Files of the Unexplained (2024) s01e07 Episode Script

[crowd chattering indistinctly]
[gentle magical music plays]
[man 1] There are stories
in this world we live in
that certainly need to be exposed.
We got all the big ones,
you know, like Roswell
and Area 51, I know about that.
But do you know about the blobs
that fell over Washington state?
The show I do is Ground Zero Radio,
talking about the paranormal,
the parapolitical,
and all things strange and peculiar.
And I found this story outta the 1990s
about Oakville, Washington.
These blobs were falling outta the sky,
and I'm a B-movie guy,
so it reminded me of the movie The Blob.
[projector whirs]
[people scream in film]
You know, when I watched The Blob,
I thought it was a funny idea,
"Attack of the Killer Jell-O."
Then after reading
about what had happened in Oakville,
I was completely just baffled.
It was definitely a topic
that people remember,
right up there
with Mount St. Helens blowing up.
It was raining, and then people saw
these little pellets of weird goo.
[woman 1] We were pokin' 'em with sticks
and, like, tryin' to, like, pick 'em up,
and my parents had told us
not to touch them.
[woman 2] It felt so surreal
and weird and strange,
and it made me wonder,
is there something more going on here
that we don't know about?
[man 2] The thing
that was most peculiar about it
is it wasn't just one episode
of blobs fallin' from the sky.
I think this happened
over a series of rain events.
[woman 3] There were hundreds,
if not more.
Just these little blobs.
It's a mystery.
And it's weird. [chuckles] Still weird.
[man 1] It's one of those stories
that needs to be looked into.
And me telling the story,
it doesn't do it justice
until you meet the people
that it affected,
till you get deep into the roots of it.
This is where you find the truth.
[theme music plays]
[curious music plays]
[narrator] On August 7th, 1994,
small gelatinous blobs rained down
on the small town of Oakville, Washington.
It was an event that would forever change
those who experienced it
and confound all who tried to explain it.
I lived in Oakville from 1993 until 2001.
[woman] Thank you so much.
Have a great day.
[Sunny] I moved from Phoenix, Arizona.
The allure of living out in a rural area
and being able to walk
down to the river and fish
really interested me.
And I also wanted
to spend time with my mother,
who had a really beautiful farm there.
[Dotty] First of the crew came down
and started mowing the field.
[Sunny] We had chickens and we had goats.
[Dotty] I baked six fresh peach pies.
[Sunny] My mother did canning,
and and her garden was just amazing.
You know, she really enjoyed
the farm life.
[Dotty] Probably gonna rain
some more. Yeah.
I notice those clouds are getting darker
and heavier as they're coming in.
[Sunny] My mother loved weather.
She really loved weather.
[thunder rumbles]
[suspenseful music plays]
And one day in 1994,
we had a very severe storm.
[thunder rumbles]
[lightning crashes]
And I remember rain was falling
against some of the windows,
and it looked like the rain was thick.
Shortly thereafter, it just blew over,
and my mother
took her little dogs outside.
[dog yaps softly]
And when she came back in, she said,
"There's something strange
all over the top of the wood box."
"It looks like hail,
but I touched it, and it's soft."
And we could see
that there were transparent,
gelatinous blobs everywhere.
My background at the time
was in the
Occupational Safety and Health Department.
And I feel
that having worked in that field
made me more interested in this substance
and wanting to know what it is.
[gloomy intriguing music plays]
And I thought it was very important
to keep some sort of record.
So, I documented.
"At 4:30 p.m. of August 7th, 1994,
my brother and I collect
samples of the goo."
My brother was a paramedic,
and both of us are safety-oriented people.
So, we put gloves on before we handled it.
"Between 5:00 p.m. and 6:30 p.m.,
I conducted tests."
"It floats in water."
[reading]
Nothing like this
had ever happened in my life before,
and so, I made phone calls.
And I was concerned
because it had fell on food.
So, I contacted
the Department of Agriculture.
And they really didn't seem
to be concerned about it at all.
I called the Department of Ecology.
I called the US Weather Service.
No one was able to tell me
what the substance was.
[gentle music plays]
[man] I've worked for a member of Congress
who represented the town of Oakville.
