned about it at all.
I called the Department of Ecology. I called the US Weather Service.
No one was able to tell me what the substance was.
I've worked for a member of Congress who represented the town of Oakville.
As with any member of Congress,
the calls come in sort of fast and furious
from all the communities in the district.
In this case, this bizarre phone call came in.
Something about blobs falling from the sky.
I thought it was a prank call.
You'd think, "Okay, people are nuts."
But this wasn't just one person.
So often, uh, people expect the elected official to have the answer.
Uh, the elected official's job really is to find an answer,
to get the experts to do the research.
At the time, no one was hurt.
All I could say was, "We're tryin' to get to the bottom of it."
The following day, I noticed my mother was missing.
I went to find her, and, as it turned out,
she was in her bathroom laying on the floor.
She was barely conscious,
and very pale,
very diaphoretic, cold sweat.
And I ask her what was wrong,
and she said that everything started spinning,
and she became very nauseated.
My brother and I called 911.
And as we were leaving for the hospital,
it just dawned on me
that she was the only one of the three of us
that touched the substance.
And I decided to take a sample of the blobs to the hospital.
I first heard about the material that fell out of the air
at about the same time
as I met a member of the community who brought in a sample.
The sample was in a translucent container
and appeared to contain some, uh, grass.
At that time,
our lab technician put some of the material under the microscope
and reported that she saw what looked to be,
in her words, "human cells."
White blood cells, in particular, in this material.
But, uh, the expectations that we would be able
to tell composition or origin,
that's well beyond the scope of what most hospitals' clinics, uh, do.
The fact that this substance contained a human white blood cell
was quite unexpected.
It really encouraged me
to send it out and have it tested further.
Sunny shipped a sample to the Washington State Department of Health,
and then personally delivered another sample
to the Department of Ecology.
She thought if anyone could provide her with answers,
it would be one of these agencies.
But once they were out of her hands,
all she could do was wait and monitor her mother's health.
My mother was hospitalized for about four days.
Her discharge diagnosis was...
"some kind of virus."
To this day, I feel pretty confident that my mother became ill
because of the substance.
And Sunny's mom wasn't alone.
That same week,
a number of Oakville residents became ill,
many with similar symptoms.
Four days after the first fallout,
during the time when my mother was still in the hospital,
my brother and I found our little kitten on the deck,
and it was-- it was dead.
And we heard stories
that there were other animals that have died.
And that was one of the reasons why I was so anxious
to identify the substance.
Shortly thereafter,
the reports from these agencies
started coming back to me.
Department of Ecology discovered a cell
that indicated that it came from a living thing.
But it was not human white blood cells.
I was very surprised
that the speculation
was that it was jellyfish.
News quickly spread
that the blobs may be pulverized jellyfish
falling from the sky.
But if that were true,
how did they get up there in the first place?
As the communications director, when all the media calls came in to me,
we needed to come up with an answer, so that was the mad scramble.
"What do we know? What have we heard about?"
"What about the fishing community? You seeing anything out in the ocean?"
Back in 1994,
my husband and I were camping on the beach in Kalaloch.
And, one day, we were walking along the shore,
and we just noticed hundreds of dead crabs.
And along with them were these little blobs.
Within the next day or two,
my husband read an article about the Oakville blobs,
wondered if there was a connection.
Dead crabs on a beach is not an anomaly,
but when there are hundreds of dead crabs on a beach
and gooey biological material falling from the sky
and all of these things happening essentially at one period of time,
you can't help but make the connection.
We remembered the day before, there were bomb blasts
that we thought possibly there was some bombing activity going on, testing.
Washington has a number of military bases.
And people had been very concerned
about, uh, the military using the ocean as target practice.
Back then, the West Coast salmon fishery had essentially crashed,
and we were stunned, I think, that there could be,
sort of, a level of insensitivity, uh, by the military.
But, on top of that,
it all seemed to make sense
that perhaps it was a detonation of some sort
and all sorts of biological material was being pulverized and sent aloft.
It is plausible that something the size of portions of a jellyfish
could be pulled up into the atmosphere
and could be then redeposited after a storm passes an area.
Oakville is inland, in a sense, but it's still fairly coastal.
We're in the Pacific Northwest,
and for anybody who ever associates anything with the Pacific Northwest,
one of those things is rain.
And so, what we get in this kind of an area
is strong storms coming off of the ocean,
bringing air currents that are extremely strong.
And they can then pull organisms up outta the water,
bring them aloft into the air.
It's been reported a number of times,
animals being dropped out of thunderstorms,
dozens of miles to 50, 80 miles inland.
So those kinds of things make it very simple,
where we've got the right atmospheric conditions
to get these things aloft,
and keep them there until they fall back down to the earth,
in the example of the blobs that happened at Oakville.
After the first fallout, about a week later,
some reporters came down to the farm
and wanted to do an interview.
And while they were there...
it fell out of the sky again.
I was quite amazed.
