Mrs. Crouch was making soap when chunks of meat, from snowflake shreds to three-inch lumps, fell around her farm, per the New York Herald's carnal rain report. Two gentlemen of prosperous circumstances tasted it raw, venison or mutton; a trapper swore it was bar, bear. Dr. J. Lawrence Smith diagnosed wind-borne frog spawn, then recanted; Brandeis called it flesh-colored Nostoc, a cyanobacterium, requiring rain that never happened; histologists Edwards and Arnold identified lung tissue, human infant or horse. Seven samples: two lung, three muscle, two cartilage.
Dr. L.D. Kastenbine, Louisville Medical News, 1876, burned a sample, noted rancid mutton, and delivered the leading theory: vultures sailing at immense height disgorged simultaneously, and wind scattered the particles, explaining the mixed tissues. Both Kentucky vulture species projectile-vomit as defense and to lighten for flight. The theory's elegance: every taster was probably right, since the flock had eaten different animals. A preserved chunk survives at Transylvania University, found mislabeled Olympia in the vaults, tested, confirmed meat, species unresolved.
The claim: the meat shower is the flagship Fortean fall, Charles Fort built a career cataloguing flesh, fish, and frogs from clear skies, and its resistance to closure is structural: a real event, real samples, and an explanation, vultures, that no one can ever verify because the witnesses flew away. Verdict: correct, and the archive notes the pattern, transient sky-events are unfalsifiable by design; you cannot subpoena a flock. The meat fell. The jar remains. The vultures, if they exist, have never commented.
If the best answer is coordinated vulture vomit, why does the county keep a jar of it?