The World's Worst Jelly Bean Was Spawned From A Meaty Mystery

A brochure for Kentucky tourist attractions might touch on the history of the state's prestigious annual horse race at Churchill Downs; its household-name fried chicken franchise; and its limestone reserves that make its water ideal for producing bourbon (per Louisville Public Media). What it might leave out is one of the most bizarre meteorological events in the books: a brief but pungent rain shower that occurred one seemingly average March day in 1876. Only it wasn't rain, it was chunks of raw meat. 

"Flesh Descending In a Shower," shouted a New York Times headline. "An Astounding Phenomenon In Kentucky — Fresh Meat Like Mutton or Venison Falling From a Clear Sky." According to a punchy Mental Floss deep-dive into the science-fiction-like event, the meat shower was investigated by a local correspondent for The New York Herald, who traveled from Kentucky's largest city to the northeastern resort town of Olympian Springs to report on the downpour of mystery meat.

As noted by Mental Floss, the New York Herald reporter framed the meat-shower story around the Crouch family, whose Olympian Springs farm was seasoned with four gallons' worth of meat across an entire acre. As far as anyone could tell, the event was a complete and utter enigma. While the farm's matriarch dispatched samples to the local police for investigation, some of her neighbors sampled the meat for themselves. One L.C. Frisbe, a local butcher, told The Herald that the meat's texture was far from appetizing, adding that "a kind of milky, watery fluid oozed out of it."

Contrary to the rumor that "the meat might have fallen from the lunch basket of a passing balloonist," per The Herald, a chemist working with the samples suggested it was "dried frog spawn" that had been pulled up from local swamps by the wind. As strange and implausible as that sounds, equally strange things have happened. Consider the National Geographic story about the droves of dismembered sneaker-clad human feet that washed up on the Salish Sea as a result of decomposition and strong tides. The answer to that particular mystery came courtesy of a "three-dimensional computer simulation," per NatGeo. Since the chemists unlocking the meat shower case didn't have fancy computers, they relied mainly on educated hypothesis — until recently. 

The aforementioned frog-spawn theory was quickly debunked. Instead, Transylvania University professor Kurt Gohde, an avid researcher of the meat shower incident, told Mental Floss that the meat was probably dropped by a kettle of vultures flying through the air. Since the species "sometimes vomit when threatened," per Mental Floss, it's possible that a large group of them spewed their lunch all over town to waylay a predator. Although he was wary of the theory at first, Gohde has come around.

When he uncovered a preserved sample of the century-old meat at his university, Gohde reached out to a Cincinnati "taste lab" to mimic the sample's flavor compounds in the form of a jelly bean. The result didn't help close the case, but it did confirm that the meat didn't taste great. Gohde told Atlas Obscura that the candy evoked "a heavily sugared bacon, with a metal aftertaste." If the vulture theory holds true, perhaps the scavengers had been dining on pork belly.