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It rained spiders, and a retiree thinks it was aliens

Millions of spiders falling from the sky were reported on Monday in the countryside near Wagga Wagga, and a UFO researcher wants your help to find more.

South Australian Keith Basterfield has been looking to the skies for the origins of a “web-like substance” since 2001 and has since turned his efforts to more traditional means to gather evidence.

He wrote a letter to country paper the Goulburn Post to encourage readers to write to him with their reports.

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And his efforts yielded results.

“Anyone else experiencing this ‘Angel Hair’ or maybe aka millions of spiders falling from the sky right now?,” Goulburn resident Ian Watson reported on Monday to a Facebook page.

“I’m 10 minutes out of town and you can clearly see hundreds of little spiders floating along with their webs and my home is covered in them. Someone call a scientist!”

He wrote that the spiders were in a group up to 100 metres up, raining a “cotton-like substance” that is “kinda like spider web but not exactly”.

The phenomenon is not unusual. Rather, it is part of the natural migration of baby spiders, said Naturalist Martyn Robinson.

The tiny spiders climb to the top of vegetation and catch the breeze with a thin streamer of web.

“They can literally travel for kilometres … which is why every continent has spiders. Even in Antarctica they regularly turn up but just die,” Mr Robinson told the Sydney Morning Herald.

Sometimes called an angel hair event, the migration can lead to paddocks covered in the fine silk.

The unexplained nature of it led Mr Basterfield to write that these paddocks may have been the site of extra-terrestrial visitations.

“It is reported to have the unusual property of ‘disappearing’ within a short time of falling. On some occasions it is reported in the company of UFOs,” he wrote.

The retiree wrote in 2001 about the angel hairs, which some UFOlogists think are the residue from a liftoff.

“Some people believe that it is the residue of UFO propulsion methods, he wrote.

“Others claim that the answer lies in falls of spiders’ web.” “Many UFO researchers who have examined this topic have opted to accept the spiders’ web hypothesis,” he wrote, but remained sceptical.

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