The Kentucky meat shower

In March 1876 flakes of what looked like beef fell from a clear sky near Olympian Springs, Bath County, Kentucky, over a strip of ground about 100 yards long.

Scientific American reprinted the story from a Bath County newspaper. Meat came down close to Allen Crouch's house, two or three miles from Olympian Springs, over a patch about one hundred yards long and fifty wide. Mrs. Crouch was in the yard making soap when pieces that looked like beef began landing around her. The sky was clear. She said it came down like big snowflakes, and most pieces were about that size. The Scientific American copy dates it Friday, March 8; Charles Fort, in The Book of the Damned, gives March 3.

Fort stresses that nothing but the falling stuff could be seen in the sky. He gives the flakes as one to four inches square. Wikipedia quotes Crouch describing it as "snowing meat", and cites a local grocer, Joe Jordan, who said the smell was foul, like a dead body.

Later accounts use Fort's date. A 2014 post on Scientific American's Running Ponies blog and a 2024 article in BBC Science Focus both give 3 March 1876. The 2014 post draws on a New York Times report printed the next week. The post's headline puts the fall down to vultures throwing up what they had eaten.