Prepare your tinfoil hats: A man in Dorset, UK, was showered with tiny spheres of blue goo that rained down from the sky during a hailstorm last week. The tiny, one-inch gelatinous spheres are odorless, are not sticky, and are not meteorological, British authorities say. Basically, no one has any real clue what they are. Somebody get PopSci chief space correspondent Newt Gingrich on the line.
Former aircraft engineer Steve Hornsby noticed roughly a dozen of the tiny blue balls scattered around his yard during a fast-breaking hailstorm and had the foresight to grab a jar and a spoon before collecting the objects, which he flicked into the jar with said spoon.
Hornsby kept the spheres in his refrigerator, though that was later deemed unnecessary, as the balls of blue goo don’t appear to melt at room temperature. British meteorological authorities say they are not the result of some kind of weather event, though there is speculation that they could be “marine invertebrate eggs” that stuck to a bird’s feet and were carried into the air. Such eggs have been attributed to previous “strange goo” incidents, which apparently happen from time to time. In fact, according to the BBC, transmission of marine eggs via birds’ feet is something that is well documented. But we smell something fishy.
