Black Blobs Appearing In Camden, NJ

Ieshan writes "Strange alien scares or just New Jersey Pollution? Occam's razor points towards the latter, but still, odd black blobs are appearing in a New Jersey city - no joke. CNN has the story - apparently, no one can identify them yet. Investigators say that they're not petrolium based, and that's about all anyone knows. On the plus side, at least they don't have stalks with green eyes?"

Comments

yup....

[jeffy124]

I go to school in Philadelphia, which is across the river from Camden, and grew up in southern Camden County, NJ, a comfortable 18 miles from Camden's state-leading crime rate and once close-to-nation-leading murder rate.

Anyways, I've seen this story on the local news. One suspicion is jet fuel falling from planes landing at Philly International, but I dont think that explanation holds much as why havent these blobs been there for however many years the airport has been there?

I personally would not be surprised if it's drug related. Philly started a huge crack down on drugs in recent weeks, causing many druggies to leave town. Camden then started their own crack down because that's where many druggies went.

Blobs? Pits? Same old story?

[skaffen42]

This reminds me of the Seattle Window Pitting Hysteria (about half way downb the page).

So these days we blame aliens instead of demons, but that is about the only thing that changes.

Idiocy is a universal constant...

Re:It's roofing g tar

[Mt._Honkey]

I just (like 10 min ago) did a study over about 4 blocks of sidewalk. It was along a large road going through a very large campus (UIUC). I counted ~1100 black spots ~2-3cm in diameter, just like the ones in the report. There were virtualy none under overhangs, but the highest concentrations were just outside overhangs, and near trash cans. Trees seemed to have no effect, whether the spots were under, near, or far away from them seemed to have no effect on concentration. Far away from buildings, there were fewer spots, but high concentrations still existed ~10m away. The few parts of brick sidewalk (around covered bus stops) had almost no spots. There was not nearly as much in streets, but there was in crosswalks

The fact that they are concentrated around trash cans and near buildings, not under overhangs but under trees, and were in crosswalks but not streets all lead me to guess that they are placed there by induviduals, so probably chewing gum built up with crud. As for why they were not under overhangs, maybe there is a sub-concious predispositon not to spid out gum indoors, and the overhang might trick their sub-concious into thinking that they are still inside.

Roofing tar would all be concentrated right up against the buildings.

I suspect that this is the same phenomena as in NJ

Re:Why isn't it on cars?

[Mark of THE CITY]

A Google search brought up several pages citing Thomas Jefferson as the source of the quote.