Seven unexplained phenomena in Washington state: what is known and what isn't
An October 9 roundup by The Daily World lists seven Washington mysteries, from the 1994 Oakville gel blobs to Kenneth Arnold's 1947 sighting. It is not a new discovery but a compilation, and it shows clearly which mysteries have a theory pointing to an everyday explanation and which do not.
In 1994, a small town received a translucent, gel-like substance from the sky. According to the report, Oakville residents found not rain or hail but a gel-like substance falling from the sky, and animals reportedly got sick after touching it. The state investigated the substance, but the testing produced nothing conclusive. The samples have since been lost, so according to the article we will likely never know what fell on the town. Military testing and the “star jelly” associated with meteor showers have both been cited as explanations, but neither has been proven. Netflix's "Files of the Unexplained" series featured the case in 2024.
Over the past twenty years, roughly two dozen feet in shoes have washed up on the shores of the Salish Sea. According to The Daily World, some of them have been identified through DNA analysis, and most belonged to people who went missing or died by suicide or in accidents; others were too decomposed to be linked to a particular person. Experts quoted by Vox in 2017 believe that the large number of people living and recreating in the area and ocean scavengers may be behind the phenomenon. Some suspect more sinister causes.
With the geographical oddities, the picture is mixed. The Mima Mounds in Thurston County are dirt mounds up to 7 feet (about 2 meters) high and 40 feet (about 12 meters) across. According to the article, there is no conclusive explanation for exactly how they formed; the Washington State Department of Natural Resources cites seismic activity and ice sheet/glacial impacts as possible explanations. At Gravity Hill near Prosser, where a car with its engine off seemingly rolls uphill, the most popular theory, which has also been investigated by scientists, is an optical illusion: on part of a larger slope, in a hill-within-a-hill situation, the true gradient cannot be judged from ground level. According to the article, some consider this invalid for Prosser based on elevation measurements, and it is currently not known exactly why the cars move.
The story of Mel's Hole began in the late 1990s, when a man named Mel Waters talked on a national radio show about a bottomless hole on his Kittitas County property. The Yakima Herald-Republic found no resident by that name in county records, the exact location is not known either, and according to geologists the claim of a depth of at least 80,000 feet is physically impossible. According to the article, no one has been able to credibly confirm that the hole exists. The situation is similar with Bigfoot: according to the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization's database, Washington has produced the most sightings, more than 700, but the creature's existence has never been confirmed.
As for UFO sightings, according to the article Washington regularly ranks high in compilations examining the number of sightings. Its best-known case is that of private pilot Kenneth Arnold, who in 1947 saw nine shiny, fast-moving objects near Mount Rainier; his description led to the spread of the term “flying saucer.”
So of the seven cases, some (the Salish Sea feet, Gravity Hill) have a theory pointing to an everyday explanation, but even these are not definitively closed questions. For others there is only speculation, and for still others the very existence of the phenomenon is in question.
The sober take
According to the article, for the feet washing up in the Salish Sea, experts hypothesize detachment by scavengers and the buoyancy of sneakers, although some suspect more sinister causes. For Gravity Hill, an optical illusion is the most popular theory, but some dispute it. For Mel's Hole, geologists consider the claim of a depth of at least 80,000 feet physically impossible, and no one has confirmed the hole's existence. Bigfoot's existence has never been confirmed, and the origin of the Oakville gel will likely never be determined because the samples were lost. The frequency of UFO sightings on its own shows how many people report an observation, not what the observed object was.