The blue spheres are jelly-like but have no smell and are not sticky. Image BBC

Steve Hornsby and one of the spheres that fell in his yard during a storm. Image Inquisitr.

Florists use water-absorbent balls in their displays. Image BBC

The manufacturer of the toy gun range said the balls were not its products. Image BBC

Blue balls theories rage after Dorset storm mystery
30 January 2012 | bbc.uk

A number of theories have been put forward to explain the presence of blue jelly spheres found in a Dorset garden.

Steve Hornsby from Bournemouth reported the 3cm diameter balls came raining down last Thursday during a hailstorm.

Theories include the balls being crystals used in floral displays or ammunition for a toy gun.

But Mr Hornsby remains unconvinced and believes they were formed in the atmosphere. Bournemouth University is to analyse the balls.

He found about 20 balls made of a jelly-like substance which the Met Office has said was “not meteorological”.

A number of people who contacted the BBC after the story was published on Friday believed the balls were sodium polyacrylate crystals.

‘Mightily convincing’

They can absorb hundreds of times their mass in water and are used in floral displays.

Mel Smith, from Ena’s Florists in Bournemouth, said the balls look extremely similar to the type she uses and have the consistence of firm jelly when broken into.

She added: “We buy them dehydrated and then soak them in water for about six hours and they hydrate to balls up to 3cm (about 1in) or so in diameter.”

Josie Pegg, an applied science research assistant at Bournemouth University, agreed that the water-absorbing crystal theory was “mightily convincing”.

But Mr Hornsby said he does not use the crystals and queried whether the short storm was strong enough to blow them into his garden.

Another idea was that they could be ammunition used in a range of toy guns.

‘Deep craters’

Mr Hornsby said there were a number of children living in the area but said his hedge was fairly high, making firing the spheres into his garden tricky.

He also said a number of the balls had made deep craters which he believed could have only been caused if they had fallen from a great height.

The manufacturer of the Xploderz toy gun range agreed with Mr Hornsby and said the balls were “definitely not” from its product.

A spokesman for Character Options said: “Our ammunition is completely spherical and at a maximum is 1cm big – these look too big.”

Mr Hornsby, a former aircraft engineer, said: “My wife is in the garden all day and didn’t see them before so I am convinced it came with the hailstorm.

“We don’t use anything like the crystals in our garden and I think it would be difficult for kids to shoot over our hedge.

“I think it is some kind of atmospheric pollution. Pollution forms into spheres and fell like the hailstones.”

Mr Hornsby, who is keeping the balls in his fridge, has accepted an offer from Bournemouth University to analyse the substance.

It seems that even though the FAA gets involved in “metal hunk fall from the sky stories” not often do their determination of the origin get much publicity. Please see the FALLS category for more stories about things that fell.

Click an image to enlarge.

Image www.wickedlocal.com

Image www.wickedlocal.com

Mysterious debris crashes through ceiling of Plymouth business: MyFoxBOSTON.com

UPDATE: Mysterious metal cylinder crashes through Plymouth warehouse roof
By Rich Harbert | Wicked Local Plymouth | Dec 02, 2011

PLYMOUTH —Employees of a local furniture business scrambled to make roof repairs and buy lottery tickets Thursday after a chuck of metal harmlessly crashed through the roof of their offices.

The cylindrically shaped piece of solid steel tore a hole through both the roof and ceiling panels of Michael’s Wholesale Furniture Distributors in Camelot Industrial Park sometime Wednesday or Thursday.

A company employee found the three- to five-pound chunk of metal lying amid broken ceiling tiles on the floor of a storage room early Thursday afternoon.

“He just happened to go in and all the ceiling tiles were blown out. It came right through the ceiling and was lying right on the floor,” Michael Facchini, owner of the import furniture business on Mary B Way, said. “We’re lucky no one got clunked on the head. It would have hurt…I’ll have to play the lottery tonight.”

