So Supernatural - CONSPIRACY: The Oakville Blobs

Episode Date: September 27, 2024

In 1994, residents of Oakville, Washington, woke up to find gelatinous blobs had rained down from the sky, covering the area in a strange, gooey substance. The mysterious blobs caused illness and confusion amongst the townspeople, prompting investigations into their origin and composition. Despite efforts to unravel the mystery, the blobs and their peculiar properties remain unexplained to this day.AUDIO EXTRA: The Kentucky Meat Shower of 1876 For a full list of sources, please visit: sosupernaturalpodcast.com/conspiracy-the-oakville-blobs So Supernatural is an audiochuck and Crime House production. Find us on social!Instagram: @sosupernatualpodTwitter: @_sosupernaturalFacebook: /sosupernaturalpod

I have this kind of obsession with cases involving unknown things falling from the sky. In my hiatus from Supernatural, I missed it so much, I actually did an episode in the Crime Junkie fan club about the Kentucky meat showers. And don't worry, it is as gross as it sounds, believe me. I'll even link to it in the show notes so you can hear. And I don't know what it is, believe me. I'll even link to it in the show notes so you can hear. And I don't know what it is about these cases. Maybe it's because they always have so many possibilities. Aliens, secret government projects, weird flukes of nature. But I came across another one recently

that I want to get the full lowdown on. So I tasked Rasha and Yvette with doing a deep dive for us. Let me set the scene. It's the summer of 1994 in the sleepy little town of Oakville, Washington. The state is no stranger to weather, particularly massive amounts of rain. But on August 7th, Oakville gets more than a heavy downpour. Clear blobs of goo about the size of jelly beans start raining down, covering people's lawns and their cars, their homes. But it gets even stranger because family pets begin eating these blobs and dying. Locals report flu-like symptoms and difficulty breathing after touching it. And this didn't just happen once, but a handful of times over the next several weeks,

leading everyone to wonder, what the heck was falling from the sky? And who or what created it? I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is So Supernatural, and this is the story of the Oakville Blobs. Okay, guys, I am a huge movie buff, and one of my all-time favorites is sci-fi. One of my favorite movies ever, Rasha, you're probably a little too young for this, is the 1958 version of The Blob with Steve McQueen. So you can just imagine when Ashley sent this file over to us, I could not believe this could have possibly happened. But you know what? The more we researched this case, the wilder those possibilities became, including some you'd never consider. Today, Rasha and I are excited to dive into the Oakville blobs and share with you the firsthand accounts of people who really dealt with them.

Let us take you on a quick journey for a second. You wake up in the morning, the sun is shining, the birds are singing, and the night before you slept like a baby thanks to the dull roar of a summer thunderstorm. You head outside to go grab the mail barefoot, excited to feel that damp ground beneath your feet, but two steps out the door you feel something ooze between your toes, giant, clear, gelatinous balls of goo, or as the people in Oakville called them, the blobs. This was what happened to the residents of Oakville back in the summer of 1994. Okay, so I'm going to kick this one off. Their story goes a little something like this. It's the morning of August 7th when an elderly woman named Dottie Hearn wakes up to do her

morning chores. Dottie lives on this 29-acre farm on the outskirts of Oakville, Washington, which is a tiny town in 1994, about 700 people tiny. Now, Dottie's used to being up early to take care of her chickens, her goats, her farm cats, you name it, while also tending to her garden and crops. But on this particular morning, things around Dottie's farm look a little different than usual. Specifically, she sees some areas are coated in a strange goo. It's clear and kind of goopy, like plain jello. And since Dottie heard the rain the night before, I mean, it's not hard for her to figure this stuff just came down with the rain.

