AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Bath County, Kentucky, celebrated a historic occurrence earlier this month - the meat shower of 1876. That's when pieces of meat mysteriously fell from the sky onto a farm. Cheri Lawson of member station WEKU was at the festivities.
CHERI LAWSON, BYLINE: At the Bath County History Museum in rural Kentucky, dozens of people crowd around Kurt Gohde. He's a professor at Transylvania University in Lexington.
KURT GOHDE: We believe it's a sample from the meat rain of 1876.
LAWSON: He's holding a glass jar with a meat sample in a clear liquid. Gohde has been fascinated with the meat shower for over 20 years.
GOHDE: And the pieces that rained in that storm ranged from the size of a hailstone to the size of Rebecca Crouch's hand.
LAWSON: Rebecca Crouch is the woman who witnessed the meat shower 150 years ago. She was outside making soap on her Bath County farm when pieces of what appeared to be raw meat rained on her under cloudless skies. In line to see the meat is Andrew Cruse. He has a cabin in eastern Kentucky and has heard the meat shower story for years.
ANDREW CRUSE: It's one of those things that you hear about, and you assume it's kind of urban legend, but it's actually - there's a piece of it.
LAWSON: Some, like Sasha Reinhardt, are having their picture taken with the jar of meat. She believes she's a descendant of the Crouch family who experienced the meat rain.
SASHA REINHARDT: It's definitely part of our oral tradition. Of course, you know, Appalachia's really big on storytelling, oral tradition, and this was always a favorite.
LAWSON: A hundred and fifty years ago, the story was heavily publicized in The New York Times and in scientific journals. There were several theories about what it was and why meat fell out of the sky. Theories ranged from it being a sign from God to a hoax. But Gohde says the most accepted theory is that the meat was vulture vomit.
GOHDE: And the idea ultimately there is that a flock of vultures was flying high enough above the farm that when Rebecca Crouch was hit with the meat, she looked up, she couldn't see them, and the whole flock disgorged at the same time.
LAWSON: He says they tested the meat in the university's gene sequencer.
GOHDE: Ultimately, the strands were not long enough to be completely conclusive. So we don't know exactly what it was, but we do know that it's closest to a goat.
IAN CORBIN: It was one of those things, as a child growing up here in Bath County, that you learned it from your parents.
LAWSON: That's Ian Corbin, who grew up here.
CORBIN: We even had, like, a week in school where you had your local history of Bath County, and you learned about it.
LAWSON: Now he has organized a festival around the event. He orchestrates meat-themed games in the town square, like a meatball toss and a bologna throw, where a thick piece of bologna is hurled like a frisbee.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
CORBIN: OK. All right. One, two, three, throw, go.
(CHEERING)
LAWSON: Vendors line the streets and sell things like T-shirts and mystery-meat chili. At the town's library, author Mick Sullivan reads his meat rain book to the kids.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
MICK SULLIVAN: (Reading) Sometimes strange things happen.
LAWSON: Janie-Rice Brother brought her two kids to the library to hear the story. She says she heard it from her father, who heard it from his father.
JANIE-RICE BROTHER: I think it's just a wonderful thing that this small community has decided to take what was a very strange occurrence and make it into something that the entire community can get behind and support.
(SOUNDBITE OF PLANE FLYING)
LAWSON: At the end of the festival, hundreds of people stand around a white split-rail fence near a field. A Cessna airplane flies over the area. One thousand eight hundred seventy-six individually wrapped pieces of beef jerky spill out of the window.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: There we go.
(CHEERING)
LAWSON: That's the work of Kurt Gohde and his team. Thanks to them, a meat shower has rained in Bath County for the second time in 150 years.
For NPR News, I'm Cheri Lawson in Bath County, Kentucky.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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