Angel Hair and Spiders
Some centuries ago the primitive inhabitants of the Hawaiian Islands, observing the feathery, hairlike threads of volcanic glass left on the ground from ancient eruptions, accounted for the substance by the legend that the goddess Pelee had once stopped somewhere in the neighborhood to comb her hair. “Angel hair,” a term in UFO parlance used to describe any unfamiliar fibers, strands, threads, liquids, granules, and powders found on the earth and supposedly deposited from flying saucers, offers an interesting analogy.
Fils de la Vierge—the hair of the Virgin Mary—is the usual French phrase for gossamer or cobwebs, whose origin was long a mystery. Similarly the English “gossamer” commonly means cobwebs. According to one source, the word may be derived from gaze à Marie—the gauze of Mary. According to legend, cobwebs were formed from threads that fell from the shroud of the Virgin Mary on her Assumption. UFO enthusiasts in France began to use fils de la Vierge in 1952, to describe the cobwebby material that allegedly fell from flying saucers. Translators of the French UFO publications, instead of using the English equivalent “gossamer” or “cobwebs,” chose to create the new term “angel hair” which, unlike the French, implies an entirely strange substance, one that has no apparent connection with such ordinary earthly phenomena as spiders.
Two remarkable falls of angel hair were reported in France on October 17 and 27, 1952. In both incidents, witnesses observed in the sky a strangely shaped, cottony cloud at a height of several thousand feet. Above it was a long, narrow, cylindrical object trailed by a white plume, moving slowly across the sky and accompanied by twenty or thirty smaller objects that looked like puffs of smoke. Following a broken path, they made rapid zigzag motions, and left a broad ribbon of white substance that slowly drifted to the ground and clung to trees, telephone wires, and roofs of houses. These masses of white threads were described as like wool, nylon, or Fiberglas. When rolled into a ball they became gelatinous and disappeared within a few hours; set on fire, they burned like cellophane.
One witness was able to disentangle a single strand more than ten yards long. None of the material, unfortunately, was preserved for study.
Students of UFOs pondered the unusual phenomenon: “If the observers really did see what they described, and if all these objects were machines guided by a single intelligence, then what mysterious experiment were they performing? What purpose was served by the strange ballet of paired saucers? What was the meaning of the whitish streak appearing between two saucers on separation? What, finally, was the ‘angel’s hair’ that sublimed so readily in the air?”[[XI-5], p. 150] UFO enthusiasts have suggested various theories of the nature and origin of the mysterious substance. According to one hypothesis[[XI-5], p. 149], angel hair might be produced in the wake of a spacecraft moving in a force field; ionization of the atmosphere would produce ultraheavy particles which would react with ordinary air to form a kind of precipitate-angel hair—which would disintegrate as ionization decreased (see [Chapter IX]). Another theory suggests that angel hair might be a chain polymer of cellulose containing radioactive carbon 14 (the carbon 14 being produced by the action of cosmic rays on atoms of nitrogen in the atmosphere), hydrogen, and oxygen from moisture in the air, the three elements combining under the action of ultraheavy particles produced by ionization[XI-6]. This theory overlooks the fact that cellulose is not formed from a combination of carbon dioxide, oxygen, and hydrogen in air. Rather, it is made by living organisms in a series of complicated enzymic reactions. Even if cellulose could be made by the hypothetical reaction suggested, it would contain no more carbon 14 than does the ordinary carbon dioxide in the air.
To French entomologists, the angel hair seen in October 1952, was no mystery at all. The objects dancing the strange ballet were not spaceships, but spiders. Far from performing a mysterious experiment, they were merely carrying out the well-established routine of migration.
Each year the young spiders of most species leave the nests of their infancy and prepare to establish their own homes. Crawling by the hundreds or the thousands to the tops of fence posts, walls, or trees, they spin long silken webs which, inflated by the air, carry the tiny emigrants up from the ground. These gossamer parachutes drift up and along on rising air currents, sometimes to great heights; they may soar for a few yards or for many miles over hills and valleys. These migrating balloonists have been observed as high as 14,000 feet, and at sea 200 miles from any land. Eventually drifting back to earth, the spiders detach the now useless parachutes and move off to build new nests for the coming year, while the abandoned gossamer may pile up in great masses on trees, fences, telephone wires, and ground, to decay and vanish in a matter of hours. These gossamer showers sometimes include so many outworn webs that the filmy blankets of fine silk may be several inches deep and may cover an entire landscape like snow.
These migrations occur in spring or, more frequently, in autumn—but only when the weather is exactly right. Spiders may sit patiently for days, waiting for a calm, clear, windless day. On such days the steady upward currents of air from the sun-warmed ground carry the spiders gently aloft[[XI-7]]. The association of angel hair with UFO sightings is completely natural. The drifting patches of gossamer reflect the sun brilliantly. A whole armada of saucers can appear overhead and then vanish as the gossamer cascades to earth.
The description of the material and the date of the fall both indicate that the angel hair observed in France in October 1952 was of arachnid origin. Even the weather was exactly right—“superb, with a sky of cloudless blue”—for the migration of a smother of spiders.