GALVESTON, Texas (AP)
Dec 21, 2002 Galveston residents are
still trying to figure out what caused the skies
over their coastal city to literally be filled on
Friday with floating strands of wads that looked
like spider webs.
The webs were visible in the air for five hours,
and poles were left wrapped with the sticky strands
and fuzzy wads.
"It blew my mind. I have never seen anything like
it before," said Lorenzo DeLacerta, who saw the webs
about noon when he delivered building material to a
site a mile east of the San Louis Pass Bridge.
DeLacerta said he called his sister, Gloria, who
saw the same thing in the sky over nearby La Marque,
The Galveston County Daily News reported Saturday.
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
attributed the webs in Santa Cruz to young spiders
that launch themselves on their homemade parachutes
after hatching to be blown to a new home.
In Wyoming, dozens of the webs can been seen
floating across the prairie in the spring, the
professor was quoted as saying in the AP story.
However, on the Internet, some conspiracy
connoisseurs remain convinced the webs are man-made
and could be part of an elaborate government plot.
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