Caroline Guy awoke Saturday to find a wee problem.
A frozen chunk of brownish yellow material had plummeted out of the sky and crashed straight through into her mobile home in Staffordshire, U.K., leaving an 18-inch hole in her roof and another in the floor, the Sun reported.
Guy, 52, believes that the icy lump is waste -- potentially from a toilet -- from one of the many airplanes that frequently fly over her home, located 40 miles from Birmingham Airport.
A spokesman for the Civil Aviation Authority told SWNS that the mystery object most likely did come from a plane. "What happens is there is some sort of leak on the plane and a body of water builds up on the outside," he said. “When the plane is at height it freezes, and then when the plane starts to descend it heats up and starts to thaw and falls off. The source of the leaks are one of three – the toilet facilities, the air conditioning or running water."
Guy told SWNS that the CAA informed her no one is liable for the incident.
"Someone should be," she said. "I could have died."
The CAA spokesman noted that these incidents are "rare," but that doesn't mean they never happen.
The Federal Aviation Administration even has a special term for frozen human waste material that winds up falling from planes -- "blue ice." From the FAA's website:
Some aircraft lavatory holding tanks have a chemical added to the water to deodorize the waste and break down any solids. This chemical is a dark blue color. If a drain tube has a leak, a bit of blue water may leak out.
Modern commercial aircraft cruise at high altitudes, and the sub-zero temperatures will cause any liquid to freeze immediately, hence the term "Blue Ice." If any of this "Blue Ice" were to fall from an aircraft, it would melt long before it hit the ground, dissipating into miniscule droplets that are nearly invisible.
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