Exactly right. But it's not a solid blanket. It's dozens of tiny little gelatinous balls, each one about half the size of a single grain of rice. Strange as this all is, it doesn't change the reality of life on a farm. There are still animals that need to be fed, weeds that need to be pulled. That's right. And Dottie's a busy woman, so she gets back to work. But as the day goes on, she can't stop thinking about how creepy all this is. And later when she's back inside her house, she tells her adult daughter, Sunny Bartliff, all about those tiny little jello clumps. She also adds that she may have touched some that

were sitting on top of the wood box. And that's when Sunny freaks out because she actually has a background in occupational safety and health. I mean, her job was to go to other people's workplaces and make sure everything was safe, that no one was in danger of getting injured or sick. So she sounds like the perfect person to handle this scenario, right? Right. Which is why Sunny's spidey senses are tingling.

This stuff could be dangerous. If she was at work, she'd be trying to find out everything that she could about the blobs before anyone got too close. Like Dottie just did by touching it. Yeah, which definitely wasn't great. Not great at all. Sunny can't go back in time and stop her mom from handling this stuff, but she can run outside and gather up some of the blobs safely. Then she puts them somewhere for safekeeping with plans to take a closer look at them later. And clearly, Sunny's instincts were

on point. Because the next morning, August 8th, she realizes that she hasn't seen her mom in over an hour. Which is super concerning, right? So she goes looking for her mom, Dottie, and finds her sprawled out on the bathroom floor. She's barely conscious, clearly not okay. All she can manage to tell Sunny is that she was feeling dizzy earlier, then the room just started spinning and she ended up collapsing. And obviously this makes Sunny really concerned because she thinks she's got to get her mom to a hospital. But one very quick detour. Before she rushes Dottie out the front door, Sunny grabs some of the blobs she's collected the day before and she packs them up so she can show them to Dottie's doctor. I mean, maybe they can get to

the bottom of this. I mean, thank God for Sunny's quick thinking. But she isn't the only person who's working to solve the mystery. Not by a long shot. And Dottie's not the only person who's apparently gotten sick from the ooze either. But in order for us to tell you about that, I need to take you back to the morning

the blobs first appeared on August 7th, 1994. Officer David Lacey is out on patrol in Oakville with a civilian friend. It starts raining, so Lacey naturally hits the windshield wipers, and he notices there's something kind of off about this rain. Like, I don't know, it's not actually rain. Bingo. As the wipers sweep back and forth, the stuff on his windshield smears, but not like water would, but like something that's much thicker and more viscous. Officer Lacey ends up pulling over to get a better look. He describes it exactly like what Dottie found in her yard.

So he puts on a pair of gloves and he picks up a handful of the gunk. With gloves on, you'd think he'd be safe from this stuff, right? That'd be nice, right? But apparently that afternoon, he also gets sick. But oddly, his symptoms are a little different from Dottie's. Remember how it took her almost a full day to start feeling bad? And when she did, she became dizzy and nauseated? Well, Officer Lacey's symptoms are severe and within just a matter of hours.

And in his case, it might be some sort of respiratory issue because he cannot breathe. Now, I know from there, more and more people keep getting sick. Take another Oakville resident named Beverly Roberts, for example. She saw the goo on the day it came down, handled it, and just like with Dottie, she started feeling super dizzy. And her symptoms also showed up the day after the blob incident. She also hightailed it over to the local hospital. But the doctors weren't equipped to deal with this spontaneous and inexplicable outbreak. Because it's not just Dottie, Officer Lacey, and Beverly. It's basically the entire town dropping like flies.

And nobody knows what's exactly wrong with them. But the answer has to lie in those samples that Sunny gathered. And when experts finally take a closer look at them, they find something incredible. In a way, the blobs are alive. Dottie Hearn checks into the hospital on August 8th of 1994, and she stays there as a patient for about three days, give or take. So whatever her condition is, it sounds pretty serious. Only you wouldn't know it from the official diagnosis the doctors give her. They say she has a simple ear infection and

something they describe in their records as, quote, some kind of virus. So either they don't know what's going on with her. Or they've been instructed not to say. Basically, everyone in Oakville gets a similarly vague diagnosis. One that feels very normal, very run-of-the-mill. This is despite the fact that some of them don't recover for weeks. And it's not like this is a one-off event. Over the course of three weeks in the summer of 1994, the blobs fall from the sky six separate times. Wait, what? I'm sorry, six times?

