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The famous Redstone Arsenal "blob" was later identified as military chaff. (Contributed photo/WHNT)

The weird radar anomaly that

in June prompting a wave of conspiracy theories ranging from UFOs to a swarming cloud of ladybugs is back in the spotlight. The radar blob - later identified to be chaff from military testing - was the subject of a recent presentation at the National Weather Association meeting held this month in Charleston, S.C.

Meteorologists first noticed the blob on their radar screens on the afternoon of June 4. The image typically indicates there was a strong thunderstorm in the area but the sky was clear. The matter, showed up as a giant blob on radar screens, stayed suspended in the air for about nine hours and covered an area between 8-10 miles in diameter for most of that time.

News of the blob quickly spread and it took several days for the military to confirm it was caused by chaff, or reflective particles designed to help aircraft avoid detection by military radar.

Matthew Havin, data services manager at weather technology company Baron Services, spoke on the radar blob at the weather association's meeting. In previous interviews with AL.com, Havin said he'd never seen anything like the image on radar before.

This photo shows what appears to be fiberglass chaff found near Highway 20 and Zierdt Road in Huntsville shortly after the blob showed up on radar. (Bob Gathany/bgathany@al.com)

In emails to LiveScience, Havin said he had people from around Huntsville and meteorologists from other states calling trying to determine what the blob was when it showed up on radar.

"My favorite explanation that we heard right away from someone in the general public was that it was caused by 1,000 ladybugs that were released by the Huntsville Botanical Garden earlier that morning," Havin said in his email. "It would take many millions of ladybugs to really show up on weather radar, and it wouldn't look the same as what we were seeing."

He told attendees at the weather association meeting his team later used dual-polarity technology which scans in both horizontal and vertical directions to determine the blob was caused by military chaff.

"What we were able to see from the dual-pol radar data looked similar to military chaff cases previously, but the primary difference was that the winds weren't blowing the stuff away," Havin said. "The releases were happening primarily below 3,300 feet (1,000 meters) above the ground and the low-level winds that afternoon were almost nonexistent (less than 3 mph (4.8 km/h), so the chaff was basically pluming outward over a good portion of the Huntsville metro area."

Havin said it was later determined the blob was caused by RR-188 military chaff. His talk to the weather group focused on how the weather that day contributed to the chaff lingering on the radar and causing the firestorm of comments and conspiracy theories.

"My goal was just to show in greater detail how the weather that day was causing things to look the way they did with the chaff release," Havin said.

Havin's presentation on the Huntsville blob her been covered on multiple media sites, including Huffington Post and NBC News.