While Mississauga, Ontario residents Traven Matchett and his daughter Donna were in their backyard, when a flaming object plummeted onto their picnic table, landing with "a sickening thud". The object just missed nineteen-year-old Donna's head. Donna quickly extinguished the flames with the garden hose. At first contact, the glowing, intensely flaming object was measured with its "perfectly" cylindrical column of flames at 18 inches high.
It turned into a flat, dark green rock, 8 inches wide, within little time. In this state, the object had a fibrous, "pock-marked" texture.
Traven Matchett contacted the Pearson International Airport (then Toronto International Airport), the nearby Canadian Armed Forces Base, the University of Toronto, and the Ontario Science Centre. All the contact phoned by Mr. Matchett offered no solution. This lack of results lead him to directly decide to contact The Toronto Sun; a story by one of their reporters was published in the next issue on Sunday, June 27, 1979.
This story then caught like wildfire, or in this case, blob-fire, spawning phone calls and visits from media around the GTA, and world-wide. "This place was like Grand Central Station…" Mr. Matchett later commented to Dwight Whallen of Pursuit magazine.
With this media attention, the blob finally received the due attention of authorities. The Ontario Ministry of the Environment sent an inspector; Peel Regional Police questioned the family and neighbours on the occurrence. To put an end to the questioning, it was simply dismissed as "common plastic", just a "flaming Frisbee" thrown into their yard. Anomalies collector Charles Fort has called this "a skyfall." This sort of anomaly is paralleled to powdre ser, a Welsh term meaning rot of the stars. Whether it was plastic, or a skyfall, or something else that has yet to been discovered remains unknown.
This private residence is located on 789 Melton Drive in Mississauga; the Matchetts are no longer the residents.