If you visit the website for Oakville, Washington, you’ll find there are zero listings of great things to do or see. They don’t even have a list of local restaurants – probably because the two eateries they do have doesn’t warrant creating a whole new page for the website. With a population that could fit comfortably into a large family reunion, they don’t even need an Oakville Police Department – relying instead on local county mounties. Things move at a snail’s pace there. But thirty years ago, in the summer of 1994, those county cops most certainly got a few phone calls… because Oakville was about to experience a close encounter of the sticky kind.

On a rainy day in Oakville—because, of course, it was raining—something truly odd happened. On August 7th, instead of the usual drizzle, blobs of mysterious clear gelatinous goo started plopping down from the sky, making the locals feel like they were in a cheap 1950s sci-fi movie. The goo blobs were tiny, about the size of a grain of rice, but there were so many of them that they turned car windshields into an oozing mess, leaving the townsfolk scratching their heads in confusion… that is when they weren’t busy slipping on the pavement like someone threw a banana peel under their Crocs.

And if one day of KY jelly falling from the sky wasn’t strange enough, it kept happening. Over the next three weeks, Oakville was treated to five more rounds of sludge showers, each covering the entire 0.6-square-mile area of the community several times over. It was like God had smitten tiny little Oakville (possibly because with only a population of 729 people, it obviously was not taking His command of “go forth and multiply” very seriously). God had already sent plagues to Egypt of locusts, frogs, and flies back in the Old Testament, and he sent fish and snakes raining down on several occasions around the world, and even a rain shower of pieces of meat once (I’ll have to cover that in a future article). I’ve heard people say it’s raining cats and dogs, too… but I don’t know that we can take that one literally. So God got creative and went with globs of glop!

But even after the goo-pocalypse, things still were strange. People who came into contact with the blobs started feeling under the weather, with symptoms like fatigue, nausea, and the kind of respiratory problems usually reserved for allergy season. Even pets weren’t left unaffected, and there were unsettling reports of cats and dogs keeling over after getting too close to the mysterious substance. Or maybe it really was raining cats and dogs, and I just got the story wrong.

Naturally, the Oakville community was abuzz with gossip and wild theories. Some wondered whether the substance might have been waste from a commercial plane toilet… or maybe it was particles of deceased jellyfish that had evaporated and been incorporated into a rain cloud. Either way… EWW.

Then there were the more fringe theories like it possibly being a military weapons test – Operation Slip & Slide! And I’m sure more than a couple of folks blamed extraterrestrials. And why not blame them? Immigration is out of control – those illegal aliens keep coming here and taking our earth jobs! Or so I read in Weekly World News.

To get to the bottom of the mystery muck, the local hospital ran some tests and found human white blood cells in the substance. Aaaaand, we’re back to EWW.

Meanwhile, Sunny Barclift decided to send a sample of the sticky stuff to Washington State’s Hazardous Material Unit, hoping for some answers. Scientist Mike Osweiler announced they found two types of bacteria in the blobs, but they couldn’t identify the strains. Triple EWW. On the plus side, they claimed there could NOT be human white blood cells in the globules because the cells in the blobs lacked nuclei. So… I guess that’s good.

The TV show Unsolved Mysteries jumped onto the bandwagon, and microbiologist Mike McDowell managed to identify one type of bacteria as bad news for human digestive systems. Did he really have to issue that warning? Was there a problem with people gobbling up the goo? Were there idiots in Oakville swallowing the slime? I know it looks like jelly, but that doesn’t mean you grab a butter knife and spread it on your bagel. “Yum! It tastes like every flavor you’ve ever tasted… and none of them!” Air pudding isn’t a thing, folks. “Flavored with 100% pure cloud, harvested fresh from the sky.”

Anyway, the investigation hit a dead end when the samples mysteriously vanished from McDowell’s lab. Uh-huh.