By James Donahue

Anyone that has ever walked through a thatch of lush moist vegetation early in a dewy morning has probably encountered “angel hair.” It is a thin, almost invisible fibrous substance that feels somewhat like thread against the skin as we move among the dripping hanging foliage.

Angel hair has always been a part of that natural element. We never questioned its origin, thinking it perhaps the work of spiders or perhaps another of the Mother’s strange creatures, constantly spinning threads as they make their trails through the elements.

Since the founding of Raelism, a UFO religion, by French journalist and test driver Claude Vorihon in 1974, the existence of angel hair has fallen under scrutiny as proof of the existence of aliens and UFOs.

To the Raelists, and many UFO buffs, angel hair has become “an alleged substance of unknown origin, said to be dispersed from UFOs as they fly overhead.” It is named for its similarity to fine hair, spiders webs, or as some have suggested, to ectoplasm and pixie dust. And as we have always known, the material appears to disintegrate shortly after it forms.

Other sightings, which make us smile, link angel hair to magical images of the Virgin Mary. And yet another theory is that the stuff is “ionized air sleeting off an electromagnetic field” that surrounds a UFO.

This seems like a lot of scary mythology linked to the magical and innocent encounters we had as a young lad walking through the wooded places on my father’s Michigan farm so many years ago. Had I thought the gentle tugs of the mystery webs I was walking through had fallen from mighty alien ships hanging over my head, it would have been a much more frightening memory for sure.

But then, the stories linked to angel hair sightings have become stranger and stranger in recent years, just as UFO and Virgin Mary sightings have been increasing in number all over the world.

Stories in both USA Today and Associated Press in August, 1998 told of twenty UFOs observed over Quirindi, New South Wales, Australia, dropping angel hair to the ground as they passed. Observers described the ships as “shiny silver spheres” littering the ground with “cobweb-like filaments.” People told of seeing cobwebs falling from the sky and one person complained that the family car was covered in cobwebs.

From Wikipedia we find the following stories:

Two men in St. Mark’s Square in Venice, Italy, reported two “shining spindles” flying across the sky and dropping a trail of angel hair on October 27, 1954. And in Portugal, after a UFO sighting, people in Evora collected angel hair for analysis under a microscope at the University of Lisbon. Researchers said they found a single-celled organism but could not identify it.

And on February 10, 1978, a large amount of fibers fell from the sky for about two hours near Samaru, New Zealand.

In all fairness, there have been scientific theories that attempt to explain angel hair. One is similar to my own thoughts of my youth. There are some types of spiders that migrate or fly through the air, leaving thin spider threads in their wake.

Another theory is that atmospheric electricity may cause floating dust particles to polarize and in this way, join to form long filaments. That is a big far out, but perhaps not as wild as saying angel hair is dropped from UFOs.