UNG professor featured in Netflix series

University of North Georgia associate professor Dr. Paul Johnson was a featured expert in “Files of the Unexplained,” a Netflix series. Each of the eight episodes of the Vox production includes witness testimony, news stories and expert analysis.

Johnson’s episode highlights blobs that rained from the sky in Oakville, Washington, in 1994. Described as “transparent, gelatinous blobs,” this phenomenon caused illness among townspeople and death among livestock.

With a doctoral degree in microbiology and molecular genetics, and 20 years of work in infectious diseases and environmental microbiology, Johnson was called upon for his hypothesis.

A resident gathered some samples of the blobs that proved helpful in early research, but they have since disappeared.

“With the samples being gone, there’s no way to conclusively say what it was,” Johnson said. “There are some things you can say it wasn’t, though. Blue ice is one. It was neither blue nor frozen.”

Johnson also ruled out the suggestion of pulverized jellyfish.

“That’s not possible, because when they tested the sample, they didn’t find jellyfish cells. They found bacterial cells,” he said.

His appearance took two days to film, Johnson said, and he described the experience as “interesting.”

“I think this was interesting scientifically. One of the things that I liked was that it points out a couple things. One is how little we know about the world around us. Every day we learn new things. We can apply what we learn and make predictions and such, but they’re not going to be perfect,” Johnson said. “The other thing I like about this is this wasn’t perfect. They didn’t have set answers. We know all these things, know all this data, but we still can’t get the answer yet.”

Johnson said he was impressed by the number of people outside the science field who were curious about the phenomenon. He encourages potential viewers to consider the subject matter.

“Maybe they will be interested enough to look into how this works,” Johnson said. “Maybe they will want to go into science now or something like that. "

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