All kinds of fish, crab, frog, ice, stone and other "pads" are best defined in the words of Winston Churchill: "A riddle that hides a secret."
These phenomena are usually called "frotskis", that is, "falling from the sky." The pages of newspapers that write about anomalous phenomena are filled with such messages.
And even reputable scientific meteorological journals regularly inform their readers about herring squalls, squid showers and trout tornadoes …
So what is behind such extraordinary events as frotskis? Why are they happening? While this is a secret hidden from the human mind, apparently, for a fairly long time. It is still waiting for its solution … But only one thing is obvious: most of the modern explanations of “fishfalls” contain an irrational and even mystical element, although some phenomena are explained, if not simply, then with sufficient reasoning.
Lifting and transporting various objects over sufficiently long distances is a characteristic property of tornadoes, or tornadoes. They can transfer humans and animals for 4-10 km, and mollusks two or three cm in size - at a distance of 160 km. Interestingly, a similar rain of creatures was first described by the Greek historian Athenaeus 200 years BC. BC: "There were so many frogs that when the inhabitants saw that there were frogs in everything they boiled and fried, and in the water for drinking, that you could not put your foot on the ground without crushing the frog, they fled."
It is noteworthy that the description of rains of this kind was reflected in the literature much earlier than the description of hurricanes, storms and tornadoes. Apparently, for the ancients it was a spectacle more amazing than natural disasters.
The tornado is capable of doing the most incredible things, because, like a vacuum cleaner, it sucks in everything that surrounds it. So, on June 17, 1940, in the village of Meshchera (Gorky Region), old silver coins began to fall on the heads of boys caught in heavy rain.
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A whole treasure fell out of the cloud hanging above the ground. Subsequently, it turned out that the coins were buried in the ground in the 16th century. The tornado funnel sucked the treasure hidden in the cast-iron pot out of the ground and lifted it into the cloud. Having flown several kilometers, the monetary rain watered the earth.
Some kind of monetary rain was noted in the vicinity of Mishkino: there, along with silt and fish, carcasses of plucked poultry fell from the sky on the heads of the frightened villagers.
On this day, a whirlwind that swooped in drained several lakes around the village to the bottom, drawing in up to a hundred domestic ducks and geese with young broods. After a day or two, they were found with their heads and legs turned away and completely plucked.
(The reason for such a striking, at first glance, phenomenon is essentially simple. The fact is that at the base of the bird's feathers there are peculiar air sacs in the skin. The sharply reduced air pressure in the tornado zone leads to the fact that air sacs explode and eject feathers.)
Scientists have shown that the positive gravitational charges that arise on the lower surface of the mother cloud can hold and transport not only silver coins and amphibians, but also huge masses of water extracted from reservoirs. Another similar incident was noted in 2000 in the UK.
Then the "lucky" residents of the coastal village in Norfolk County. Sixty-year-old Fred Hodkins at first simply could not believe his eyes: “The fish fell straight from the sky. My whole garden was littered with fish. All the fish looked "fresh", as if they had just "left" the sea. " A tornado raged over the North Sea just days before the unusual event, according to the British Meteorological Bureau.
Apparently, it was he who "grabbed" the fish from the sea, subsequently "rewarding" the inhabitants of the village with a good catch. There were also cases when a tornado instantly sucked water from the river, so that the bottom covered with silt, or sea water, along with a huge number of jellyfish, was exposed. And in 1888 in Texas, during a tornado, hail fell the size of a hen's egg. He walked only eight minutes, but during this time he covered the valley with a layer of ice pellets of two meters.
But scientists have not succeeded in "blaming" all the blame on the tornado. The fact is that sometimes frotskis occurs in absolutely calm weather and in the absence of terrible tornadoes. But the most important thing is that the "rains" are very selective in choosing their "stuffing". A tornado dumps everything that gets into it from its trunk, sorting in the air fish to fish, frogs to frogs, algae to algae, etc. Here are a few such cases.
On October 24, 1987, the British newspapers Daily Mirror and Daily Star reported that an unusual rain of pink frogs had spilled over the town of Stroud. Thousands of poor fellows fell on the sidewalks and sought refuge in streams and gardens. Two weeks before this incident, similarly described pink frogs had visited Cirencester in large numbers.
These amphibians were examined by naturalist Ian Darling, who attributed them to the albino tribe, determining that their strange pink color was due to small blood vessels visible through pale skin. Such cases are not at all uncommon.
In 1954, at a fair in Birmingham's Sutton Caulfield park, shoppers were hit by a shower of three centimeters long frogs during the usual light rain.
They jumped on umbrellas and were visible everywhere in the air, and the land, 50 m2, was literally covered with a carpet of frightened amphibians.