It didn't last very long,
but they were exactly the same as the first fallout.
So, the jellyfish theory didn't feel right to me.
Because there was not just one fallout of gelatinous goo.
There were six... ...over a three-week period of time.
So the jellyfish would've had to have been up there
for quite some time before it fell.
It didn't seem very likely.
It happened many times.
Apparently, six storms brought that stuff.
And still no answers. What is it that Sherlock Holmes said?
Something like, he said,
"When the simple is not the explanation, you have to go for the extraordinary."
The most significant testing that was done
was when I sent it to Mike McDowell with the State Health Department.
The result that they got yielded something quite unexpected.
This is my dad.
I think this was, maybe, the last year he was alive.
So, it'd be like 2019.
He's sitting on the deck he built with his own bare hands.
As kids, we went to the State Health Department a few times
and we got to see the tests and what he did.
Every once in a while,
uh, military vehicles would come pick him up
during the anthrax outbreaks, you know, in 2000.
He was just one of the guys they would call.
What I remember about the blobs is when people started gettin' sick
and a bunch of cats and a bunch of cattle died from it.
And then, when Unsolved Mysteries hit,
everybody was calling, you know,
and being like, "Man, I saw your dad on TV."
The goo was promptly forwarded
to the Washington State Department of Health
for further analysis.
It was very uniform. There was no structure
that we could see visibly or-- or with a microscope.
Uh, I set it up on various microbiological media
and attempted to isolate, uh, bacteria.
Mike McDowell did probably the most research on the blobs.
I heard that the sample that I sent
was kept in a medium containment facility.
And I'm assuming that's because the Health Department considered
that it was a type of biological hazard.
And this was the lab report.
And here it clearly states...
My understanding is that bacteria lives in the gut,
and that really sent up some red flags.
Mike McDowell's research
once again forced the scientific community to rethink the blobs' origin,
causing some to look to the sky for answers.
There was a theory about the Oakville blobs
being human waste, being dropped from aircraft.
These days, I don't know if it happens as much.
But back then, I had heard stories
of "blue ice," uh, falling through a person's roof.
Blue ice is kind of a slang term
referencing waste from the-- the toilets in an airplane.
It's got a blue coloring,
and it's also got an antifreeze mixed in with it,
which can be quite toxic.
When I contacted the FAA,
they said that they didn't think that it was possible.
Well, the FAA said many times
they don't drop their human waste from planes over populated areas.
They usually clean out the planes at the airports.
Now, mistakes can be made, of course,
and something can drop, but, um, it's blue.
The ice is blue.
Uh, these blobs were not blue.
They were clear and gelatinous.
I don't understand how that could've been human waste falling from a plane.
A couple things are sort of interesting about it. Yes,
there were these bacteria present in all these samples,
and it is a normal part of the digestive tract for humans
and actually most mammals,
but it also can be found environmentally,
because, uh, of course...
...animals don't have flushing toilets.
And so you get bacteria that gets mixed into the soil.
You also get it in the water, and then it can be aerosolized.
That's just nature.
Whatever it was that happened in Oakville, it made me question more,
and it made me feel like there was a darker element
that has not been talked about, that the media ignored.
I think there was something more sinister involved.
For several months before the fallout of the blobs,
fairly frequently, at least once or twice a week,
we would have flyovers of big black helicopters.
That is a black helicopter flying over.
Wanna get him on, uh, tape.
They say there is no such thing, but there is.
And then, I think it was in 1997,
when I was working at the soda fountain,
a group of men came in...
...strangers, not from the Oakville area,
and ordered milkshakes.
And then the lead guy started questioning me.
"Isn't this the town where the blobs fell?"
And I said, "Yes."
"And is it true that someone saw black aircraft?"
And I just felt very uncomfortable.
And they finally left,
and I ran over to the window to write down their license plate number,
and one of my customers said to me, "I already have it."
And she goes, "I don't know who those guys were,
but," she says, "the hair is standing up on the back of my neck."
The license plate number came back registered to Fort Hood, Texas.
I spent many years researching what happened in Oakville,
and I found that Mike McDowell called it a matrix.
He said it was a substance that was like an envelope
that something could be inserted into,
like a germ or a virus.
He thought it was a delivery system.
Like a c-- carrier system. He did say that.
He goes-- He goes, "Think--" He goes, "I don't have any proof,
but it does look like it was for, like, carrying something."
Based on what I know now that I didn't know then,
I think it was a military exercise.
I really do.
You know, it's happened throughout history,
where they have done types of experiments on people without their permission.
Could the US military be to blame for the blobs?
And if so, why?
What would they gain by infecting their own people?
The time has come when everyone in the Navy
must face up to the threat of biological warfare or "BW."
In 1943, the United States was concerned
about the potential for a bioweapon attack
from either Germany or Japan,
because they were afraid
that those countries were developing their own weapons programs.
Biological warfare could be used to seek out personnel
in areas where there is cover.
So, the US conducted a number of open-air tests.