As with any member of Congress,
the calls come in sort of fast and furious
from all the communities in the district.
In this case,
this bizarre phone call came in.
Something about blobs
falling from the sky.
I thought it was a prank call.
You'd think, "Okay, people are nuts."
But this wasn't just one person.
So often, uh, people expect
the elected official to have the answer.
Uh, the elected official's job
really is to find an answer,
to get the experts to do the research.
At the time, no one was hurt.
All I could say was,
"We're tryin' to get to the bottom of it."
[Sunny] The following day,
I noticed my mother was missing.
[mysterious music plays]
I went to find her, and, as it turned out,
she was in her bathroom
laying on the floor.
She was barely conscious,
and very pale,
very diaphoretic, cold sweat.
And I ask her what was wrong,
and she said
that everything started spinning,
and she became very nauseated.
My brother and I called 911.
And as we were leaving for the hospital,
it just dawned on me
that she was the only one
of the three of us
that touched the substance.
And I decided to take
a sample of the blobs to the hospital.
[man] I first heard about the material
that fell out of the air
at about the same time
as I met a member of the community
who brought in a sample.
[mellow pulsing music plays]
The sample was in a translucent container
and appeared to contain some, uh, grass.
At that time,
our lab technician put
some of the material under the microscope
and reported that she saw
what looked to be,
in her words, "human cells."
White blood cells,
in particular, in this material.
But, uh, the expectations
that we would be able
to tell composition or origin,
that's well beyond the scope
of what most hospitals' clinics, uh, do.
[Sunny] The fact that this substance
contained a human white blood cell
was quite unexpected.
It really encouraged me
to send it out and have it tested further.
[narrator] Sunny shipped a sample to
the Washington State Department of Health,
and then personally delivered
another sample
to the Department of Ecology.
She thought if anyone
could provide her with answers,
it would be one of these agencies.
[kettle whistles]
But once they were out of her hands,
all she could do was wait
and monitor her mother's health.
[gloomy music plays]
[Sunny] My mother was hospitalized
for about four days.
Her discharge diagnosis was
"some kind of virus."
To this day, I feel pretty confident
that my mother became ill
because of the substance.
[narrator] And Sunny's mom wasn't alone.
That same week,
a number of Oakville residents became ill,
many with similar symptoms.
[Sunny] Four days after the first fallout,
during the time
when my mother was still in the hospital,
my brother and I found
our little kitten on the deck,
and it was it was dead.
And we heard stories
that there were other animals
that have died.
And that was one of the reasons
why I was so anxious
to identify the substance.
Shortly thereafter,
the reports from these agencies
started coming back to me.
Department of Ecology discovered a cell
that indicated
that it came from a living thing.
[gloomy music intensifies]
But it was not human white blood cells.
I was very surprised
that the speculation
was that it was jellyfish.
[mysterious music plays]
[narrator] News quickly spread
that the blobs may be pulverized jellyfish
falling from the sky.
But if that were true,
how did they get up there
in the first place?
[Bill] As the communications director,
when all the media calls came in to me,
we needed to come up with an answer,
so that was the mad scramble.
"What do we know?
What have we heard about?"
"What about the fishing community?
You seeing anything out in the ocean?"
[woman] Back in 1994,
my husband and I were camping
on the beach in Kalaloch.
And, one day,
we were walking along the shore,
and we just noticed
hundreds of dead crabs.
And along with them
were these little blobs.
Within the next day or two,
my husband read an article
about the Oakville blobs,
wondered if there was a connection.
[Bill] Dead crabs on a beach
is not an anomaly,
but when there are hundreds
of dead crabs on a beach
and gooey biological material
falling from the sky
and all of these things happening
essentially at one period of time,
you can't help but make the connection.
We remembered the day before,
there were bomb blasts
that we thought possibly there was
some bombing activity going on, testing.
[intriguing music plays]
[Bill] Washington has
a number of military bases.
And people had been very concerned
about, uh, the military
using the ocean as target practice.
Back then, the West Coast salmon fishery
had essentially crashed,
and we were stunned,
I think, that there could be,
sort of, a level of insensitivity,
uh, by the military.
