It was a pleasant sunny day on March 3, 1876 in Bath County, Kentucky (USA). The farmer's wife, Mrs. Crouch, was working outside and making soap when she suddenly saw something shapeless and bright red falling from the sky to the ground.
The pieces plopped on the ground with a juicy sound and, looking closely, the woman realized that this was raw meat, and not particularly fresh.
This lasted only a few minutes, after which Mrs. Crouch, in a panic, called her husband Allen. They examined their site and saw that pieces of meat had been littered with an area measuring 91 by 46 meters.
The Crouch couple were very devout and immediately decided that this was a manifestation of divine anger and most likely a sign of the imminent Apocalypse.
The pieces of meat lying on the grounds of their farm looked as if their owner had been caught in a huge meat grinder. If it were today, most people would think about birds caught in an aircraft engine, but in those years only balloons flew through the air, and before the era of aircraft propellers, it was still a long way off.
Everyone in the area quickly learned about the unusual phenomenon, and there were even daredevils who decided to taste the meat. According to them, it reminded them of venison or mutton. And one hunter decided that it tasted very much like bear meat.
When later journalists began to write about the event, they mainly focused on the version of lamb. Articles about the "Kentucky meat shower" were published in such major publications as Scientific American and the New York Times.
Fortunately, one of the locals came up with the idea to collect his samples before the meat began to rot in the heat and these samples are still stored in a small jar (see photo below).
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True, it is not known whether this photo with the remains of flesh from Kentucky is real or a fake. The jar does not look like a medical specimen, but as something very amateurish. Obviously, there is no question of any sterility there, and the state of the pieces of meat is also not known.
More or less it is known only where this bank is kept - in the cabinet of curiosities of Arthur Byrd in Kentucky.
The pieces of meat were small, mostly about five centimeters in length, the largest piece being 10 cm long. They were covered with some kind of damp substance or water.
One of the experts said that this is not meat, but cyanobacteria Nostok. However, these bacteria are mainly found in fresh water and are greenish in color. So here it is not at all clear what this is about.
When the meat samples came to the scientists of the Newark Scientific Association, they determined that it looked like the lung tissue of a horse or … a human baby. In another piece of tissue, remains of cartilage and pieces of muscle tissue were found.
As for whose meat it was, there is still no definitive answer to this. Some histologists (specialists in the cellular tissues of living organisms) said that it was mutton, others that it was venison, and others that it was beef. And they were all respected and competent specialists.
The main version eventually became the one that assumes that the meat was vomited from the stomachs of vultures. These scavengers have previously been seen similarly when they feel they are in danger.
It is possible that the vultures feasted on the carcass of a sheep or horse, and then someone disturbed them close to their nest and they regurgitated undigested pieces of meat.