Facchini said the storage room had last been visited late Wednesday afternoon. Nobody heard the metal crash through the building, but it must have made quite a racket.

It tore through the furniture warehouse’s roof, two sheets of fiberglass insulation and then the tiled ceiling before landing one the floor.

Facchini said the metal was about eight inches long and three inches round and looked like part of an axle. Both ends appeared sheared.

Police detectives took possession of the metal and have contacted the Federal Aviation Administration on the assumption that it fell from a passing airplane. But the feds turned the investigation right back at them.

FAA spokesman Arlene Salac said flight standards inspectors examined the piece of metal Thursday at police headquarters and determined it did not come from any aircraft. Salac said it remains a mystery where the metal came from, but in the past flying metal debris has been traced to nearby railway lines or heavy equipment.

There is not a rail line near the industrial park, but there is plenty of heavy equipment, including an industrial strength woodchipper in a nearby lot. Salac said it remains for local police and the building’s owner to determine the source of the flying metal, if possible.

Police, meanwhile, are classifying the metal rod with an unusual, but long-established government acronym for such unexplained events. TFOA stands for Things Falling Off Aircraft.

Read more: UPDATE: Mysterious metal cylinder crashes through Plymouth warehouse roof – Plymouth, MA – Wicked Local Plymouth http://www.wickedlocal.com/plymouth/features/x300720451/Mysterious-metal-cylinder-crashes-through-Plymouth-warehouse-roof#ixzz1g2yvt9H7

“It’s pretty bizarre. I guess ferris wheels are stronger than they look.”

Plane crashes into NSW ferris wheel
www.abc.net.au/news | October 03, 2011

The pilot of a light plane that crashed into a ferris wheel at a fair on the New South Wales mid-north coast says he simply did not see it.

Four people, including two children, had to be rescued after the plane crashed into the wheel at the Old Bar Festival about 10:00am (AEST) on Saturday.

All four walked away unscathed.

Local pilot Paul Cox was flying with his son-in-law when he failed his first landing attempt on the airstrip next to the festival.

When he turned the plane around, he crashed into the ferris wheel.

Two children had to be rescued from a basket at the top of the ferris wheel and Mr Cox and his son-in-law were rescued after dangling from the top of the wheel inside their plane for more than an hour.

Taree Mayor Paul Hogan says it is amazing no one was killed.

“I had to open the ceremony and I said we’ve witnessed a miracle here today,” he said.

“It could have been far worse.

“If [the ferris wheel] had toppled over, boy oh boy.”

Emergency workers have managed to remove the plane, which was wedged in the ferris wheel for hours.

The plane had been leaking aviation fuel and emergency services had to spray the area with foam. There were also fears the ferris wheel could topple over.

Witnesses described hearing a “crunch” as the plane hit the wheel.

Lorraine was watching the aircraft from a viewing platform.

“He’d gone in and made a landing and then I heard him taking off again so I turned around to watch him come, because he was going up a pathway [that] took him over the top of the ferris wheel,” she said.

“And as I turned around to watch him I thought ‘Christ he’s low, he’s coming in low over that’ and next thing bang he went straight into it.

“And the only thing that stopped anything else happening was a support bar of the ferris wheel – that sort of went in between the struts of the wing.”

Rescue operation

Rimian Perkins was also at the scene of the crash and told ABC News Online that rescue crews had to use a crane and a cherry picker to free those trapped.

“They’re lifting this big crane at the moment and it’s like an industrial crane,” he said.

“I imagine they’re just trying to secure the ferris wheel. The rescue guys have tied it down at the bottom but it could topple at any second.”

He says the two children sat patiently while they waited to be rescued.

“Apparently there were two people in the plane and the plane’s pretty messy. Underneath the plane there’s a lot of foam from the fire extinguisher so I don’t think the people fell out of it, but I’ve heard they’re okay.”

Mr Perkins says the plane seemed to clip the ferris wheel as it tried to land.