But, on top of that,
it all seemed to make sense
that perhaps it was
a detonation of some sort
and all sorts of biological material
was being pulverized and sent aloft.
[man] It is plausible that something
the size of portions of a jellyfish
could be pulled up into the atmosphere
and could be then redeposited
after a storm passes an area.
Oakville is inland, in a sense,
but it's still fairly coastal.
We're in the Pacific Northwest,
and for anybody who ever associates
anything with the Pacific Northwest,
one of those things is rain.
And so, what we get
in this kind of an area
is strong storms coming off of the ocean,
bringing air currents
that are extremely strong.
And they can then pull organisms
up outta the water,
bring them aloft into the air.
It's been reported a number of times,
animals being dropped
out of thunderstorms,
dozens of miles to 50, 80 miles inland.
So those kinds of things
make it very simple,
where we've got
the right atmospheric conditions
to get these things aloft,
and keep them there
until they fall back down to the earth,
in the example of the blobs
that happened at Oakville.
[Sunny] After the first fallout,
about a week later,
some reporters came down to the farm
and wanted to do an interview.
And while they were there
[fascinating music plays]
it fell out of the sky again.
I was quite amazed.
It didn't last very long,
but they were exactly the same
as the first fallout.
So, the jellyfish theory
didn't feel right to me.
Because there was not just one fallout
of gelatinous goo.
There were six [chuckles]
over a three-week period of time.
So the jellyfish
would've had to have been up there
for quite some time before it fell.
It didn't seem very likely.
It happened many times.
Apparently, six storms brought that stuff.
And still no answers.
What is it that Sherlock Holmes said?
Something like, he said,
"When the simple is not the explanation,
you have to go for the extraordinary."
[captivating classical music plays]
[Sunny] The most significant testing
that was done
was when I sent it to Mike McDowell
with the State Health Department.
The result that they got
yielded something quite unexpected.
[man] This is my dad.
[chuckles] I think this was, maybe,
the last year he was alive.
So, it'd be like 2019.
[Dan] He's sitting on the deck
he built with his own bare hands.
As kids, we went
to the State Health Department a few times
and we got to see the tests
and what he did.
[Dan] Every once in a while,
uh, military vehicles would come
pick him up
during the anthrax outbreaks,
you know, in 2000.
He was just one of the guys
they would call.
What I remember about the blobs
is when people started gettin' sick
and a bunch of cats
and a bunch of cattle died from it.
And then, when Unsolved Mysteries hit,
everybody was calling, you know,
and being like,
"Man, I saw your dad on TV."
[host] The goo was promptly forwarded
to the Washington State
Department of Health
for further analysis.
It was very uniform.
There was no structure
that we could see visibly
or or with a microscope.
Uh, I set it up
on various microbiological media
and attempted to isolate, uh, bacteria.
[Sunny] Mike McDowell did probably
the most research on the blobs.
I heard that the sample that I sent
was kept in a medium containment facility.
[walls clanking]
And I'm assuming that's because
the Health Department considered
that it was a type of biological hazard.
And this was the lab report.
And here it clearly states
[reading]
My understanding is
that bacteria lives in the gut,
and that really sent up some red flags.
[chiming music plays]
[narrator] Mike McDowell's research
once again forced the scientific community
to rethink the blobs' origin,
causing some to look
to the sky for answers.
There was a theory
about the Oakville blobs
being human waste,
being dropped from aircraft.
[intriguing music plays]
[David] These days,
I don't know if it happens as much.
But back then, I had heard stories
of "blue ice," uh, falling
through a person's roof.
Blue ice is kind of a slang term
referencing waste
from the the toilets in an airplane.
[water whooshing]
It's got a blue coloring,
and it's also got an antifreeze
mixed in with it,
which can be quite toxic.
[Sunny] When I contacted the FAA,
they said that
they didn't think that it was possible.
Well, the FAA said many times
they don't drop their human waste
from planes over populated areas.
They usually clean out the planes
at the airports.
Now, mistakes can be made, of course,
and something can drop,
but, um, it's blue.
The ice is blue.
Uh, these blobs were not blue.
They were clear and gelatinous.