Some of those were on military bases,
some of those were over civilian populations.
San Francisco,
San Diego,
Honolulu,
Panama City, Florida,
Norfolk, Virginia...
There were over 200 tests conducted.
They've been doing gain-of-function exercises since the '50s,
and, uh, this is done for national security reasons.
They did it in San Francisco
to figure out if the Bay Area would be a great place for a biological attack.
Operation Seaspray had spray devices on barges off the coast of San Francisco.
They released simulant organisms, which were deemed to be non-pathogenic.
But they were also deemed to be very similar
to agents like anthrax,
as a way to compare
what would happen, you know, with something like anthrax.
And what they found was, under the right weather conditions,
a significant portion of the population of San Francisco
would've been exposed to these organisms
if it had been a bioweapon attack.
Around the time Operation Seaspray was run,
there was a case report
of around 11 people who were infected with Serratia marcescens.
At the time, the bacteria Serratia marcescens
was believed to be harmless to humans.
The pink slimy substance is found in humid environments,
but is now known to cause certain types of infections,
and in some cases, pneumonia.
In fact, one individual died. But there's been a lot of conjecture
about whether that had anything to do with the actual open-air testing or not.
They don't think twice about exposing people to this
if they can get some data.
I mean, going back to Oakville,
were they experimenting on the people of Oakville?
I think... chances are, yeah.
I have decided that the United States of America
will renounce the use of any form of deadly biological weapons
that either kill or incapacitate.
President Nixon closed
the military's offensive biological warfare program in 1969.
There was significant increasing international pressure
to establish new treaties
to ban the use of chemical and biological warfare agents.
So, in the case of the Oakville situation,
if we were actually doing that type of testing
of a potential bioweapon agent,
that would be in violation of international treaties.
Number two, um,
really, if someone's using bioweapons,
an attack is silent.
So, the organisms is-- is not even visible to the naked eye.
You don't smell it. You don't know it's comin' around you.
Uh, and so, I think it's highly unlikely
something like that was done by the government.
We were just waiting for the doctor to come and run some tests,
and I just asked my dad, I was like,
"Hey, you know, remember that story you did on Unsolved Mysteries?"
"You never told us the answer to that."
Like, "What did you find in those, uh, blobs?"
And he told me, he goes, "I never got to finish, and that really frustrated me."
"Before I could finish what I was doing, someone came and grabbed it."
According to Mike, he went to work,
and he was going to get the sample,
and it was missing.
He was very distraught,
because he had worked there for decades
and he had never lost a sample.
And when he approached his supervisor and said that the sample was missing,
his supervisor advised him to not ask any questions.
My dad did say, "Suits came in." And I was like, "Suits?"
And he was like, "Yeah." He d-- he didn't know if it was government,
but he said "black suits."
That's what the lady at the front desk told him,
that black suits came and took it.
I remember one time talking about it, you know,
like, in a living room at my uncle's house or somethin',
and-- and he started gettin' emotional that he never got to finish it,
'cause it would've been, you know, a big finding in his career.
The records seem to have gone missing.
The samples seem to have gone missing.
Unfortunately, the people who handled a lot of this have passed,
and so we are looking at, largely, an oral tradition now.
Eventually, the samples were consumed by testing
until we just simply ran out.
We would never be able to identify the substance.
In 1994, the blobs fell.
And since then, their origin has been debated.
Yet, after all the theories and speculations,
only one truth has emerged,
some mysteries are destined to endure.
I was looking into this again
and found a few other cases where people said something similar,
but there was very little detail,
largely 'cause I don't think anybody got sick.
So, that's where... nobody sorta cared.
What happened in Oakville was unusual,
and we s-- call it the-- sort of the 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.
One of the things that was the most important to me
was to make people aware of it.
I spent a lotta time, \you know, researching,
tryin' to figure it out,
because in my reality,
blobs don't fall out of the sky.
I think what Sunny has done is important,
because she's kept the investigation alive.
I wish more people were behind her,
because the more we talk about it,
the more we get down to the bottom of what happened.
You wanna recognize
that there's a rational explanation for it,
and even the most rational, science-based explanation
is still gonna be a wild one.
My view is that blue ice is the, uh, cause
of this, uh, deposition.
It has to be man-made.
That-- that's where my mind goes, but...
It's like, "Why? What's the purpose? What's the point?"
I mean, look where we are now with COVID.
I mean, we know all about what it's like to be subjected to a scary disease,
you know, where you don't even wanna go outta your house.
You-- you-- you don't even wanna do anything 'cause you're so terrified.
Well, these people were terrified to leave their homes,
because there were gelatinous goop everywhere that was making them sick.
I mean, how-- how do you deal with that?
Some people just didn't necessarily believe it,
because they didn't experience it.
And that's okay.
I know that I was there, and experienced it.
My mother experienced it.
That's good enough for me.
Well, what you're lookin' at here is a beautiful sunset.
See you later. Bye for now.