"Mass spider migration hits Texas; residents await arrival of William Shatner (From The Daily News, Galveston, 21/12/02) Was it part of nature's enigmatic web, or part of a sinister web of conspiracy in the black-helicopter, secret-mass-experiment vein? Hard to say, but one thing seems clear: The skies over Galveston County on Friday were literally filled with floating, shimmering strands and fuzzy, luminescent wads that looked a lot like spider webs. Lorenzo DeLacerta saw them about noon when he delivered building material to a site a mile east of the San Louis Pass Bridge. "It blew my mind," DeLacerta said. "I have never seen anything like it before." Others on the site saw them, too, he said, but their minds were not blown. "They were like ‘Yeah?' They didn't seem to think much about it." Lorenzo called his sister, Gloria, who saw the same thing in the sky over La Marque. She called The Daily News where a half dozen skeptical news people were forced to admit that there was, indeed, under way a slow, steady parade of slender web-like strands, some near the ground, some way up where the airliners ply. The webs were visible in the air for five hours, and poles were left wrapped with the sticky strands and fuzzy wads. So what were they? Official sky-web sources seem scarce. A spokesman at the National Weather Service Office in League City said the service had received no reports of flying webs, and that flying webs weren't really their thing. The phenomenon has occurred in at least two other places. The Associated Press reported Oct. 8 that "long, floating spider webs" were "bobbing through the skies of Santa Cruz, Calif., … confusing some community members concerned about biological weapons, UFOs and other phenomena." And the Wallowa Chieftain in Oregon reported on Dec. 22, 2000, the sightings of "web-like material … falling from the sky" that some locals thought came "from three military jets that had been flying back and forth in an east-west flight pattern at high altitude." A University of Wyoming microbiology professor quoted in the AP story attributed the Santa Cruz webs to a seasonal migration of hatchling spiders leaving their nests. The professor, who did not return messages left at his home and office, said it was not uncommon to see "dozens" of webs floating across the plains of Wyoming. But observers here were not reporting dozens of webs, but hundreds of thousands. One explanation, of sorts, can be found on the World Wide Web, where scores of people are convinced that the webs are man-made and may be part of a sinister conspiracy. Like a lot of web-based topics, exactly what is the man-made material and the conspiracy's goal is a little murky. Some posts say the webs appear on days when strange condensation trails, like those from jet airplanes, also occur. Was Galveston County visited by a mundane migration of arachnids or something else? Lorenzo DeLacerta, who spent Friday contemplating the webs, does not know what they were, but he says he's sure of one thing. "I have never seen anything like this before. I have seen spiders floating on webs before, but I have never seen this."" Source (only in google cache): This is G o o g l e's cache of http://twtd.bluemountains.net.au/Rick/scienceintherealworld.htm as retrieved on 5 Jul 2007 20:33:42 GMT.