The History of the Kentucky Meat Shower

“Haha, holy shit, I did not mean to do that.”

~God

The world is filled with mysterious events that often defy explanation.  As much as we crave order and reason, there are still occurrences out there that we can only guess the causes of.  The Bermuda Triangle, the last flight of Amelia Earhart, Angelina Jolie’s marriage to Billy Bob Thorton, all of these are riddles that may never provide us with an answer.  Sometimes, these mysteries are mundane or eerie.  And sometimes, there are mysteries that are so American we have no choice but to embrace them.

Like, for example, an event involving meat raining down from the sky.  When something like that happens in America, you know we at AFFotD are ready to spring into action and inform the living hell out of you all.  Really, there’s no stopping us from teaching you about…

The History of the Kentucky Meat Shower

The story is as simple as it is ultimately unexplainable.  On March 3^rd, 1876, large chunks of red meat fell from the sky for a period of several minutes over a 100 by 50 yard area near Olympia Springs, Kentucky.  That is the extent of the Kentucky Meat Shower.  Yes, the name of the event is far more literal than you could have even dreamed.  It was a meat shower, taking place in Kentucky.

America, let’s pause here for a minute and try to put ourselves in the shoes of the people who witnessed meat fall from the heavens over the area of a fucking football field.  How would you react to such a situation?  How could you react to such a situation?

…Did you just say that you’d cook up the meat and taste it to try to figure out what kind of animal it was from?  Well congrats, that’s exactly what two of the witnesses did.

“Eh, could be mutton.  Could be human.  Only one way to not even make sure…”

These two tapeworm victims brave Americans told the New York Times, who actually covered this event, that based on the taste of the meat, that it was either mutton or venison, meaning that they had eaten mysterious meat that fell from the sky and were able to come to the conclusion of “it might be sheep?  Or deer?”

The meat fell alongside the house of one Allen Crouch, while his wife was outside making soap.  If there’s anything we’ve learned from Fight Club, it’s that major corporations are responsible for the death of Meatloaf, but if there’s a second thing we’d have learned, it’s that the process of making soap is really fucking gross.  This means that as a woman is rendering fat into soap, chunks of some mystery meat began falling around her like a goddamn director’s cut of Carrie.  We’re not saying that this might have caused the worst smell to ever hit America until the invention of Louie Anderson after three days of not bathing, but it’s at least got to be in the running.

“Oh God, put it away, bring back the rotting meat and rendered fat, oh Lord!”

Of course, this meat was sent to a doctor, who attempted to identify the meat through a method slightly more nuanced than “cook it up and eat it.”  His finding was that the meat was lung tissue, either from a horse, or a human baby.  That’s right.  Horse lung…or baby lung.  Neither of those options seem quite as appetizing as mutton or venison now, do they?

“AFFotD, thanks so much for putting this mental image in our head, the Italian Sub we were just about to eat at our desk is worthless to us now, you assholes,” you probably are now mumbling through full mouths because we all know that an American is physically unable to stop themselves from eating a meat-laden sandwich when it is placed in front of them, no matter how unappetizing it may seem at the time.  Well, it’s going to get even better, because the one thing better than a sea of raining meat being eaten by random Kentuckians would be the theories of where the meat actually came from.

Theory 1:  Self-Disgorging Buzzards

Ha ha, how’s that sandwich tasting now, Americans?  You still can’t stop eating it, can you?  We can be awful when we put our minds to it!  The “most likely” explanation states that a large pack of buzzards, after eating some freshly dead horses (or, you know, according to the doctor examining the meat, a big old pile full of freshly dead babies) were flying overhead when one of them “spontaneously disgorged itself.”  It was in the nature of the rest of the buzzards to take that as a sign that they should disgorge themselves too, because apparently Buzzards are the grossest bird in the animal kingdom.

For those of you keeping score at home, that means that the men who ate this raining meat were at least able to rest easy knowing that they had eaten bird puke, and not babies.  Probably.

Theory 2:  Cosmic Meat

Oh that’s right, you had forgotten that this thing took place in the late-mid 1800s, a time where you could actually get away with writing the sentence, “I think the meat shower was caused by cosmic meat that was floating around in space, which dropped through our atmosphere similarly to meteors.”  At least, that’s the theory posited by William Livingston Alden.  And while today, “hunks of cosmic meat floating through space” sounds like a line from a deleted scene of Spaceballs, 1870’s Kentucky shrugged and said, “Floating space meat?  Sure, maybe.”

This would be the most palpable explanation for the Kentucky Meat tasters, since space meat seems far more appetizing than any of the other theories.  And don’t even think of using the term “Cosmic Meat” as the title of your next band, we’ve already called dibs.

Theory 3:  “Finely-hashed citizens of Kentucky”

William Livingston Alden also posited a theory that, and we’re just gonna quote it here, the Kentucky meat shower consisted of “finely-hashed citizens of Kentucky, who had been caught up in a whirlwind while engaged in a little ‘difficulty’ with bowie knives, and strewn over their astonished state.”

Yeah, apart from being the worst case scenario for the two hopefully-not-cannibals who ate the meat, this theory sounds more like something from a Roadrunner cartoon written by Frank Miller than anything else.  It’s also one of the more badass theories- a Kentucky bowie knife fight resulting in a misting of humans over the state.  And let’s not forget that the whole “baby lung” thing is still on the table.  We’ll be the first to admit that it’d be a tragedy, but what if the bowie knife fight was a babies with bowie knives fight?

Sure, it’s not likely…but it’s a little more realistic than the Cosmic meat thing.  Just barely.

Ultimately, we may never know the origin of the Kentucky meat shower.  All we can do is know that it’s happened, and stay alert.  Because if a shower of mystery meat has happened before, it could happen again.  Just don’t eat the meat right away next time, if it does.