I don't understand how that could've been
human waste falling from a plane.
[Paul] A couple things
are sort of interesting about it. Yes,
there were these bacteria present
in all these samples,
and it is a normal part
of the digestive tract for humans
and actually most mammals,
but it also can be found environmentally,
because, uh, of course [chuckles]
animals don't have flushing toilets.
And so you get bacteria
that gets mixed into the soil.
You also get it in the water,
and then it can be aerosolized.
That's just nature.
Whatever it was that happened in Oakville,
it made me question more,
and it made me feel
like there was a darker element
that has not been talked about,
that the media ignored.
I think there was
something more sinister involved.
[tense ethereal music plays]
[music intensifies]
[Sunny] For several months
before the fallout of the blobs,
fairly frequently,
at least once or twice a week,
we would have flyovers
of big black helicopters.
[helicopter whirring]
[Dotty] That is a black helicopter
flying over.
Wanna get him on, uh, tape.
They say there is no such thing,
but there is.
[Sunny] And then, I think it was in 1997,
when I was working at the soda fountain,
a group of men came in
[menacing music plays]
strangers, not from the Oakville area,
and ordered milkshakes.
And then the lead guy
started questioning me.
"Isn't this the town
where the blobs fell?"
And I said, "Yes."
"And is it true
that someone saw black aircraft?"
And I just felt very uncomfortable.
And they finally left,
and I ran over to the window
to write down their license plate number,
and one of my customers said to me,
"I already have it."
And she goes,
"I don't know who those guys were,
but," she says, "the hair is standing up
on the back of my neck."
The license plate number came back
registered to Fort Hood, Texas.
I spent many years
researching what happened in Oakville,
and I found
that Mike McDowell called it a matrix.
He said it was a substance
that was like an envelope
that something could be inserted into,
like a germ or a virus.
He thought it was a delivery system.
Like a c carrier system.
He did say that.
He goes He goes, "Think"
He goes, "I don't have any proof,
but it does look like
it was for, like, carrying something."
Based on what I know now
that I didn't know then,
I think it was a military exercise.
I really do.
You know,
it's happened throughout history,
where they have done types of experiments
on people without their permission.
[narrator] Could the US military
be to blame for the blobs?
And if so, why?
What would they gain
by infecting their own people?
[archival narrator 1] The time has come
when everyone in the Navy
must face up to the threat
of biological warfare or "BW."
[suspenseful music plays]
In 1943, the United States was concerned
about the potential for a bioweapon attack
from either Germany or Japan,
because they were afraid
that those countries were developing
their own weapons programs.
[archival narrator 2] Biological warfare
could be used to seek out personnel
in areas where there is cover.
[Mark] So, the US conducted
a number of open-air tests.
Some of those were on military bases,
some of those
were over civilian populations.
San Francisco,
San Diego,
Honolulu,
Panama City, Florida,
Norfolk, Virginia
There were over 200 tests conducted.
[Clyde] They've been doing
gain-of-function exercises since the '50s,
and, uh, this is done
for national security reasons.
They did it in San Francisco
to figure out if the Bay Area would be
a great place for a biological attack.
Operation Seaspray had spray devices
on barges off the coast of San Francisco.
They released simulant organisms,
which were deemed to be non-pathogenic.
But they were also deemed
to be very similar
to agents like anthrax,
as a way to compare
what would happen,
you know, with something like anthrax.
And what they found was,
under the right weather conditions,
a significant portion
of the population of San Francisco
would've been exposed to these organisms
if it had been a bioweapon attack.
Around the time
Operation Seaspray was run,
there was a case report
of around 11 people who were infected
with Serratia marcescens.
[narrator] At the time,
the bacteria Serratia marcescens
was believed to be harmless to humans.
The pink slimy substance
is found in humid environments,
but is now known to cause
certain types of infections,
and in some cases, pneumonia.
[Mark] In fact, one individual died.
But there's been a lot of conjecture
about whether that had anything to do
with the actual open-air testing or not.
They don't think twice
about exposing people to this
if they can get some data.
I mean, going back to Oakville,
were they experimenting
on the people of Oakville?
I think chances are, yeah.
