A rare image of spider ballooning in May 1974. Albury, NSW. Image via Keith Basterfield

You might have heard that Australia is drowning in spiders. “Tiny spiders ‘rain’ down in Australian town,” read a headline in USA Today, while CNET ran the similarly titled, “Welcome to Australia, where even the rain is spiders.” But the click-ready headlines don’t really get to the point. What actually happened is that for a brief period on May 4 some spiders in Goulbourn, New South Wales, did what spiders do all around the world. Then a man studying UFO conspiracies called the local paper, and the story went viral.

Spider ballooning is a little-understood phenomena in which spiders use their webs to migrate. In clear conditions with a light wind, juvenile spiders produce thin strands of web called gossamer in a triangular shape to get airborne. Using their web as a parachute they can travel hundreds of kilometers, although the why of this phenomenon is still somewhat unclear. The point is that it’s something lots of types of spiders everywhere in the world can do, which is made clear in this YouTube video from Brazil.

Once on the ground the gossamer, or “angel hair,” doesn’t last long. A few hours tops. But as ballooning often occurs during the night, it means people wake up to landscapes covered in web. This is what happened in Goulbourn. A man named Ian Watson found his house covered in webs, and then took to the Goulburn Community Forum on Facebook to write, “You can clearly see hundreds of little spiders floating along with their webs and my home is covered in them. Someone call a scientist!”

Related: Watch these drones act like spiders.

The man who responded was a South Australian social scientist and UFO researcher named Keith Basterfield. “I contacted the Goulburn Post,” says Basterfield. “And it turns out that Ian had already called them but they needed a push.”

Basterfield, who has been cataloguing spider ballooning since 2001, explained the situation to the paper’s editor, who then assigned the story. “I’ve been studying this for years,” says Basterfield. “I first noticed ballooning because conspiracy theorists claim it’s a byproduct of UFO propulsion systems. That is, of course, ridiculous.”

It’s unknown what species of spider was involved, but as it’s a phenomenon associated with babies it’s unlikely they were dangerous. Keith explains that in the Southern Hemisphere, May is the month for spider ballooning and especially after heavy rain. He claims it’s likely to happen again and wants people to take photos. As he points out, every article has contained only one of two photos, simply because that’s all that exists. The one at this top of this article was taken in 1974, just as a quick example. “So if you see an area covered in spider webs, please take a photo,” implores Keith. “This is one of the reasons I wanted this story out there.”

If you have a photo of spider ballooning please contact Keith at keithbasterfield@yahoo.com.au.

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