What would you do if chunks of raw meat rained down from the sky?

Hopefully you wouldn't eat it, but apparently some people did when "a horse wagon full" of hunks fell from the sky on March 3, 1876, covering the yard of a confused farmer's wife in Bath County.

What was described as "flakes" of meat rained down around Mrs. Allen Crouch, who was making soap in her garden at the time.

An article in The New York Times a week later published the account of Harrison Gill, "whose veracity is unquestionable." The article said some pieces were 3-4 inches square, and others stuck to the fences. When the meat first fell, it "appeared to be perfectly fresh."

The two unidentified men who tasted the meat said it was either mutton or venison.

Over the next two days, curious neighbors and scientists flocked to the Crouches' farm to try to determine what had caused the strange phenomenon.

There is no definitive agreement about what happened that day, said Kurt Gohde, an art professor at Transylvania University who has researched the incident. There are, however, plenty of theories.

Gohde's favorite theory is one that he said was presented later in The New York Timesthat it was "cosmic meat" — flesh of animals from an exploding planet. People were familiar with meteors at the time, but they didn't know that it would've been impossible for the meat to fall through the Earth's atmosphere without being incinerated. So the explanation was certainly plausible to them, no matter how absurd it sounds today.

One scientist who tested the meat said it was tissue from the lungs of a child or goat, which drew a lot of attention, but didn't stick.

One theory that didn't get a lot of attention, Gohde said, was by Robert Peter, a scientist at Transylvania University: vulture vomit.

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Peter knew, or at least theorized, that when vultures are startled or need to take off quickly, they may need to lighten their load so they can fly. In such cases, the birds vomit food they've recently eaten, possibly even while flying.

This theory is believed today to be the most likely, though Gohde pointed out it has a big hole: To believe the vulture vomit theory is to disbelieve the account of the only person who saw it happen. Mrs. Crouch said when she looked up, the sky was clear, and if vultures were vomiting enough meat to scatter across a football field, Mrs. Crouch presumably would have seen vultures overhead.

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The Kentucky Meat Shower is not a historical event taught in classrooms, but there is a children's book about it, and no, it's not "Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs."

Mick Sullivan, host of "The Past and The Curious," a history podcast for kids, wrote "The Meatshower: The Mostly True Tale of an Odd (and Somewhat Edible) Occurrence" earlier this year. It's written from the perspective of a piece of the meat that fell in Mrs. Crouch's yard and still sits in a jar on a shelf at Transylvania University today. The little chunk just wants answers about what happened, but like us, he may never know.

If something like the meat shower happened today, Gohde said, scientists would dig until they found out exactly what happened. In the 1800s, however, unexplainable things happened all the time, and when scientists couldn't settle on an explanation, they moved on to the next thing.

"If you look historically, things fell from the sky with a surprising frequency," Gohde said. "I don't think things have changed to cause things to fall with less frequency, but things are solved now."

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Gohde said he hears about strange things falling from the sky somewhere in the world about once every two years, though it's never raw meat.

If he had to put his money on a theory, Gohde said he would go with the vulture vomit. But he's fine not knowing with certainty.

"I prefer wonder to solutions," he said. "I think there are things we don't understand. ... I prefer the unsolvable."

Contact Emma Austin at eaustin@gannett.com and 502-582-4180 or follow on Twitter @emmacaustin. Support strong local journalism by subscribing today: subscribe.courier-journal.com.