The Kentucky Meat Shower

We must never forget.

To get yourself in the mood for today’s topic, click the arrow below to play a snippet of Phil Collins’ iconic 43-minute song, “In the Air Tonight”:

Yes, something is indeed “coming in the air,” and that something is: Meat. Tomorrow, February 28, meat will literally fall from the skies over Kentucky as part of the festivities marking the 150th anniversary of the historic Kentucky Meat Shower.

I am not making this historic event up. It occurred on March 3, 1876, in a place called Olympia Springs in Bath County, Kentucky. Shortly before noon on that historic day, a woman named Rebecca Crouch was making soap on the family farm when she witnessed hundreds of smallish pieces of raw meat raining down from the heavens. The New York Times published a story about this event, headlined:

FLESH DESCENDING IN A SHOWER

AN ASTOUNDING PHENOMENON IN KENTUCKY — FRESH MEAT LIKE MUTTON OR VENISON FALLING FROM A CLEAR SKY

Of course if a meat shower occurred today, the Times would have no journalistic choice but to link it to Global Climate Change. But nobody had heard of that in 1876, so people were baffled. They weren’t even sure what kind of meat it was. The Times reported that “two gentlemen, who tasted the meat, express the opinion that it was either mutton or venison.”

My initial reaction to that was: “They TASTED it? Yuck!” But then it occurred to me that I routinely eat “Slim Jim” brand snack cylinders, which for all I know — the ingredient list is unreadable — are made from weasel rectums.

So far be it from me to judge the gentlemen who tasted the Kentucky mystery sky meat. To this day, nobody knows exactly what kind of meat it was; guesses include beef, lamb, deer, bear, horse and others. There is only one surviving specimen of the fallen meat, which is preserved in alcohol in a small glass vial with a faded label that says “Olympia Springs.” Efforts have been made to analyze the specimen’s DNA, but it’s too old and contaminated and stanky. It looks like something you’d find lurking behind the jar of expired tomato sauce in your refrigerator.

Kurt Gohde

This vial is normally kept on the campus of Transylvania University, which is Kentucky’s oldest university and has nothing to do with vampires so stop your juvenile snickering. The meat-shower specimen is one of the exhibits in the Monroe Moosnick Medical and Science Museum, which is named for Monroe Moosnick, who was a beloved Transylvania U. chemistry professor before he died. In addition to the Kentucky Meat Shower specimen, the Moosnick museum houses many 19th-century scientific and medical artifacts, including a hairball 14 inches in diameter — once believed to be a world record — that was removed from the stomach of a cow; and a “Tobacco Smoke Clyster,” which is a device that doctors once used to try to revive drowning victims by blowing tobacco smoke up their butts. I am not making any of this up.

But getting back to the historic Kentucky Meat Shower, the big question is: What caused it? The most widely accepted theory, which also happens to be an excellent name for a rock band, is: vomiting vultures. Apparently when vultures are threatened or scared, they vomit as a defensive measure, a tactic also employed by human infants to indicate that they do not care for pureed squash. Vultures are common in Kentucky, so the theory is that a large flock, which had previously chowed down on some form of meat, was flying over the Crouch farm, when something startled the vultures, causing them to launch their collective lunch.

That historic event occurred 150 years ago, but its spirit — the spirit of meat falling from the sky — lives on in Bath County, which tomorrow will observe the sesquicentennial with a big celebration in Owingsville, the county seat, a few miles from the site of the 1876 shower.

The celebration, which begins at noon, will include a baloney-throwing competition, a meatball toss and a “mystery meat chili cookoff,” among other activities. But the big excitement will come at 4 p.m., when, if all goes according to plan, a truly once-in-a-lifetime event will occur in Bath County, as described on the official website, fleshfalls.com:

That’s right: Tomorrow it will rain meat again in Bath County.