“It was just like a big crunch,” he said.

“It’s pretty bizarre. I guess ferris wheels are stronger than they look. It must have been a low speed collision.”

An investigation into the accident is now underway.

NASA: Huge Defunct Satellite Will Fall to Earth This Week
by Tariq Malik, SPACE.com Managing Editor | 19 September 2011

A dead climate satellite that has been circling Earth for 20 years will make a fiery death plunge this week, with some pieces of the 6 1/2 ton spacecraft expected to reach the surface of the planet, NASA officials say.

The bus-size Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite, or UARS, will likely plummet down to Earth sometime around Friday (Sept. 23), according to NASA’s latest projections. There is a 1-in-3,200 chance that UARS debris could hit a person, though NASA considers that scenario extremely remote.

“Re-entry is expected Sept. 23, plus or minus a day,” NASA officials wrote in an update posted Sunday (Sept. 18). That means that by Saturday (Sept. 24), the UARS satellite should slam into Earth’s atmosphere and break apart. The space agency’s space debris experts predict that at least 26 large pieces of the satellite will survive the scorching temperatures of atmospheric re-entry. But exactly where the UARS satellite debris will fall is uncertain.

NASA officials have said that the drop zone for UARS satellite debris could be anywhere between the latitudes of northern Canada and southern South America, an area that includes much of the planet.

The satellite should re-enter over a 500-mile (804-kilometer) track, according to NASA officials. Since 75 percent of Earth is covered with ocean, there is a high likelihood that the satellite will re-enter over the sea or a remote, uninhabited stretch of land, Victoria Samson, the Washington Office Director of the Secure World Foundation, an organization dedicated to the peaceful use of outer space, told SPACE.com last week.

If the satellite does fall while flying over a populated region of Earth, skywatchers on the ground could see a dazzling light show if they have clear weather, Nick Johnson, chief scientist of NASA’s Orbital Debris Program at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, said on Sept. 9.

As of Sunday, the UARS was flying in an orbit that reached a high point of about 149 miles (240 km) above Earth, according to NASA’s latest update. That is down from an orbit that peaked at an altitude of 171 miles (275 km) on Sept. 8. [Infographic: NASA's Falling UARS Satellite Explained]

And UARS is falling closer to Earth with each passing orbit.

The huge satellite is 35 feet (10.7 meters) long and 15 feet (4.5 m) wide, and has been falling faster than anticipated (initial re-entry estimates pegged its plunge to somewhere between late September and early October) due to increased solar activity last week. Solar activity can cause the Earth’s atmosphere to heat and expand, increasing drag on low-flying spacecraft.

The U.S. Strategic Command at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., and NASA are keeping a close eye on the falling UARS spacecraft, but have said that they will only be able to pinpoint the satellite’s point of impact to within about 6,000 miles (10,000 km) about two hours before re-entry due to its unpredictable nature, U.S. Air Force Maj. Michael Duncan, deputy chief of the U.S. Strategic Command’s space situational awareness division, told reporters on Sept. 9.

NASA launched the $750 million UARS spacecraft in 1991 to study the ozone layer and other chemical compounds in Earth’s upper atmosphere to better understand their role in the planet’s climate. The satellite was initially designed for a three-year mission, but it lasted for 14 years until newer satellites made it obsolete.

The UARS satellite was decommissioned in December 2005 when NASA commanded the spacecraft to fire its thrusters one last time to use all its remaining fuel to place it on a years-long path toward disposal in Earth’s atmosphere.

If any pieces of the satellite debris do fall over or near a populated area, NASA and the U.S. military warn the public not to touch UARS remains. Instead, local law enforcement officials should be contacted, NASA officials said.

Any debris from the UARS satellite still remains the property of the U.S. government and cannot be sold for profit to collectors or on eBay, they added.

