Vulture vomit is the leading theory for Kentucky's 1876 meat shower
The Kentucky meat shower of 1876 remains a peculiar historical event, with vulture vomit being the leading explanation for the phenomenon. Eyewitness accounts described chunks of meat falling from the sky, prompting scientific investigations that yielded inconclusive results. The mystery continues to intrigue, with a preserved sample of the meat now housed in a university museum.
- ▪On March 3, 1876, chunks of meat fell from the sky in Bath County, Kentucky.
- ▪The leading theory attributes the event to vultures regurgitating their stomach contents.
- ▪A preserved sample of the meat is currently stored at Transylvania University.
Boing Boing files mainly under tech. We currently carry 343 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Boing Boing |
| Canonical URL | https://boingboing.net/2026/05/18/vulture-vomit-is-the-leading-theory-for-kentuckys-1876-meat-shower.html |
| Publication time | Mon, 18 May 2026 22:19:36 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-18T22:44:56.955Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-18T22:44:56.955Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | a25yyURIbW6G |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Vulture vomit is the leading theory for Kentucky's 1876 meat shower Ellsworth Toohey 3:19 pm Mon May 18, 2026 Boing Boing / Google Gemini Mrs. Crouch, a farmer's wife in Bath County, Kentucky, was stirring a kettle of soap on her porch around 11 a.m. on March 3, 1876 when chunks of fresh meat began dropping out of a cloudless sky. By her own account, quoted in Wikipedia's writeup of the Kentucky meat shower, the sky was simply snowing meat, and each piece hit the ground with a sharp snap. The flakes — mostly two inches square, with one specimen four inches across — covered a patch of pasture roughly 100 yards long and 50 yards wide, just outside the village of Olympia Springs. The whole shower lasted only a few minutes.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Boing Boing.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from Boing Boing
