Have you ever experienced a personal mystery?
Something that might not have sent you screaming into the street, but still comes to mind now and then because you simply do not know enough about what you experienced?
My main unexplained personal mystery is "angel hair" falling in long white strings (e.g., 10 to 20 feet) from the sky. About 30 years ago, in the early 1980s, my wife and I were visiting my older half-sister in the backyard of her house in the city of Evansville, Indiana. The quiet afternoon was warm with virtually no wind.
We happened to look up, and saw maybe a dozen long vertical strings of something white drifting slowly down to the ground from high up in a clear blue sky that had no clouds or signs of aircraft.
The white vertical strings were spaced far apart and descended separately in no obvious pattern, no clumping, with additional strings coming into view high up as others neared the ground. We were outside watching them for about an hour.
A few eventually came down in and around the backyard where we were standing. When the strings touched anything they slowly collapsed or clung as you would expect spaghetti strands to do, and that's about what they looked like: whitish, rather translucent, diameter of a grease pencil "lead", no odor, feeling quite neutral, e.g., vaguely nylony, maybe just a little sticky.
(Trying to describe the phenomenon still makes on-line searches daunting. I tried many terms before "angel hair" proved productive.)
The "angel hair" strings seemed to be slowly dissolving or disappearing. (Later I would learn this is sublimation, changing from a solid state to gas without becoming liquid [or much of it] as they passed from colder upper air to warmer lower air around the ground.) We thought about collecting some of them, then figured somebody else with more knowledge would be doing it somewhere and figuring it out.
How's that for calm Hoosier processing of unidentified new information? What the heck -- no apparent threat, surely somebody in charge knows about it, another sidebar for the newspaper or passing mention on TV in a slow news day.
I thought the most logical candidate would be processed wastes vented from aircraft, which accounted for most of my disinterest in collecting them and messing with them. What did I think, that waste was being blobbed and then run through some noodle crank?
(Prevailing lore is that most aircraft waste is in sealed tanks, and that if any ever escapes it is most likely in the form of blue ice chunks reflecting the dominant chemical treatment.)
To my surprise, apparently nothing was ever reported about this incident of "angel hair." My half-sister said if any neighbors ever saw it, they never mentioned it. I figured if it was important I would soon hear about it. Later I searched here and there for info but came up with nothing. As time passed the angel hair faded in memory but always remained a curiosity.
Today, decades later, I decided to look again and finally stumbled across "angel hair" as the most relevant search term. Several Internet references suggest angel hair is of biological origin from UFOs. Ha, more than I expected: E.T. excretion. Glad I didn't mess with it.
Anyway, if you haven't heard about this already, thought you'd be interested, and I'd certainly like to know if you have seen or heard anything about this phenomenon. I also have searched Snopes several times describing this in several terms but have never found anything there about this version of angel hair.
I still can't come up with any better guesses than something to do with treatment of human waste from aircraft or some form of biodegradable chaff. Or maybe some sort of shedding from some sort of stealth or other vehicle surfacing. Or maybe an exotic fuel byproduct.
Key seems to be the strings are biological. (Twilight Zone do-de-do-do swells in background.) And way too thick to be spider soaring aids.
Some studies suggest peaks around October. Here are three links to angel hair info:
http://www.bibleufo.com/angelhair.htm (brief history)
tracers.8m.com/AHair.htm (some substance analysis)
www.cufos.org/boldman.pdf (An Analysis of Angel Hair 1947-2000)
If any of this sounds familiar, please share if you have ever seen anything like this phenomenon.
