Spelling mistakes mine:
...Also unlikely to be spiders' webs were the strange lines which stretched up into the sky in three American locations in the 1970s: Caldwell, New Jersey, in August 1970, Elberton, Gerogia, in m,id-June 1972, and Greensburg, Ohio, in Spetember 1978. Several lines or wires were hanging from the sky over Caldwell, in actual fact stretched taut at angles between 30 and 50 degrees to ground level. The reports published in /Pursuit/ give the relevant facts, and we quote:
"Neither the upper nor the lower ends were ever seen, or located,m even when they finally fell. They just came out of the sky from, apparently, down low at one end, and went up overhead amnd then on up into the sky to a point of invisibility, even when traced with binoculars. In one case the line remained taut for a months, through several severe electrical storms and several other days of high winds. Then, for no apparent reason, one 'end' of the line gave way and a pile of the stuff was found in a front yard. The owners pulled in a large amount, but the line snapped farther up and the upper end remained invisible. In another case, four boys spent /one hour/ hauling in a line which had dropper during the night; again, this snagged and broke before the entire line could be pulled in. And in all cases, when the line fell it immediately curled up, just as did the nylon fishing lines on 2" spools, bought by us for comparison."
No pattern could be discerned in the distribution of the lines, and despite numerous effort, no ends could be found. Some of the material retrieved was analysed by the DuPont Company "who stated that it was 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." A sample was also analysed by a Dr. Vargas at Rhode Island University, where another mystery developed. "These 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 ound to his amazement that this tube was filled with some other solid substance, and this defied analysis as far as we can make out."
Two years later, a similar line, single this time, was seen at Elberton, Georgia. Newspaperman Herbert Wilcox was alerted by the initial witnesses, and he went over to see the thing for himself.
"By the time I got there, the sun had come up and the moon had gone down, but the line was still mounting the sky and shimmering in the light of the early morning sun as far as the eye could see. An earthly guess was that it might be a kite string. If so, it was the longest and fanciest kite string ever seen around here. Besides, there was no kite in sight to hold it way up in the air. Another guess was that it was some sort of hot line laid out by a plane, or maybe a parachute had disintegrated way up yonder and that this was what was left of it. This still didn't explain how it managed to stay up there. During the day, Eddie Boswell (...) got on the roof, where the line was at its lowest point. He pulled in yards and yards of it but never saw a thing to indicate what it had been fastened to. There were two kinds of material in the line. That pulled from the west was a fluffy, whiny, white substance. That from the east was a tiny, hard-finished green material something like a fishing line. Both were hard to break."
The third line we know of (there may be more) was seen at Greensburg, Ohio, in September 1978. A man who found it snagged on a bush behind his house began pulling it off, and had to call his neighbors in to assist. Using fishing reels, they collected 1000 feet, filling eight reels, before the line broke and floated away. It ould still be seen stretching up into the sky, and the theory again was that children had been flying a kite using fishing line. But although the explanation was invariably trotted out, no one has ever reported seeing the elusive kite, or finding anyone who had been flying it.
Bord & Bord, "Unexplained Mysteries of the 20th Century," 229-230
