Tuesday, November 17, 2015

Spiders Web "angel hair" fall in good old Grafton, my home town, in 1947

Reading my piece "UFos and "angel hair" - in search of evidence" you will understand why I was intrigued when Steven Walters sent me the following report from the Dungog Chronicle of 21 February 1947 via the Trove digital newspaper archive:

Intrigued I went onto Trove and searched the Daily Examiner and found these 2 items:

The Daily Examiner of Wednesday 28 January 1947:

The Daily Examiner of 15 February 1947:


While the "melting" referencing seemed initially compelling, melting suggests solid to liquid, not sublimation as I experienced in 1969 at Grafton, i.e. solid to gas with no liquid phase in between.
The examination of the material by "Wildlife" magazine, published since about 1909 in Australia confirmed spiders web.  Given it was sampled by a Grafton local - Eric Nicholson - and sent to the magazine, this clearly suggests stability, not something that was disappearing like my own 1969 experience or the references to alleged "angel hair" since the 1950s.
So an interesting find, but one that supports that what was found in Grafton in 1947 was spiders web.