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

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