Return of the blobs: SW Washington revisited by decades-old gooey mystery

A curious phenomenon known as the “Oakville blobs” appears to have returned to a small southwest Washington community, 31 years after the first reports of an unidentified gelatinous substance fell from the sky. This time, the goo fell on Rochester, Wash.

Alli McCrite had just returned home from work on April 8 when she saw the blobs. The goo was raining down from the sky, over her Rochester home.

“They’re clear. Gelatinous,” McCrite told KUOW’s Soundside. “About the size of the palm of my hand. There was no odor at all. It just kind of smelled like rainwater.”

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McCrite reports that she found about 10 blobs in total. She collected some in a jar, but the blobs later melted at room temperature.

McCrite immediately suspected she might be witnessing the return of a local legend. Rochester sits about 8 miles away from Oakville, Wash. in Grays Harbor County. That’s where, 31 years ago, there were similar reports of tiny blobs of goo falling from the sky. There was never any explanation for the bizarre happening. It made national headlines. The incident even made it onto an episode of “Unsolved Mysteries.”

“I used to live in Oakville, so obviously I knew about the Oakville blobs, because everybody does,” McCrite said. “I was like, ‘Oh my gosh: This is literally what happened.’”

After the incident in 1994, some locals reported being sickened by the substance. In a 2014 report in The Daily Chronicle, Beverly Roberts recalled the goo from decades earlier. She said she spent nearly a week in the hospital with severe vertigo after being exposed to the gooey rain. Several friends reported animals dying after eating the substance, Roberts told the paper.

When they were first reported, in August 1994, the gelatinous globs were about the size of a grain of rice, much smaller than what McCrite collected. That’s according to the eyewitness account of Tom Paulson, a former journalist at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer who initially broke the story of the Oakville blobs.

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“I started out thinking this was going to be kind of a joke, and it was a slow summer day,” Paulson recounted on KUOW. “I just was looking for some way to get out of the office.”

He was interviewing two Oakville residents in their home about the blobs, “thinking I'm just going to have a fun, goofy story here,” Paulson said. “And then it started raining while we were there, and blobs fell out of the sky.”

“I saw the blobs,” he said.

Initially guessing the goo could be toilet waste ejected from an airplane, Paulson called the FAA and McChord Air Force Base (now JBLM), but neither the military nor commercial aviation officials claimed the blobs.

Paulson said samples were eventually sent to the Washington State Departments of Ecology and Health for testing, but the agencies came up with conflicting results: Ecology said the blobs were inorganic. DOH said they were organic.

“So the testing resolved nothing,” Paulson said.

The reporter said he finally took it upon himself to send a chunk of blob to a private lab for testing, at a cost of about $100. The result? Polyacrylamide. It’s a chemical used for various purposes: to prevent soil erosion; as a water treatment flocculant; oil clean up; even to stabilize cosmetics.

“And of course, nobody really wanted to accept that. That's a boring answer,” Paulson said. “I guess they wanted biological warfare or jellyfish or whatever.”

As to why polyacrylamide would fall from the sky?

“Well, that we don’t know,” Paulson said.

Over the years, there have been dozens of theories about the origin of the blobs — everything from illegal chemical dumping to something extraterrestrial — but the truth remains elusive.

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The public’s fascination with the blobs seems to re-emerge every few years, Paulson said. He had a long career in journalism, with stories reported all over the world.

“The blobs of Oakville are probably the most long-lived, most re-reported story of mine,” Paulson said with a laugh. “So that's my legacy.”

Over in Rochester, McCrite said she appreciates how the mystery of the Oakville blobs has started interesting conversations.

“I hope it does get solved,” McCrite said. “I'm really curious about things and I would love to know. At the same time, if it's a mystery, it's more fun. Then people can speculate.”

After a moment, she added: “It would be good for it to be solved, [in case] it is something gross, and I just touched it from my yard.”