A substance said to have fallen at Montussan (Gironde) on October 16, 1883 was sent to La Nature, 1883-342. The Editor (Tisandier) wrote that the fibrous substance was white, “but was something that had been burned.” It fell from a cloud “composed of a woolly substance in lumps the size of a fist,” accompanied by rain and a violent wind. “M. Tissandier,” writes Fort, “astonishes us by saying that he cannot identify this substance. We thought that anything could be ‘identified’ as anything. He can only say that the cloud in question must have been an extraordinary congomeration.”
–Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned, p63 (The Complete Books of Charles Fort, Dover, c1974).