Never mind cats and dogs – school hit by worm rain
By Angus Howarth | news.scotsman.com | 02 April 2011

A PE class had to run for cover as it started raining worms.

Teacher David Crichton was leading a group of pupils playing football at Galashiels Academy when dozens of the invertebrates began plummeting from the sky. The 22 second-year boys had to abandon their lesson

Mr Crichton said the children had just completed their warm-up when they began to hear “soft thudding” on the ground.

The class then looked to the cloudless sky – and saw worms falling on to them.

Mr Chrichton, 26, said he was baffled by the incident, with teachers later finding more worms spread across a tennis court almost 100 yards away.

Mr Crichton said: “We went out to one of our outdoor areas – an all-weather Astroturf pitch.

“We were out playing football and had just done our warm-up and were about to start the next part of the lesson.

“We started hearing this wee thudding noise on the ground.

“There were about 20 worms already on the ground at this point. Then they just kept coming down.

“The kids were laughing but some were covering their heads and others were running for cover for a while.

“The just scattered to get out of the way.”

The teacher scooped up handfuls of the worms that had fallen from the sky as proof they had landed on his class.

Mr Crichton said he and his colleagues eventually found about 120 worms after checking the artificial football pitch and tennis courts.

He said the children had not stopped talking about the incident since it happened on Tuesday.

“I spoke with the science department here but none of them had any explanation for it,” Mr Crichton said.

“One of them thought maybe it was a freak weather thing

“But it was such a clear, calm day.”

Kenny McKay, headteacher at Galashiels Academy, said: “The event does coincide with a significant change in the weather in recent days and so could be the result of an unusual meteorological event.

“The students and staff of Galashiels Academy are rightly proud of their school for many reasons, including its record in sport and its beautiful environs.

“However, we never thought we’d be famous for such a strange event.”

“None of the students were hurt, although they did find the experience quite bizarre.

“None of them will ever forget the day at school when worms fell out of the sky.”

Wiggly wind

Showers of worms falling from the heavens have been reported in the past.

The incident in Galashiels is believed to have been caused by freak weather over a nearby river lifting water and worms and dumping it over the road.

Similar events were recorded in 1872 in Somerville, Massachusetts, in 1877 in Christiana, Norway, and in 1924 in Halmstad, Sweden.

In July 2007 a woman was crossing a road in Louisiana when large clumps of tangled worms dropped from above.

VIDEO: Croc caused plane crash, says survivor

Crocodile on plane kills 19 passengers
www.news.com.au  | by Staff Writers  |  news.com.au  |  October 22, 2010

•    Crocodile escapes from carrier bag
•    Creature causes on board stampede
•    Plane tips, then crashed into house
•    All the latest travel news
A STOWAWAY crocodile on a flight escaped from its carrier bag and sparked an onboard stampede that caused the flight to crash, killing 19 passengers and crew.

The croc had been hidden in a passenger’s sports bag – allegedly with plans to sell it – but it tore loose and ran amok, sparking panic.
A stampede of terrified passengers caused the small aircraft to lose balance and tip over in mid-air during an internal flight in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The unbalanced load caused the aircraft, on a routine flight from the capital, Kinshasa, to the regional airport at Bandundu, to go into a spin and crash into a house.

A lone survivor from the Let 410 plane told the astonishing tale to investigators.
Ironically the crocodile also survived the crash but was later killed with a machete by rescuers sifting through the wreckage.
British pilot Chris Wilson, 39, from Shurdington, near Cheltenham, Glocs was acting as the plane’s first officer alongside Belgian pilot Danny Philemotte, 62, who was owner of the plane’s operator Filair.
The plane smashed into an empty house just a few hundred metres from its destination.
“According to the inquiry report and the testimony of the only survivor, the crash happened because of a panic sparked by the escape of a crocodile hidden in a sports bag,” news organisation Jeune Afrique reported.
“One of the passengers had hidden the animal, which he planned to sell, in a big sports bag, from which the reptile escaped as the plane began its descent into Bandundu.
“The terrified air hostess hurried towards the cockpit, followed by the passengers.”
The plane was then sent off-balance “despite the desperate efforts of the pilot”, said the report.
“The crocodile survived the crash before being cut up with a machete.”
The plane was a Czech-made Let L-410 Turbolet, one of more than 1,100 produced as short-range transport aircraft and used mainly for passenger services.