Yes, in three weeks. I don't know the exact timing of each blob fall, but I do know that each time it happens, more people get sick. At one point, Dottie's daughter Sunny sees one of their kittens coming into contact with some of the goo. Not long afterward, the kitten gets sick and it doesn't survive. On top of that, Beverly Roberts starts making a list of all the dead animals she sees

around Oakville post-blob rain. Ravens, frogs, and other wild animals just laying on the ground. She counts 12 individual animals total. And while Beverly never actually saw any of them touch the blobs before they died, she knows it cannot be a coincidence. I don't know if this shows up in Beverly's count

or not, but farmers also report their cows are dying all over Oakville. So this is no joke. The blobs are dangerous. Sunny knows it, which is why she's determined to figure out what's inside that goo. And she's not thrilled about the non-answers the hospital is giving her. So instead, she sends her samples off to a couple of different labs all over Washington, like the Washington State Department of Health and the Department of Ecology, both of which are big, important government offices. But after that, it's a waiting game. When she finally does get a response, the news is huge. I mean, seriously, y'all, jaw-dropping stuff. It actually comes from the hospital Dottie was at. One of their researchers put a blob under their microscope

and found something completely unexpected. Human cells. Well, human white blood cells to be exact, which suggests the blobs came from a human body. If you think all that sounds incredibly confusing and suspicious, things get even weirder when the Department of Health starts doing their research. A microbiologist named Mike McDowell was assigned to the task, but he never says anything about seeing white blood cells. He does, however, detect two kinds of bacteria, both of which usually live in the human digestive tract. So we hear the word bacteria and think, okay, that's what was getting everyone sick, right? So we can take that as one puzzle piece that fits, except Mike can't say for sure if this specific bacteria is dangerous. He says it's impossible to say without more testing, which is exactly what Mike intends to do.

He spends all day running different tests. By that evening, he still hasn't done everything he wants to do, so he puts everything away somewhere safe, thinking he'll pick it up back tomorrow. He calls it a night, he goes home, and eagerly returns the next morning. But when Mike gets back into the lab the next day, the samples are gone. Like, they just vanished into thin air. So Mike, of course, goes to his manager to ask if they have any idea what happened to the blobs.

And the manager replies, quote, do not ask. Wait, seriously, I didn't know that part. Yep. I'm assuming Mike doesn't ask any follow-up questions after that. Well, if he does, Mike never goes on to publicly explain what else he learned.

So it's impossible to say whether that manager was actively part of a cover-up or if they just knew it could be too dangerous to dig too deep. But the blobs aren't the only things that go missing. Since that day, no one's been able to find records saying the Department of Health actually received samples from Sunny. We have Sunny's testimony that she sent them the blobs. We have Mike's account of the test he ran and the conversations with his manager.

But none of that shows up in the Department of Health's official documentation. It's almost like the paperwork was destroyed. Totally suspect, isn't it? To me, it feels obvious there are people out there, maybe with the government or maybe a powerful corporation, who don't want Mike to learn anything else about the blobs. The good news is Mike isn't the only person looking into this. Remember, Sonny also sent samples to the Department of Ecology. But weirdly, when they examine the substance, they come to a conclusion that completely contradicts Mike's interrupted findings and the hospital's discoveries.

So here's what the Department of Ecology said. They also saw living cells in the blobs, but they weren't from human beings because they didn't have a nucleus. So the hospital said human and the Department of Ecology said non-human. What the heck is going on with this stuff? I don't know the answer to that question, but what I'm starting to suspect is the U.S. government is hiding a whole bunch of stuff. In the summer of 1994, a couple named Jim and Kathy Bellinger are on a camping trip near the beach in Washington state. As they're strolling along the shore with their dog, they notice something weird in the sand, a clear goo that's coating the ground. But that's not the most attention-grabbing thing on that beach. Jim and Kathy also come upon dead crabs, and not just a few dead crabs, but hundreds of them. Unfortunately, while they're distracted by all of this, they fail to stop their