And in 1969, the journalist Veronica Papworth, well-known in England, became one of the "wet" eyewitnesses who fell under the rain of thousands of frogs that fell on the town of Peny in Buckinghamshire. Ten years later, another Englishwoman, Mrs. Vida McWilliam from Bedford, went into the garden after a heavy rain, during which even the branches shook, and found that the ground was covered with small green and black frogs, and their eggs were hanging on the trees and bushes.
Why frogs more often than other living creatures fall from heaven is still impossible to understand. In second place after them are fish. The earliest official mention of the fishfall dates back to 1859. Then the "fishy" rain was in Wales, in the city of Glamorgan, where the "catch" was located on an area equal to three tennis courts. Fishfalls have been reported almost everywhere on the globe. So, on a clear warm May day in 1956, live fish rained down from the sky at a farm in Chalatchi, Alabama.
Eyewitnesses to this mysterious incident claimed that they fell out "as if out of nowhere." First, it dripped over a small patch of land only two hundred square feet in area, and then an unusual cloud from dark to almost white and three species of fish - catfish, perch and bream - fell out of it.
From the fact that the fish were alive and fluttering, it is clear that they did not stay in the sky for very long, which cannot be said about the fishfall itself, which, according to eyewitnesses, lasted a good 15 minutes. Although the fish were all native and the creek teeming with them was only two miles from the farm, there had been no tornadoes or hurricanes for many weeks, so it remains unclear exactly how they rose into the sky and were transported this distance.
There have been many other similar cases in the United States this century (Boston, MA; Thomasville, Alabama; Witchite, Kansas). On the morning of December 19, 1984, fish rained in unusually large numbers on Santa Monica (freeway near Cranshaw Boulevard in Los Angeles), creating an emergency on the road. The next year, a large portion of fish fell out of the sky in the backyard of Luis Castorino's house in Fort Bort, who later admitted that he was very frightened by what was happening, for he firmly believed in his supernatural origin.
Fishfalls are so common in some countries, such as India and Australia, that the newspapers there have almost stopped reporting them on their pages. One Australian naturalist, Gilbert Whitley, even published a list of fifty fish showers on the sixth continent in 1972 alone. These included the falls of stream minnows at Cressy, Victoria; shrimp near Singleton, New South Wales; dwarf perch in Hayfield, Victoria; and unidentified freshwater species hitting suburbs of Brisbane.
Although such showers are not so common in Britain, several reports of them can still be found. In August 1914, unfortunate eels were seen landing in the Hendon area of Sunderland; In the same month of 1948, a certain Mr. Ian Reti of Hayling Island, Hampshire, was showered with cod while he went to play golf. Among the crustaceans that occasionally fall on British soil, crabs are the most common.
Although salamanders are not found in North Dakota, in October 1949, there was a rain of salamanders, which reached a size of ten centimeters.
And officials in Japan also found it difficult to explain the appearance of the carcass of a five-month-old elephant on the shore of Senzumara (Oshima) one morning. Careful research has established that there were no dying elephants on board the aircraft, and no missing elephants have been found in Japanese zoos.
But it was even more unpleasant to experience the rain of blood and flesh. But this is exactly what happened: tons of chunks of black dried meat fell on a ranch in California on August 9, 1869. Those who study such phenomena are also well aware of the report of a whole wagon of meat (without the wagon, of course) strewn across the hills of Wat County, Kentucky on March 3, 1876.
These and numerous other similar cases are described in The Book of the Damned, published by the American scientist Charles Hoy Fort, who was a passionate and tireless collector of paranormal events. During his short life, he collected hundreds of reports about such phenomena that occurred in the second half of the 19th - early 20th centuries.
Could such incidents be explained by something other than supernatural reasons? Some people think you can. It is widely believed among meteorologists that since fish falls can no longer be considered fantasies, then at least the explanations for them should not be from the paranormal.
But it is difficult to imagine how whirlwinds or winds sort the fish by species, preferring to carry one and reject the other. And why does nothing else fall with the fish - sand, for example, or algae? When the inhabitants of the sea are pouring down from above, no one notes salty rains before or after them, and if the theory of water vortices can "do away" with the showers of species living near the surface of the sea coast, then it cannot cope with cases when it "rains" deep-sea species or those that prefer to live further from the coast.
But if fish and frog falls can somehow be squeezed into a scientific framework, then how can we explain the case when on November 25, 1961, in Ely-Zabetton (Tennessee), a ton of plastic film fell from the sky (note that there is no plane near It was). Hundreds of kilograms of plastic literally covered the surrounding fields. Deputy Sheriff Paul Nidiffer said the huge transparent sheet had no shape, no beginning, no end that could be found.