17 year old Juliane Koepcke was in an airplane that exploded over the Amazon. Juliane Koepcke plunged to earth, landed in the jungle and survived 9 days of trekking thru tough conditions to find civilization. Juliane Koepcke survived the ordeal and thrived to be a successful adult. Her story was featured in 2 films.

Here’s some info about her from wikipedia not included in the following story.

Her experience is the subject of two films, the first being the 1974 Giuseppe Maria Scotese film Miracoli accadono ancora, I (Miracles Still Happen), and the most recent being the 2000 Werner Herzog film Wings of Hope. Herzog was inspired to make the film as he narrowly avoided taking the very same flight while he was location scouting for Aguirre, Wrath of God. His reservation was canceled due to a last minute change in itinerary.^[3]

Köpcke returned to Germany, where she fully recovered from her injuries and continued her studies, eventually earning a PhD degree in zoology, like her parents, in 1987. Now known as Dr. Juliane Diller, she specializes in mammalogy, studying bats in Munich, Germany,^[4] and working at the Munich Zoological Center, where she is a librarian.^[2]

For more stories of children who were the sole survivors of plane crashes click here.

The young Miss Koepcke

As an adult she returned to survey the wreckage for a 2000 documentary.

This story below is a direct lift from bad ass of the week.com

On Christmas Eve 1971, in the skies above the desolate, remote jungles of Peru, LANSA Flight 508 got its ass rocked like a hurricane by a ginormous bolt of lightning that blew the entire fuselage apart like a humongoid human-filled flying pipe bomb with wings. Juliane Koepcke, a quiet seventeen year-old high school senior on her way to visit her father, fell two miles out of the sky, without a parachute, crunching into the dirt floor of the Amazon Rain Forest with enough velocity to fracture the skull of Bahamut the World Fish. When she somehow miraculously awoke and came to her senses (a feat which few of her fellow passengers managed to accomplish), she was still strapped in to her seat. She had a broken collarbone, a severe concussion, deep cuts in her arms and legs, and one of her eyes had been swollen shut like Stallone the end of Rocky II. You know, the sort of injuries you’d expect from someone who just plummeted through a few thousand feet of freefall and splashed down in a goddamned rainforest.

Juliane unbuckled her apparently-indestructible airline seat belt (she was obviously paying attention when the flight attendant was going through that whole “here’s how you properly fasten your safety belt” portion of the spiel) and briefly surveyed the wreckage. All she saw were corpses and empty seats. She was alone in the Amazon, with the thick canopy jungle above her preventing her from signaling for help, and effectively crotch-stomping any hope for a successful or timely rescue. Juliane Koepcke had no food, no tools, no gear, no powerbars, no means to make fire, no maps, and no compass. Shit, she only had one shoe, having lost the other one during that whole “careening through the atmosphere” thing, which I guess is understandable. It was just her and the wilderness, mano-e-womano.

