The Kentucky Meat Shower
March 3, 1876
On the morning of 3 March 1876, near Olympia Springs in Bath County, Kentucky, a farmer's wife named Mrs. Crouch was outside making soap when flakes of what looked like raw meat began falling around her from a clear sky. Pieces landed over an area roughly the size of a large field, mostly a couple of inches across. Samples were sent to scientists, and the reports did not agree: one called it a kind of cyanobacteria, others found lung, muscle and cartilage tissue. The explanation most often favoured, proposed by a Louisville doctor in 1876, is that a flock of vultures overhead threw up their meals.