AMONG some fifty counter-controlled cloud-chamber photographs of penetrating showers which we have obtained during the past year as part of an investigation of the nature of penetrating particles occurring in cosmic ray showers under lead, there are two photographs containing forked tracks of a very striking character. These photographs have been selected from five thousand photographs taken in an effective time of operation of 1,500 hours. On the basis of the analysis given below we believe that one of the fonked tracks, shown in Fig. 1 (tracks a and b), represents the spontaneous transformation in the gas of the chamber of a new type of uncharged elementary particle into lighter charged particles, and that the other, shown in Fig. 2 (tracks a and b), represents similarly the transformation of a new type of charged particle into two light particles, one of which is charged and the other uncharged. The rise of modern particle physics owes much to the early work on cosmic rays. Such studies revealed the existence of the positron (1932), muons (1937), and the pion (1947) — the particle postulated by Yukawa as the mediator of a short-range nuclear force. But further surprises were still in store. Close on the heels of the pion discovery, Rochester and Butler observed the occasional presence of curious forked tracks in a series of cosmic-ray experiments that indicated the existence of a new type of unstable elementary particle: K mesons, the first ‘strange’ particles.