An incident that confused Evansville-area residents in December has now gone worldwide.

Two weeks before Christmas, what looked lines of storms appeared on weather radar above Western Kentucky and Southern Illinois. The only problem? It wasn’t raining.

According to an Air National Guard spokeswoman, those were the result of military chaff – radar jamming material often employed during training exercises, the War Zone reported. The military has used it for various reasons since World War II.

Similar incidents were unfolding in Maine and Florida around the same time. Official explanations never materialized there.

Now it’s happening even farther away from home.

News.com.au– which bills itself as “Australia’s No. 1 news site” and is backed by News Corp., the same company behind Fox News and The Wall Street Journal – reported strange radar images rollicking above Sydney. But the skies were blue.

Graham Creed, a weatherman with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, offered an explanation.

“If anyone out there’s been looking at the Sydney radar … you can see those echoes moving towards the northern suburbs of Sydney. It’s not actually rainfall,” he told his listeners. “It’s the Williamtown (Royal Australian Air Force) base and they’re putting what’s known as chaff in the atmosphere.

“The idea of it is that it hides what they’re doing underneath it,” he said.

Of course, not everyone will believe that explanation.

Two Courier & Press columns about the supposed chaff were picked up by The Drudge Report, sending several … interesting … emails crashing into my inbox.

Some blamed aliens or chemtrails. The most impassioned notes, though, came from folks who thought this was all proof of government weather-control technology. (If the government can control the weather, we here in Southern Indiana would like a word.)

News.com.au reached out to Australia’s department of defense to confirm the use of chaff, but hadn’t received an answer as of Thursday morning.

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Contact columnist Jon Webb at jon.webb@courierpress.com.