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Indian village confused after 'extra-terrestrial' icy ball falls from plane toilet overhead

Some 'thought it was some celestial rock and I’ve heard that they took samples home'

Harriet Agerholm
Monday 22 January 2018 16:47 GMT
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Senior Gurgaon official Vivek Kalia said residents were startled by a 'big thud'
Senior Gurgaon official Vivek Kalia said residents were startled by a 'big thud'

An icy ball fell from the sky and landed on a Indian village in the northern state of Haryana.

Authorities believe the frozen mass is human waste that leaked from an aeroplane flying overhead.

It is normally disposed of once the plane has landed, but it has been known for it to come out midair.

Senior Gurgaon official Vivek Kalia said residents were startled by the “big thud” of the 10-12kg ice block hitting a field in the Fazilpur Baddi village.

Some locals thought the ball of ice was an “extra terrestrial” object, he said.

"People of the village came running out of their homes to find out what had happened,” he told the BBC.

While a number of villagers thought it was an alien object, “others thought it was some celestial rock and I’ve heard that they took samples home”, he said.

A team from the India Meteorological Department and National Disaster Management Authority was dispatched to the village.

A senior official at the department said that after inspecting the sample the projectile was “definitely not a meteorological phenomenon”.

In 2016, India announced introduced fines for airlines that empty their plane’s toilet tanks in mid-air, after reports that icy waste was being dropped onto people’s homes.

Aeroplane waste tanks are usually emptied once the plane lands, but there have been a number of incidents of leaks causing excrement to be dropped on residential areas.

Earlier in 2016, an Indian woman suffered a severe shoulder injury when she was hit by a “football-sized” block of ice that fell from the sky.

Aviation experts believe it was likely to have been “blue ice” — the name given to frozen human waste that forms around the overflow outlets on aeroplane toilets. The term refers to the blue colour given to the ice from toilet chemicals.

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