I just came across this today, and it has really been freaking me out, especially as I look more into it. Is seems that back in 1970, in a town in New Jersey called Caldwell, some type of thread was noticed in the air hanging down over someone's house. No one could see where the thread was coming from. From a newspaper report,
"It looks rigid, as if it were a wire, not a string. It appears silver when the sunlight strikes it. On Monday it hung about 150 feet above the houses on Forest Avenue and Hillside Avenue. By Tuesday, it seemed limper to Mrs Smith and other observers, as if one of its ends wherever that is had loosened. It also seemed lower in the sky. The Caldwell police tried to trace it on Monday, found signs of it up Hillside and down towards West Caldwell, but lost it in the clouds before tracking down the origins. They looked again on Tuesday with the same nebulous results."
Neighbors from all over came out to see the thread. It stayed there for about a month (!) just hanging in mid air, through storms and windy days. Finally, some kids used a fishing pole and line to snag the end of it, they pulled on it, and they gathered "buckets" of the thread according to one report I read, "1000 feet of it" before it "snapped" according to another report. The end that was still up in the sky was never found. The part that was pulled down was taken to the DuPont company for testing. I read one report that said DuPont couldn't figure out what it was, and another that said they found it to be "chemically a type 6 Nylon (caprolactam) or possibly a copolymer such as type 6 and type 66, but that it was not of their manufacture." Also, the lines "had a fine hollow tube running through their length. When Dr. Vargas first examined the specimens this was empty, but after a time in a vacuum jar he found to his amazement that this tube was filled with some other solid substance, and this defied analysis as far as we can make out."
Apparently this has also happened in other places, the Caldwell NJ incident took place in August of 1970, then it happened in Elberton, Georgia in June 1972, and in Greensburg, Ohio in September of 1978. Has anyone ever heard of anything like this? Is it some kind of hoax? I would think that if it were real, there would have been some kind of major investigation on it, every report I've been able to find seems fairly blasé about it.
The latest report I found was from 2003, where someone writing for a publication called "Weird New Jersey" found one of the kids (who was around 40 years old at the time of the interview) who had snagged the thread with the fishing pole back in the 1970's. He said, "After the thread was hanging there for about a week, attracting all kinds of crowds, me and my buddies decided to pull it down. I got a fishing rod and just kept casting until we snagged it from mid air over the house. When we got a hold of it we just kept pulling and it just kept on coming down out of nowhere. Then it stopped and we found the end. There wasn't anything holding it from the other end, it was just coming out of nowhere! They took it from us and sent it off to some lab somewhere for testing and that's the last any of us ever heard about it. Jeez, now I wish I had saved some of it for a souvenir!".
Now he's saying he found the end, where other reports say the thread snapped and the end was never found. But, it was over 40 years ago, I'm sure memories are a bit rusty by now. There's not a whole lot of info on this online, and what little there is comes from just a few sources. Anyone know someone who works at DuPont who could look into this?