posted 12-22-2002 09:53 AM            

Floating 'spider webs' fill Galveston skies
Associated Press
GALVESTON -- 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.

posted 12-22-2002 12:31 PM            

Even AP is reporting this now?

I don't think TPTB have anything to worry about. I think most people are concerning themselves with if or a not a new "Harry Potter" movie will come out next year..or say.. what those nauseating Yuppies on "Frasier" are up to, or which SUV has the TV inside of it.

Most people wouldn't know reality if it jumped up and bit them on the ---.

Funny how AP had to put the old "they're just conspiracy nuts" venom in their story.