I have decided
that the United States of America
will renounce the use
of any form of deadly biological weapons
that either kill or incapacitate.
[somber music plays]
[Mark] President Nixon closed
the military's offensive
biological warfare program in 1969.
There was significant
increasing international pressure
to establish new treaties
to ban the use
of chemical and biological warfare agents.
So, in the case of the Oakville situation,
if we were actually doing
that type of testing
of a potential bioweapon agent,
that would be
in violation of international treaties.
Number two, um,
really, if someone's using bioweapons,
an attack is silent.
So, the organisms is
is not even visible to the naked eye.
You don't smell it.
You don't know it's comin' around you.
Uh, and so, I think it's highly unlikely
something like that
was done by the government.
[thunder rumbles]
[tense music plays]
[James] We were just waiting
for the doctor to come and run some tests,
and I just asked my dad, I was like,
"Hey, you know, remember that story
you did on Unsolved Mysteries?"
"You never told us the answer to that."
Like, "What did you find
in those, uh, blobs?"
And he told me, he goes, "I never got
to finish, and that really frustrated me."
"Before I could finish what I was doing,
someone came and grabbed it."
[Sunny] According to Mike,
he went to work,
and he was going to get the sample,
and it was missing.
He was very distraught,
because he had worked there for decades
and he had never lost a sample.
And when he approached his supervisor
and said that the sample was missing,
his supervisor advised him
to not ask any questions.
My dad did say, "Suits came in."
And I was like, "Suits?"
And he was like, "Yeah." He d
he didn't know if it was government,
but he said "black suits."
That's what the lady
at the front desk told him,
that black suits came and took it.
[Dan] I remember one time
talking about it, you know,
like, in a living room
at my uncle's house or somethin',
and and he started gettin' emotional
that he never got to finish it,
'cause it would've been,
you know, a big finding in his career.
[footsteps receding]
[Paul] The records seem
to have gone missing.
The samples seem to have gone missing.
Unfortunately, the people who handled
a lot of this have passed,
and so we are looking
at, largely, an oral tradition now.
[Sunny] Eventually,
the samples were consumed by testing
until we just simply ran out.
We would never be able
to identify the substance.
[melancholy classical waltz plays]
[narrator] In 1994, the blobs fell.
And since then,
their origin has been debated.
Yet, after all the theories
and speculations,
only one truth has emerged,
some mysteries are destined to endure.
[Paul] I was looking into this again
and found a few other cases
where people said something similar,
but there was very little detail,
largely 'cause I don't think
anybody got sick.
So, that's where nobody sorta cared.
What happened in Oakville was unusual,
and we s call it the
sort of the Swiss Cheese model.
Finally had enough things
that came together,
enough of those holes lined up,
that we got just the right magic bullet
to get through there
to give us a one-off unusual story.
[Sunny] One of the things
that was the most important to me
was to make people aware of it.
I spent a lotta time,
you know, researching,
tryin' to figure it out,
because in my reality,
blobs don't fall out of the sky.
[Clyde] I think
what Sunny has done is important,
because she's kept
the investigation alive.
I wish more people were behind her,
because the more we talk about it,
the more we get down
to the bottom of what happened.
[Bill] You wanna recognize
that there's
a rational explanation for it,
and even the most rational,
science-based explanation
is still gonna be a wild one.
[David] My view is
that blue ice is the, uh, cause
of this, uh, deposition.
[Dan] It has to be man-made.
That that's where my mind goes, but
It's like, "Why?
What's the purpose? What's the point?"
[Clyde] I mean,
look where we are now with COVID.
I mean, we know all about what it's like
to be subjected to a scary disease,
you know, where you don't
even wanna go outta your house.
You you you don't even wanna
do anything 'cause you're so terrified.
Well, these people were terrified
to leave their homes,
because there were gelatinous goop
everywhere that was making them sick.
I mean, how how do you deal with that?
[Sunny] Some people
just didn't necessarily believe it,
because they didn't experience it.
And that's okay.
I know that I was there,
and experienced it.
My mother experienced it.
That's good enough for me.
[Dotty] Well, what you're lookin' at here
is a beautiful sunset.
See you later. Bye for now.
[suspenseful music plays]