Neither he himself, nor the people with him found any inscriptions or labels. The Federal Air Agency in Knokoville did not add anything to the puzzle, and practical farmers cut them into pieces and used the film to cover haystacks and tobacco beds. And on February 19, 1965, in Bloomsbury, Pennsylvania, it rained from tiny plastic hemispheres the size of a button on a shirt.
Large chunks of ice are often reported to have mysteriously dropped from the sky, usually attributed to the thawed wing of an aircraft. At high altitudes on the fuselage, moisture really freezes and then falls off when the plane enters the warm atmospheric layers. There have even been cases where disinfection fluid and waste leaked out of the toilets and froze in this way. However, not all hailstones consisted of sewage, and many fell to the ground in places far from the airways.
And besides, information about the fall of such ice blocks has reached us even when the aircraft were not built. For example, on August 14, 1849, The Times described in great detail the fall of an ice mass weighing more than half a ton on a meadow near Horde on the Isle of Skye in Scotland. The building, which was hit by the shell, collapsed in the blink of an eye because of … a single hailstone.
Research showed that it was completely transparent and consisted of diamond-shaped crystals ranging from 1 to 3 inches long.
Further tests determined that the ice was formed from cloudy moisture, but experiments conducted in laboratory conditions have failed to recreate anything that even approximately resembles the strange crystalline structure of ice hailstones.
Another theory, which suggests that huge masses of ice falling from a cloudless sky may be of unearthly origin, that is, in other words, be ice meteorites, is hardly more plausible. But one of the professors from the Drekel Institute said: “I can declare with certainty that these large blocks of ice cannot be of meteorological origin. Atmospheric processors cannot form or hold such masses of ice, especially under the weather conditions of that time."
He is echoed by Professor Renee from the laboratory of atmospheric and space research at the University of Colorado:
“The meteorological theory lacks sufficient foundation. While some astronomers acknowledge the existence of meteors made of ice, it is doubtful that such lumps could survive the intense heat they enter upon entering the atmosphere.”
In general, taking into account the above facts, it is very difficult to explain these mysterious phenomena by any causes of a natural, physical property. Sometimes even a crazy thought comes up: isn't this the trick of some cosmic joker? After all, in all countries of the world, mysterious balls of foam, thin strands of "angel hair", strange pieces of rope fell on people. Most of them have something in common.
As Ivan Sanderson noted in the April 1969 issue of Pursyot (the journal of the Society for the Study of the Unexplained), “both animate objects (fish, frogs) and inanimate (statues, coins) are terrestrial objects. Only all this has been teleported, exposed to forces unknown to us, moved in space and … time!"
In addition to creatures falling from the sky, there are colorful rains. Now most experts explain this by the activities of industrial facilities and the raw materials with which they work, as well as by the high percentage of excess emissions of spent aerosol substances into the atmosphere. But these eerie spectacles have happened in history hundreds of times, both in hoary antiquity and in times closer to us.
Even the ancient Greek historian and writer Plutarch talked about the bloody rains that fell after the great battles with the Germanic tribes. He was sure that the bloody fumes from the battlefield soaked the air and painted ordinary drops of water in a blood red color.
From another historical chronicle, you can learn that in 582 a bloody rain fell in Paris. “For many people, the blood soiled their dress,” wrote an eyewitness, “that they threw it off themselves with disgust”. And so on … until the last 30, which fell out in the last century, when no one was afraid of them.
Red rain in Sri Lanka
The so-called "colored" rains also owe their origin to winds that lift tons of red lead dust into the air, for example in the Sahara, and shed it in red rain somewhere in Europe, or tornadoes that sucked water from a lake rich in microscopic plankton. As for milk rain, it usually contains particles of chalk and white clay.
But on the Indian village of Sangrampur, located 60 km from Calcutta, an unusual rain of yellow-greenish fell. Its color and glue-like drops caused panic among the population. Fearing toxic effects, we analyzed them. To the surprise of the researchers, the drops turned out to be bee excrement, in which traces of honey were found. This “rain” was brought by huge swarms of bees flying over the village and its surroundings.
Scientists have found an explanation for the multi-colored rain, which greatly frightened the inhabitants of Kerala in India. But first, rainfall in yellow, green and black puzzled scientists. It has been suggested that the volcanic ash and sand of the Sahara brought in by the western monsoon was the cause of this phenomenon.
However, there was not enough substantiation for this theory, and the hypothesis was rejected. Experts studied samples of multi-colored water, strangely spilled from the sky, for a long time, and came to the conclusion that the meteorite was to blame for everything. It was found that shortly before that a small meteorite entered the earth's atmosphere, but its size was small, so the celestial body burned up and disintegrated into thousands of tiny pieces.
So an explanation for colored rains has been found. But the full interpretation of the frotskis, starting from the biblical story of the "manna from heaven", has yet to be fully unraveled.
