As unpredictable as the weather is, we still generally expect its anomalies to be limited to a specific list of events with which we are more or less familiar. However, sometimes something happens on our planet that it is impossible to refrain from biblical associations.
We are talking about the rarest and truly amazing weather events of all that people have ever seen. And blood red rain is not the most amazing of them.
Bloody rain
Those who have seen this will never forget. Blood rain is a fairly common phenomenon, and even a special article on Wikipedia is devoted to it. The most recent high-profile incident occurred in 2001, when a red downpour hit the Indian state of Kerala.
If you thought that this was one of the ancient Egyptian executions sent again by the Almighty to punish us, you can calm down. The authors of the first reports were almost sure that it was an alien invasion.
Then scientists (who narrowly escaped being stoned) nevertheless carried out a chemical analysis of the water and discovered that behind this frightening phenomenon was only a bloom of red algae.
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Rain of frogs (as well as birds and fish)
Here is another type of rain that is arguably much more common than you might think. It seems that the United Kingdom is a favorite landing site for air amphibians: in 1996, a stream of frogs poured from the skies to the town of Llandewey in Wales, and in 1998 this was repeated in London. In 2010, the US state of Arkansas was struck by an air strike … by a huge flock of unlucky blackbirds. Something similar happened in 2011 in Italy, only there pigeons fell from the sky.
But the strangest of all such miracles can be considered a phenomenon that repeats every year in May or June in Honduras. Lluvia de Peces - fish rain, has long turned into a kind of holiday in the Yoro department. From the sky, along with streams of rain, thousands of fish fall, which glitter with scales on the stones of the streets, until the joyful inhabitants collect them to cook for dinner.
Scientists still cannot agree on the cause of these strange rains (perhaps because there is no single reason), however, one of the most plausible theories says that tornadoes pick up unfortunate animals and after a while abandon them, dead or alive, at a great distance from home.
Bagnado
To be honest, it looks more like a nightmare. Bagnado (tornado of beetles) _ looks exactly as it sounds: it is a giant column of humming midges circling in the air, going high into the sky.
Such tornadoes do not reach dangerous speeds and do not cause long-term damage, except for psychological trauma, which can be easily received by being too close with your mouth open in surprise, but still it is a very, very creepy phenomenon.
Its nature is essentially the same as that of dust storms: areas of the earth overheated by the sun, where a vortex is formed, pushing the air upward. The peculiarity is that these vortices are full of living beings.
Balloon rain and star jelly
In 1994, a thunderstorm passed over the small town of Oakville in Washington state, but instead of raindrops, it left small gelatinous balls with … no one knows what.
Local resident Sunny Buckclift was especially taken aback by this phenomenon, as her farm was at its epicenter. When she took the balls the size of a grain of rice to the state ecology department, the experts discovered that they were teeming with living cells - but exactly which cells remain unknown.
One of the versions that gained some popularity was that they were pieces of a jellyfish that exploded during one of the training bomb strikes over the ocean. You know, at this point I want to say: even if this is true, it is somehow strange.
Or maybe it was a mysterious substance known as "star jelly." Stories about this substance go back to the 14th century, when it was believed that they remained on the ground after a collision with a stream of meteorites, which is not true.
The version of the 14th century scientist John of Gaddesdon, according to which gelatin balls were an effective remedy for the external treatment of abscesses and abscesses, is also incorrect. However, the so-called "star jelly" is absolutely real - and it simply cannot be the same substance.
Examples are the slime mushrooms, myxomycetes, which sometimes appear in the grass and have a distinctly alien appearance. Another version is the oviducts of amphibians, which are often abandoned by predators, refreshed by an appetizing frog. However, whatever it is, it leaves an extremely unpleasant impression or, more simply, an absolutely disgusting thing.
Igor Abramov