Now, I touched on the Amazon River Basin somewhat in my article on EL TITANOBOA MONSTRUO, but perhaps this would be a good time for me to get into this in a little more detail. The Amazon is one of the most insane, hardcore jungles ever devised  a ghastly hellhole of unrighteous suckitude filled with horrors beyond that which most hack basement-dwelling sci-fi authors could ever dream up in their wildest LSD-inspired psychotic delusions. This place is right up there with the Congo, rural Siberia, and the Sahara Desert in terms of “terrible places you would only really want to visit if you enjoy being miserable and suffering a slow and painful death”. It is home to thousands of species of venomous creatures, dozens of other non-poisonous things with large, pointy, flesh-rending teeth, revolting man-eating monsters, and giant evil gorillas that can face-punch people so hard their necks explode. It’s the home of the Candiru Fish, a sick reject from God’s murderous asshole that makes its living by swimming up peoples’ urethras and embedding itself with a couple of horrific, groin-cringingly sharp spines. I mean, this place almost killed Teddy Roosevelt, a guy who is pretty much widely believed to be one of the most badass men to ever take a dump in the bathroom of the Oval Office, so you KNOW it’s not something you should really jerk around with if you can help it. Shit, the fact that I even need to reference the TITANOBOA when talking about this place should give you a good idea of how retardedly insane this place is. You’d have better odds for survival working as a custodial technician in Ravenholm or sweeping out air ducts on LV-426.

Well, as I mentioned previously, Juliane Koepcke was just a young high school senior, but I should also say that she was working towards a degree in flippin’ zoology at a school in Lima, Peru, so it wasn’t like she was awkwardly terrified of a little bit of torrential rain or knee-deep mud or giant carnivorous predators or anything. It also didn’t hurt that both of her parents were famous German biologists, either. In fact, she’d grown up living in a number of different research stations in the middle of this godforsaken jungle, so I guess I don’t have to tell you that this ridiculously tough broad wasn’t going to give up and start digging her own grave with a broken set of chopsticks just because she was lost and alone in one of the cruelest and most inhospitable jungles on the planet. Forget that. She wasn’t going down without a fight, and she had every intention of giving this nightmarish deathzone a giant barefooted roundhouse kick right in its horrible dripping serrated mandibles. Juliane searched through the wreckage, grabbed the few pieces of candy and food that she was able to scrounge up from the debris, and started walking off into the jungle.

Though she was disoriented and concussed, Juliane kept her wits about her and didn’t just go running around screaming and falling down all over the place like some slutty bimbo in a bad horror movie. This unbreakable survivor knew that her best chance of making it out of this craptastic situation was to link up with civilization as quickly as possible, and that most people tend to live near waterways of some form or another, so she pressed through the underbrush until she found a small creek, and she just started following it downstream. When the creek ran into a larger body of water, she followed that. When the vegetation on the river bank was too thick, she waded through knee-deep, piranha- and candiru-infested waters without even giving a crap. She just constantly pushed herself on, fighting forward, driving ahead through sheer force of will alone.

For eleven days (!) Juliane Koepcke trudged through the Amazon Rain Forest without any gear or food, smashing her way through the snarls of vegetation and plant life, avoiding the man-eating crocodiles she routinely encountered, and fighting off insect swarms, clouds of leeches, and other disgusting creatures of blood-sucking and/or multi-legged insanity. She drank river water, battled through infection and disease, foraged for whatever scraps of food she could get her hands on, and did a bunch of other badass Bear Grylls-types of shit just to stay alive long enough to find help.

Finally, after a week and a half of this hellish, ball-sucking death march, the semi-conscious, zombie-esque Koepcke shambled into a remote, makeshift logging camp on the edge of the rain forest. She fell down, curled up, and waited for help, which arrived the following day. The loggers gave her some very rudimentary first aid (part of which involved pouring gasoline on her to clean out her wounds, which sounds like it was probably a whole lot of fun), and took her on a seven-hour canoe trip to the nearest town, where a local pilot then flew her to the hospital for treatment. Of the 92 people on board Flight 508, this unassuming 17 year-old woman was the only one who walked out of the wilderness alive.

Of course, Juliane Koepcke wasn’t done yet. She went on to get a PhD in Zoology, proving that this survivor could take the most horrible shit mother nature could throw at her and it wasn’t even going to slow her down. Nowadays she studies bats in Germany or something, which is pretty sweet if you ask me. Her survival story remains one of the most badass demonstrations of human endurance that I’ve ever come across.