How is this possible? To find out, I spoke with the man behind the operation, Kurt Gohde. He’s a professor of studio art at Transylvania University, and he also happens to be the world’s foremost authority on the Kentucky Meat Shower. He became interested in it when he joined the Transylvania faculty in 1998, and he was surprised to find that nobody seemed to know much about the meat shower. “I didn’t set out to become the expert,” he says, “but it turned out it wasn’t hard because there just wasn’t another person.”

When I spoke to Kurt he was busy getting ready for the sesquicentennial celebration, but he took the time to explain the plan for the big 4 p.m. meat rain, which involves a flyover by a squadron of specially trained and recently fed vultures.

No, that’s a joke, obviously. PETA would never allow that to happen. The actual plan, as explained to me by Kurt, is that at 4 p.m., a small airplane will fly over Owingsville and drop 1,876 individually wrapped pieces of beef jerky.

I asked Kurt if he had any safety concerns about this plan, and specifically whether he was familiar with the legendary episode of WKRP in Cincinnati about the radio station’s Thanksgiving turkey-giveaway promotion, in which live turkeys were dropped from a helicopter and, in the immortal words of WKRP newsman Les Nesman, were “hitting the ground like sacks of wet cement.”

Kurt said that he was, indeed, familiar with the fictional WKRP turkey drop, and that when he was planning his actual jerky drop, he consulted with a Transylvania U. physics professor who’s a friend of his: “I asked him to tell me, if my pieces of meat weigh about what a nickel weighs, what speed will they be when they reach the ground. When he responded I was already well into the planning, and he said it should be about 130 miles an hour. And I had a little bit of hard time breathing, to be honest, because that seemed bad. So I said, that seems to be a problem, and he said, that’s only a problem if lethality is a problem for you. And I’m like, of course that’s a problem.”

So Kurt had to redesign the aerodynamics of the packaging to make sure the jerky pieces would fall at a less lethal velocity. “I ran some tests,” he said, “and they will actually hit the ground at between 8 and 12 miles an hour. So that’s way better.”

Each of the 1,876 jerky pieces to be dropped tomorrow will be numbered. The idea is, if you find one, you can go to fleshfalls.com, enter your jerky number and see if you won a prize. The prizes include one of my books, autographed and personalized, which I am happy to donate because I think the Kentucky Meat Shower re-enactment is a truly great thing. In fact I asked Kurt if I could invite you Substack readers to attend. He immediately replied: “Absolutely! Tell them they should come.”

Kurt said that if you go, you should stop by the Bath County History Museum, where you can meet him and see the historic meat-shower specimen in person. He also said he’d give you Substackers the inside scoop on the precise location of the jerky drop, which so far is a secret.

I hope some of you can make it to Owingsville tomorrow. I’m genuinely sorry that I can’t be there. I’ll be stuck here in Miami, where the only falling meat is in the form of the occasional frozen iguana.

This is a photo I took Monday morning of an actual Miami weather forecast.

One final thought: This year, as you know, America is celebrating its 250th birthday. I’m sure many solemn and meaningful commemorative events are being planned, but wouldn’t it be great if we got Kurt Gohde involved? Look what he’s done with limited resources and just one small plane; imagine what he could do if he had access to the entire U.S. Air Force.

Picture the scene: It’s July Fourth, a quiet day until... What’s that sound? At first it’s distant, barely audible, but it grows steadily louder until it fills the skies — the deep thrum of huge bomber engines high overhead, the planes themselves all but invisible. Then the skies begin to darken, as if obscured by clouds, but it’s not clouds: It’s hundreds of millions — no, it’s billions — of units of beef jerky, raining down from the skies and landing, at a velocity of 8 to 12 miles per hour, all over this great land of ours, except on California, which would get the vegan option.

Or maybe it’s not raining units of jerky. Maybe — I’m just spitballing here — it’s raining units of something even better, like affordable housing. We’d have to check with the Transylvania U. physics department on the feasibility of that. But these are details. My point is that a fun, goofy, wonderfully American thing is happening tomorrow in Bath County, Kentucky. Wouldn’t it be great if our national birthday celebration had some of that vibe?

At least that’s what I think. Now (speaking of fun and goofy and wonderful) let’s find out what you paying subscribers think.