A California family believes their home was bombarded with human waste from a low-flying plane over the weekend.
Michelle Steinberg said she and her family were swimming in the pool in the backyard of their Studio City home on Sunday when they noticed a "horrible stench" and saw droplets falling from a plane flying overhead.
"All of a sudden we smelled this horrible stench," Michelle Steinberg's 11-year-old daughter Ellie told CBS 2/KCAL 9.
"I thought the smell was fertilizer maybe from the neighbor's yard," family friend Gianna added.
Jumping out of the pool, the girls said they found "foul smelling droplets" all over their back porch and believed the droplets were from human waste that had fallen out of an airplane lavatory.
"Just splatters of brown everywhere," Ellie Steinberg said as her friend added: "It was definitely waste."
The family's Southern Californian Studio City home is directly under the flight path for the Burbank Airport and planes frequently fly overhead.
Michelle Steinberg quickly began her own investigation and collected a sample of the substance with a Q-tip. She said their neighbor noticed the same thing.
"I've done a little bit of googling since it happened of course and people say oh, they can't dump, that's not how the systems work. But, there could be leaks, there could be cracks, there could be problems in the plane, so…" the mother said. "Ideally, they get whatever is wrong fixed so it doesn't happen to anybody else."
The family said they hosed down the area but believe a more thorough cleaning is needed if the substance is, in fact, human waste.
The Burbank Airport told CBS 2/KCAL 9 that the matter for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to investigate and confirm they received the family's report, and will look into it.
Newsweek has contacted the Federal Aviation Administration for comment.
It's certainly not the first time mysterious objects have fallen from the sky connected to overhead planes.
Residents of an Indian village near New Delhi were mystified by a large ball of ice that fell from the sky creating a hole a foot deep in a wheat field back in 2018.
Teams from the Indian Meterological Department (IMD) and the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) were called to the scene and quickly ascertained that the object, which began melting after a few hours, was human waste.
"Since the waste did not melt for long, we mistook it for a meteor," local official Vivek Kalia told the Hindu Times. "We summoned the scientists who prima facie confirmed that it was human excreta. It later melted. Still, we have sent the sample for forensic examination."
The human waste was believed to have likely come from an airplane toilet.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
