The Sky Is Falling - Things That Have Dropped In Unannounced
Posted: Tuesday, July 08, 2008
by Betty Sleep
Carraig Creative Writing and Editorial Services
From the prehistoric to the present, man has been pelted on a random basis with the flotsam and jetsam of a disturbed atmosphere, disturbed minds, and sometimes just an upset tummy! You never know what's going to drop in, out of the sky.
STONED OUT OF THEIR MINDS
Open your Old Testament, Book of Joshua, Chapter 10 Verse 11: "" And as they fled before Israel, while they were going down the ascent of Beth-hor'on, the LORD threw down great stones from heaven upon them as far as Aze'kah, and they died;"
Was it Him again, in Livy's first book of the history of Rome, Chapter 31: " when king Tullus [672-640 B.C.] and the entire Roman state were at a high pitch of glory and prosperity, it was reported to the king and senators that there had been a rain of stones on the Alban Mount [Mount Albanus] envoys were dispatched to study the prodigy, and in teir site there fell from the heavens, like hailstones which the wind piles in drifts upon the ground, a shower of pebbles."
Not until 1790, when a fireball raced across the sky over Barbon, France was the scientific community faced with absolute proof that raining rocks were more than just the imaginings of a peasant, pickled on port. Ernest Frederick Chladni presented a detailed study, indicating that rock falls were a result of fireballs, whether the flaming objects were seen or not. He further stated that because of their great speed, fireballs had to come from outer space, because there wasn't the rev up time within our own atmosphere to blaze a trail across the sky.
The first "rock" hard evidence to back him up, came in 1803, when Jean-Baptiste Biot demonstrated how the elliptical pattern of rock falls was the result of an object coming down out of space at an angle. More weight was added to the argument by English chemist, Edward Charles Howard, who determined that meteorites were made up of three basic materials: stone, iron, or a blend of both. What startled the skeptics, was his discovery that in almost all meteorites there was a form of nickel alloyed with iron, something which rarely if ever, occurs on earth. The amalgam was found in the "goods" from mysterious rock showers.
So eventually the scientific world accepted meteorites, and some rock falls, but they still didn't have an explanation for them all. For instance, one of the more celebrated cases was a "hail" of a storm of pebbles, chips, and small boulders on Chico, California, in early 1922.
Beginning around March 9, pebbles and rocks fell on the roof of two warehouses, located at the corner of Sixth and Orange Streets. The stoney-faced owners called in Marshall Theodore Peck, who promptly got a "John Doe" warrant for whoever he suspected was catapulting the showers of sedimentary shards.
As always, the public's appetite for sensation "shale" prevail. Word spread and Chico was inundated with psychics, doomsayers, and spiritualists. On March 22, the targeted area changed to Main Street, where terrified merchants feared for their glass windows. Marshall Peck hired three pilots to scope the sky and scout out the scoundrel. The media frenzy was still present, but curiously unattentive to the letter received March 24, 1922 by the Marshall and the warehouse owners. It was signed by "The Ghost", and confirmed that he did indeed have a catapult, which he elevated to about 200 yards, in order to make the rocks seem as if they came straight down. His range was about 600 yards, so knowing that an aerial search would locate his hiding place, hevanished. The rock falls stopped, but the legend rolled on for some time. And gathered no moss.
FLOUNDERS AT FIVE O'CLOCK
Fish falls appear to go fin in webbed foot with frog flinging. Back in 1859, the peculiar shower of sticklebacks in Glamorganshire, Wales covered an area of only 80 x 12 feet. The falling fishies were some five inches long, and found in the thousands on the ground, and on roofs. A British Museum expert opined that an employee of the property where the finned flyers had fallen, had doused another with a pail of water and fish, and the wet worker then assumed they had fallen from the sky. The theory of course, was all wet, due to the sheer numbers of fish involved, and the fact that the shower was repeated, ten minutes later! (Now if they'd only had some loaves of bread, they could have had the neighbors over for lunch.)
Frogs and friends, have fallen on hard times (and ground) as far back as 1804, when a rain of small toads assaulted Toulouse, France. Similar incidents have been recorded for 200 years, from America to South Africa, with the chief similarities being that the amphibians were small, sometimes accompanied by fish, and often fell after a storm had passed by the area. This was not the case in Helltown, California in 1878, when a cloudless day witnessed a mid-afternoon onslaught of sun perch, flying fish and other varieties of finned wonders, from one to three inches in length, which covered a 2-3 acre area. Wet on landing, they soon dried off. Surprised but not superstitious, residents took some home and ate them. The incident was blamed on a flock of hiccupping pelicans, but nary a bird was to be seen.
MANNA AND OTHER THINGS FROM HEAVEN
Although Psalm 78:24 states that God rained down manna from heaven, it is also a by-product of certain trees, from Sicily to the Sinai Peninsula. It drops from twigs and at night appears fluid, but hardens in the daytime, to the same coriander seed-like bits that were consumed for 40 years until the wandering Tribes crossed the Jordan river and began eating grain. Biblical manna corrupted after a day, never fell on Sunday, and fell in double quantities on Saturday, to remain uncorrupted for two days over the Sabbath.
Other curious items delivered "air express" include:
One wacky weekend in Wichita, August 2001, corn husks fell over a considerable part of the city. There had been no storm, and daily winds at 12mph were not strong enough to carry that quantity and weight of vegetation.
May 5, 1786 after a six-month drought, a rain of small black eggs fell on Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Unidentified creatures resembling tadpoles hatched from the eggs, shed their skins, and apparently died soon after.
A 1922 heavy snowstorm over the Swiss Alps showered the slopes with a variety of insects resembling spiders, caterpillars and large ants.
Thousands of snakes dropped in on Memphis, Tennessee in 1877. There was no known locale where snakes existed in such numbers.
A dud WWII shell dropped into a backyard in Lakewood, California in 1984...almost 40 years after the war had ended.
Florida starfish fell on St. Cloud, Minnesota in 1985, during a heavy rainstorm. Their presence was blamed on high-spirited university students, casting the crustaceans from atop a tall buildinga mile away from the fall.
In the mid 1800s in California, and Kentucky, we find reports of "flesh" falls- rains of meat and blood, long before aviation could be a part of the explanation. In the Kentucky incident, doctors examined the material, eventually declaring that it consisted of lung and connective tissue. The explanation? Buzzards flying overhead with indigestion had upchucked their lunch.
OF WIND AND WATER
The most common opening act for a sky fall, is the appearance of a cloud(s), variously described as black, red, yellow, or multi-hued. Clouds of unusual colour are often associated with light refracting in a stormy sky, and can be seen when tornadoes are in the territory. With tornadoes come waterspouts. Tornadoes are a vortex of winds, forming a convective cloud. A waterspout is a whirling mass of water sucked into the vortex, which is capable of traversing land and water. The spouts are short lived, consequently affecting only small areas. One explanation for why showers of amphibians and fish are often limited geographically.
Terminal velocity is responsible for where items sucked up, will fall back to earth. A function of mass, density, and shape, terminal velocity is the maximum velocity at which an object falls through a liquid medium. That, and your basic gravity explains why stones fall out first, and things like corn husks would be carried further, and so on. Or why your shower would consist of only small frogsthe larger ones having fallen out sooner, or not having been picked up at all due to weight.
Perfectly logical reasoning. But it sure takes the fun out of watching big ole toads bounce off someone's brolly.
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Top-level comments on this article: (2 total)Entertaining. Thank you for sharing. I have always wondered where those little frogs came from!
Glad you liked it, Jay. I originally dug up much of this while researching a trivia article. I think the most bizarre dropped things were the mattress and the "innards".
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