12/03/03 Trolling the Skies Over Caldwell for Mystery Thread
Here’s a little update to a story we've previously published about the town of Caldwell’s most famous weird occurrence. Weird NJ readers are probably already familiar with the story of the Caldwell Mystery Thread, a silvery line that was suspended for days over a house at 85 Forest Ave. back in 1970. Neither the police nor local townsfolk who came to see it after being reported in the Caldwell Progress could figure out what it was or where it was coming from. Hundreds of curiosity seekers converged on the area. Whatever the material was made of, or where it came from, was never solved.
Eventually a group of neighborhood kids managed to snag the Mystery Thread out of the sky by casting a fishing line up to it. The thread was pulled down from the heavens, buckets full of it, and sent off to Dupont for analysis. But the company could not determine its origins.
Fast forward to a couple of years ago. Mark Sceurman and I were in Denville at the Rattle Snake Ranch for an appearance on a live broadcast of Rob Moorhead's Big Greasy Breakfast radio program on WDHA-FM. We were hanging out in the bar drinking coffee (yes coffee--it was 7:30 am), when a man named Jeff, who appeared to be about forty, approached us to offer his compliments on the magazine.
"Thanks a lot," we said, then asked him, "so what's weird where you live?"
"Nothing!" He replied, adding, "You don't know any good stories about Caldwell, do you?"
"Well, there was that mysterious thread hanging from the sky back in 1970," we offered.
"Oh my God! I was one of the kids who pulled that thread down out of the sky! I haven't thought about that in years!" He said excitedly.
Of course we didn't believe him for a second, not at first anyway. But then we quizzed him on his knowledge of the event and his story all added up. He was the right age to have been about eleven years old at the time of the incident in question. He knew the exact address of the house the thread hung over, and the names of the people who lived there at the time.
"I grew up on Forest Ave., just up the street from that house," he said. "My mother still lives there. After the thread was hanging there for about a week, attracting all kinds of crowds, me and my buddies decided to pull it down. I got a fishing rod and just kept casting until we snagged it from mid air over the house. When we got a hold of it we just kept pulling and it just kept on coming down out of nowhere. Then it stopped and we found the end. There wasn't anything holding it from the other end, it was just coming out of nowhere! They took it from us and sent it off to some lab somewhere for testing and that's the last any of us ever heard about it. Jeez, now I wish I had saved some of it for a souvenir!"
And this guy didn't think there was anything weird about Caldwell. Just goes to show you--sometimes you can be so close to something that you don't recognize it for the weird thing that it is. In other words, sometimes you can't see the forest through the trees. Or, in this case, Forest Ave. through the threads.
- Mark M.
Do you have a story about something unexplained that you'd like to share?
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You can read more about the Mystery Thread in our book and in issue #8 of the magazine.
