Strange Objects Falling From Our Skies

By James Donahue

We have all heard the stories about fish, frogs and ice blocks falling out of sometimes cloudless skies, but usually during heavy rain storms. But lately we have noticed reports of much more interesting objects crashing down on homes and yards.

People in Jennings, Louisiana, said large tangled clumps of living, crawling worms literally plopped out of the sky on their town in July, 2007. Reporting the odd fall was Eleanor Beal, an employee for the Jennings Police Department. She said she was crossing the street on her way to work that day when the worms just dropped out of the sky. She said there were blobs of them. To prove her story Beal said she got fellow workers to come out of the office to see for themselves.

In Perkasie, Pennsylvania, the local television station said people all over town reported a strange substance had fallen after a rain. The station asked chemists at nearby Kutztown University collect samples of the material and determine what it was. They said it looked like "sparkly" ice cubes dumped all over the ground, except it was not ice and it did not melt. The chemists took the material off for some tests but said they were stumped. They had no idea what the stuff was or where it came from.

And in Freehold Township, New Jersey, authorities were mystified over a mysterious metallic object that crashed through the roof of a house bounced off a tiled bathroom floor and embedded itself in a wall. Nobody was hurt. They said the object had a rough surface, looked metallic and was about the size of a golf ball. It weighted about as much as a can of soup. Was it space debris?

Perhaps the strangest fall of the year is going to be the four-thousand-pound aluminum storage shed that crashed into the roof of a church in Elkhorn, Kentucky. People said it happened under clear blue (or perhaps smoggy brown) skies. The Rev. Jeff Edwards of the Pine Grove Church said the 12 by 24-foot building even contained a few building supplies. There were no explosive materials that might have suggested it was propelled into the air by a blast of some kind. The insurance company said the damage to the church, estimated at about $20,000, appeared to be an "act of God."