Short Stuff: Kentucky Meat Shower

What It Covers

On March 3, 1876, chunks of meat rained from a clear sky onto Rebecca Crouch's Kentucky farm, covering roughly a football field. Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant examine the historical event and competing scientific explanations for what caused it.

Key Questions Answered

• •Vulture vomit theory: The leading scientific explanation, proposed by chemistry professor L.D. Kastenbein in 1876, holds that a group of vultures simultaneously regurgitated mid-flight. Vultures vomit to reduce weight during flight, and the meat matched decomposed animal flesh consistent with vulture diet.
• •Altitude factor: Art professor Kurt Godi spent two decades arguing Crouch would have seen vultures overhead, until researchers confirmed vultures can fly at 20,000 feet — rendering them invisible to the naked eye and making a mass simultaneous vomiting event entirely plausible from that altitude.
• •Competing theories eliminated: Two early hypotheses — rehydrated frog spawn carried aloft and cyanobacteria (star jelly) dispersed by wind — both collapsed on the same flaw: the sky was completely clear, requiring precipitation to rehydrate and deposit the material, which never occurred.
• •Flavor reconstruction: Godi worked with a jelly bean manufacturer to recreate the meat shower's flavor profile using analyzed compounds from historical descriptions. Tasters at Kentucky's Court Days festival described the result as uncooked bacon, rotting lamb, or strawberry pork chops. Godi himself finds them vile.