dog from coming into contact with some of the ooze. Not long afterward, it gets very, very sick. Oh my God, please tell me that the dog survives. It does, thank God. Now, I don't know the exact date of Jim and Kathy's beach visit, but it seems to be a few days after the very first oak blobs fell. But more importantly, it's just one day after a possible Air Force weapons test that was allegedly conducted along the Washington shoreline. Roughly 24 hours before the couple saw the goo in all of those dead crabs, they heard the rumbling of bombs going off not too far away. I would imagine the Bellingers didn't know a whole lot about what the military was up to. I would imagine the Bellingers didn't know a whole lot about what

the military was up to. I mean, the armed forces don't go around advertising all of their operations. But it's not hard to put two and two together. You hear a crash, and the next day hundreds of crabs are dead. Maybe whatever those planes dropped was full of goo that wiped out the crabs. That's safe to say. It's also worth mentioning that the beach was just 40 to 50 miles away from Oakville. So that's close enough to wonder if there's a connection between the Air Force operations and the Oakville blobs. It might sound outlandish, the U.S. military designing slushy bioweapons and unleashing them onto a town full of American citizens. But unfortunately, this wouldn't be the first time something like this has happened.

In 1950, we know for a fact that the Navy ran tests that involved dropping bacteria on the beaches along the coast of San Francisco. And you know what this was called? Operation Sea Spray. Now, this was just a test. The Navy was worried that terrorists might use similar tactics and they wanted to see if they'd actually work. Problem was, they thought the bacteria they were using in their experiment was harmless. Only, it wasn't as safe as they thought. 11 people got sick enough to go to the hospital.

One of them even died. And frustratingly, none of their loved ones knew the real reason for their illnesses because that operation was classified for another 26 years. Similar experiments happened over the next few decades. In 1951, Army researchers intentionally infected a Naval Supply Center workers with fungus just to see how sick they'd get. This is disgusting and frustrating because scientists were operating under the racist theory

that the fungus would affect Black people more seriously than white people. So what did they do? They picked a factory with a lot of black employees just to see if it was true. A federal group called the U.S. Army Chemical Corps also released potentially toxic chemicals from airplanes. Not just once, but a bunch of times through the 1950s. Again, they thought it was okay because they didn't realize those chemicals were dangerous. They just wanted to see how these chemical drops would work in a

wartime situation. And then in 1966, a bunch of commuters on a New York subway were unknowingly exposed to another supposedly harmless bacteria as part of an Army study. I say supposedly harmless bacteria as part of an army study. I say supposedly harmless because this bacteria technically doesn't make people sick. Except for those who are allergic to it or who have asthma. For these folks, it can trigger serious breathing problems. So we're not running through all of this to sound like a pair of tinfoil hat-wearing conspiracy theorists, but it's worth acknowledging the reality here, which is the U.S. government has a long-standing, confirmed habit of testing bioweapons on its own citizens, some of which are targeted at people who we know don't have much privilege or the ability to stand up for

themselves because of their race or their income. Now, of course, authorities deny that they had anything to do with the Oakville blobs. They also insist that those Air Force drills had nothing to do with any kind of biological weapon. But it's safe to assume that if they were behind the blobs, they wouldn't admit to it willingly. As for evidence, Sonny says she spotted unmarked black helicopters flying over Oakville on multiple occasions in the summer of 1994. These sightings consistently came before yet another blob fall. She and Dottie even have home video evidence to back up these claims. But things really came to a head three years later in 1997. At this point, Sonny's working at a soda fountain in town,

and one day, a group of men in all black walk in, and they all order milkshakes. Gotta remember, Oakville is a tiny town of about 700 people at this time, so Sonny probably knows pretty much everyone in the community by face or if not by name. She's never seen these guys before and she knows that they're not from around here. But the men all start asking Sunny these very pointed questions about the blobs. She's uncomfortable with how this conversation is going, but she can't refuse

