Spider Webs Choke Wallowa County Air Space Source: Wallowa County Chieftain Shortly after 1:30 last Thursday afternoon, the Wallowa
County Chieftain was alerted to a phenomena taking place over the city
of Enterprise at that very minute. The message was that spider
web-like material was falling from the sky, and said to be the product
of "contrails" from three military jets that had been flying back and
forth in a east-west flight pattern at high altitude at the south end
of the Wallowa Valley above the mountains.
They flew "at least an hour" and one flight pattern was
directly overhead, according to the informant, Steve Doster of
Enterprise. He said stuff like that which was falling from the sky
here has been making people sick all over the country.
Doster, the person who called, suggested that someone
with a good camera come out to shoot some photographs above the street
in front of Ace Hardware, where he and a group of other people were
watching the "webs" fall down.
Though there was no aircraft visible when the requested
camera arrived, and the bright sky made a decent photograph doubtful,
spider-web like material - from thin filaments to thicker masses - was
indeed falling from the sky, hanging up on utility lines and car
antennae. The stuff seemed to be everywhere.
Doster said, according to information he'd read on the
Internet, some of this material had been tested in a health lab and
was found to be a "biological soup" designed to make people ill. He
said theories ranged from the government trying to raise the immunity
of residents to the government trying to reduce world population to
somehow facilitate the establishment of a world order.
"I haven't formed any opinions myself, I just wanted
people to be aware that this has been happening," said Doster.
Doster later supplied Internet material, most of it
reports published by Environmental News Service (ENS), as well as
Internet links, talking about the "contrails" coming from military
jets flying in a grid pattern.
Contrails are condensation trails generated at altitude
high enough for water droplets to freeze in a matter of seconds and
not quickly evaporate. Unlike normal contrails , which dissipate soon
after a jet's passage, videos show "eery silver jets streaming fat
contrails from their wing tips," according to a ESN release dated Jan.
8, 1999. One from Jan. 12, 1999, described "globular filaments
resembling spider webs usually falling in clumps or wads ranging from
pencil eraser size to the size of a balled up fist. ... Winds often
whip the cobweb-like material into filaments as long as 50 feet. ...
(The) sticky substance 'melts in your hands' and "adheres to whatever
it touches.'"
According to ENS reports, flu-like illness with symptoms
ranging from bronchial problems and headaches to fever and diarrhea
connected with the contrail/web phenomena, according to the Internet
reports, with some hospitals reporting epidemic conditions.
The contrail patterns have been reportedly been observed
in over 40 U.S. cities and in 10 or more countries, according to the
reports. The address to the web page from which most of the material
was taken is http://www.islandnet.com/~wilco/. Most of the reports
were written by William Thomas, who can be described as a right-wing
environmental journalist.
Before reading this material - which cautioned against
handling the stuff because of illness associated with it - the
Chieftain retrieved a sample of the stuff lying on the ground. As of
press time the reporter handling the web-like material had not gotten
sick.
However, Doster said Tuesday this week that he was
suffering from an "upper respiratory infection and fever, typical flu
symptoms," while two of the people who'd been watching the webs with
him had light headaches that night and one woman was suffering from
severe diarrhea. "Of course it could be coincidental," he noted.
A call to Wallowa Memorial Hospital Tuesday afternoon
uncovered the fact that there were then five patients in the hospital,
"a little lower than normal," said a spokesman. When told about the
web-like material that had fallen that is said to possibly make people
sick, he commented, " As far as I know, nobody has even heard of that
around here."
A trip Friday morning (when there was no longer webs
falling from the sky) to the Wallowa County Extension Office to
investigate the web stuff was inconclusive. The filaments, by this
time mostly a sticky white glob, were compared under a 20-power
bioscope with a normal spider web. The two samples were very similar,
though it did appear that the material that had fallen out of the sky
was somewhat coarser than what was known for sure to be a spider web.
A call was placed by Wallowa County Extension Agent John
Williams to Oregon State University to consult an entomologist. Insect
identification specialist Lynn Royce said that this time of year
spiders do produce a large amount of spider web material to send their
spiderlings "ballooning"off into the world. She said they could seem
to be coming from high in the sky.
She admitted, however, that usually the spider webs
would not fall all at once, in one day, and the phenomenon described -
with the spider web material falling heavily at once did sound to be
atypical. "I would expect to see spiderlings (on the webs) ... and not
all at once," Royce commented. An insect wing - but no spiderlings -
had been found on the material under scrutiny, but then it had been
retrieved from the ground.
Local rancher Pat Wortman happened to be coming into the
Extension Office at the time of the inconclusive investigation. When
he heard about it, he had his own theories: "They are spider webs. It
happens every year on an annual basis, you see them everywhere. ...
Chief Joseph probably saw them, and wondered if they were coming from
airplanes or motorcycles."
Wortman added one more theory, "It was probably caused
by the hot air from the presidential debates."
Whether Wallowa County was the victim of a somewhat
mysterious phenomena that has been reported - or rather non-reported
by most major news outlets - around the country, or whether there was
just an unusually heavy drop of spider webs last Thursday may never be
known.
Copyright 2000 Wallowa County Chieftain
by Elane Dickenson
http://www.wallowa.com/chieftain/archives/023/3news/3news.html