The Jerome School Angel Hair

The stuff that fell from the sky turned the teachers' hands green. In the archive's tellings it came down for about an hour after the sighting. It was white and fibrous like cotton and it draped the telephone and power wires for three miles. It formed gelatinous balls and dried away to nothing. It began at about 3.15 in the afternoon when pupils at Jerome Elementary School saw a bright object low over the school and fetched the principal. He saw it before it vanished. A teacher who came out after him missed it.

What is on the record

The archive lists three claimants: the principal, the teacher, and the pupils counted as one group. The pupils were about sixty children, who are not named here. The principal is Rodney Warrick in the published record. The archive's transcripts render him Warwick. The teacher is recorded as Mrs George Dittmar.

The object itself changes between tellings. Two describe a low disc. The third has a bright silver cigar that hovered and then shot off, which is closer to catalogues that describe a cigar with portholes and smaller discs. The calendar settles the year. Dennett's book on schoolyard encounters places the event in 1955, but 22 October that year was a Saturday. The school-day timing fits 1954.

No reply from Lockbourne is recorded, though one telling says the sample dissipated and was labelled spider gossamer. That is the usual explanation for angel hair: silk spun by ballooning spiders. October 1954 also brought falls of angel hair in Europe. The case appears in Johnson's day-by-day catalogue. Contemporary Marysville newspapers have not been seen.

Why it sits where it does

The case grades L3, though its three tellings come from one channel. What remains is a school full of witnesses and a fall of fibres whose only reported test result comes from a single telling. What hung over the school and what fell from the sky are not resolved here.