Weird Science: The Dorset Blue Ball Mystery
Holy blue balls, Batman! No. Not like that.
Photo: Flavitchu in São Paulo, Brazi (Flickr)
This time last year, the inclement weather meant blue balls of a very different nature dominated the headlines. However, the opening throes of 2012 have seen a very strange phenomenon provoke much debate and speculation.
Late last month in Dorset the afternoon sky turned black, then (apparently) yellow before blue balls began falling out of the sky. Or at least so says 61 year old Steve Hornsby. He has been on the hunt to discover what the objects, blue, gelatinous and marble sized that peppered his home and back yard as he sheltered in his garage could possibly be.
An aircraft engineer- so obviously no stranger to excitement- Hornsby claims balls fell from the sky in a short hailstorm of 20 or so seconds, which he thought at first looked like broken glass. On closer inspection, they were ‘jelly-like’ and ‘almost impossible to pick up’, many of them lying all over his lawn.
Naturally then, Hornsby, 61, used a spoon to flick the balls into a jam jar in order to test if they had a smell, or floated. They didn’t, and didn’t. Like a choc ice, the balls had a soft centre and exterior shell, and seemed to fall in only a small area in his back yard.. He exclaimed excitedly, “It is the most peculiar thing I have ever seen – there must be about 20 complete spheres.”
Hornsby speculated the spheres could be caused by atmospheric pollution trapped in hail clouds. A jar of balls was taken to Bournemouth University where Josie Pegg, a research assistant at Bournmeouth University claimed they were “marine invertebrate eggs”. They weren’t.
Examination revealed the objects were not living material, so not eggs (or aliens). Back-tracking, Pegg then said: “The balls do look very much like the florists’ hydrating jelly, as suggested by some eagle-eyed members of the public”.
A sample is currently being desiccated for chemical analysis to attempt to put the case to rest. Even if it turns out that the objects are indeed something uninspiring and ubiquitous, like hydrating gel, this still doesn’t explain how on earth they apparently fell as rain in Mr Hornsby’s garden. Perhaps the mystery will never be solved. It has, and it was hydrating gel. Somehow Josie Pegg insists her work wasn’t a waste of time.