to talk to these guys. They're paying customers. But as soon as the men leave, she runs over to the window and she writes down the license plate number, hoping that she can get to the bottom of this weird encounter. And she does. I mean, sort of. She finds out it was a car registered in Fort Hood, Texas, which, by the way, was recently renamed Fort Cavazos. More importantly, though, it happens to be a United States Army post that's been rumored to perform biological and chemical training, meaning, maybe this might be a stretch, those men in black were servicemen with the Army. But from what I can tell, it doesn't sound like Sonny ever learned anything else about these guys, just that they were from Fort Hood. So we can't prove it, but I would imagine the Army would be very interested in the blobs, regardless of where they came from.

If the blobs were a secret bioweapon, that might explain how the samples at the Department of Health ended up going missing. Clearly, the U.S. government wouldn't want to let an engineered disease get into the wrong hands. It also makes sense that Mike McDowell's boss told him, do not ask when he was trying to find out. The good news is, whatever the Oakville blobs were, they didn't kill any people. The problem is, is that they did apparently take the lives of several animals, including frogs, birds, cows, all of those crabs, and Dottie's poor little kitten. To make everything weirder, the blobs never came down again. Not in Oakville, and not anywhere else from what we can tell. So it's not even an option to just go out and get more samples. These things are gone,

which means we may never get any answers. But that hasn't stopped some people from putting out other theories about what the blobs really are. Okay, now, we're not running through these because we necessarily think they're believable, but just because we think they're worth covering. Right. Like if you asked the chief of police in Oakville back in 1994,

he'd say a bunch of jellyfish got swept up out of the ocean and into the air somehow. Well, an associate professor of biology at the University of North Georgia actually backed up his claims. They said that basically, it was possible a windstorm could have whipped them up into the clouds before they rained down in the gooey clumps all over Oakville. And when people touched the rotting rancid flesh, it made them sick. Okay, okay. I could see that happening as a freak occurrence once, maybe, but six times in one summer and no other time in

all of Oakville's documented history? Come on. And I mean, how did human DNA get into a jellyfish? Yeah, I can't get behind this one either. Okay, so here's another interesting theory. This is one that I need your flight attendant expertise on. Okay. Guys listening, this is going to be gross, but just bear with me. Some wondered if it was airplane related, like one was flying over Oatville and its toilet was leaking. So gooey clumps of human waste came down and coated the farms.

Like Russia, please tell me this is not a real thing. Not a real thing. So gooey clumps of human waste came down and coated the farms like Russia. Please tell me this is not a real thing. Not a real thing. 100% not a real thing. Even back in the 90s, planes had waste containment systems like they do today, and they only empty them when they're on the ground. And again, this has the same issue as the jellyfish explanation. The blobs came down six times over the course of one summer, and no one ever reported seeing them except on those six occasions in 1994. So either jellyfish took flight six times in three weeks and never again, or...

A cover-up of some kind? My thoughts exactly. Okay, we're down to the final possibility. There's these simple organisms, and they're called slime molds. They look like little patches of sticky brown or white goo that are known to grow on the ground after wet weather. But it's usually around the spring. sure I could see that, except the blobs fell in August. And now I'm thinking about the story Officer Lacey told. He saw the goo literally falling out of the sky. He thought it was rain, so I don't think this one works either. Yeah, I don't think we're alone on this. I mean, lots of people say that the quote-unquote official explanations for the Ophel blobs leaves a lot to be desired. Now there could be an innocent

explanation. Maybe researchers and reporters are just as baffled as the rest of us. They could be taking shots in the dark to try and figure out what happened. Or they could just be lying to mislead us all. The point here in my mind is that we shouldn't stop asking the hard questions. The people of Oakville certainly haven't. To this day, they're still looking up at the sky, wondering what's up there, waiting to see if the ooze will ever return. This is So Supernatural, an Audiochuck original produced by Crime House. You can connect with us on Instagram at sosupernaturalpod and on our website, sosupernaturalpodcast.com. Join Yvette and me next Friday for an all-new episode. So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?