Anything can fall on our heads from the unclouded sky blue. And Australian meteorologist Duke Daybor, who has succeeded in collecting artifacts of everything that can be qualified as natural wonders, in his book "Chains of Ice" helplessly admits that he cannot reasonably explain what is happening.
For example, on the lawn of Daybor's mansion on the outskirts of Canberra, on the morning of August 1993, brand new galoshes with the stigma of the now defunct British firm Gaffer & K, as it turned out, closed after the end of the First World War, fell. Moreover, this shoe with a high corrugated top was pressed into incompletely crystallized ice, which does not melt for a suspiciously long time in the hot sun. Part of the snow slurry, placed in the freezer, during laboratory analysis, gave out an atypical molecular structure inherent only in so-called dead water.
Duke Daybor in the afterword to the book writes that almost all the structure of the ice that fell from heaven is identical. And if the purest spring water, when frozen under an electron microscope, reveals amazingly beautiful crystal lattices, then the purest water formed when the ice of heaven melts in the focus of magnifying equipment is ugly in structure.
Abstracting from the tricks, as some ufologists believe, aliens, or, which is no less absurd, the devil, let us turn to domestic historical facts drawn from Daybor's book.
PANOPTICUM OF THE KULIKOVSKY REGENT
In the 80s of the XIX century, the inhabitants of Tula were pretty amused by a visit to the courtyard of the church choir director Matvey Kulikovsky, on the wooden roof of whose house something was constantly falling from above. On August 14, 1893, for example, the people who ran away, grumbling and crossing themselves, looked at a round block of ice the size of the largest Astrakhan watermelon. The lump, being milky, melted after two hours, revealing an empty bottle, one of those used to pour citro at the local soft drinks factory.
The wiseacres assumed that the bottle was thrown from the balloon's gondola. To which Kulikovskikh reasonably objected that the balloons do not fly so high that the bottle in flight had time to be covered with such a thick ice shell.
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The natural science teacher of the Central Real School Nikolai Prishutov, agreeing with the conclusions of the choir director, conducted an inquiry, during which it turned out that in total exactly twenty objects frozen into the ice fell on the roof of the Kulikovskys' house in less than a year and a half. Somehow: a boot awl, a bunch of wax church candles, a rag doll, a copper cartridge case, a pig's ear, an opened box of matches, a lined piece of paper dotted with scrawls, a scattering of pharmaceutical scales and much more.
The most outlandish followed. As soon as the teacher Prishutov laid out in the classroom for the students to see "a freak show of objects that had melted from the ice of the Kulikovskys regent's courtyard", "synchronously with the drought, the roof of the real school was subjected to ice shelling." Ice floes have always been the size of a fist. They always beat them with "shrapnel", never carrying anything man-made with them. Ice, smelling of acetic acid, fell out three times. With the first downpour, everything unusual, except for the heavy hail of the summer of 1893, stopped. Duke Daybor learned about the heavenly incidents in Tula from the Niva magazine and the provincial Tula newspapers.
POWDER RED ICE
On June 22, 1941, in the Russian town of Monchegorsk, near the house of the foreman of the fishing artel Afanasy Gorets, a red ice bomb exploded, falling from a clear sky, on which no aircraft were observed. The fishermen, young strong guys, who left for the Great Patriotic War fronts the next day, witnessed not only this, but also the repeated explosion. Naturally, against the backdrop of the national misfortune, the mysterious explosions that set fire to the canopy over the boats and the haystack were not paid attention.
But in May 1945, when only three eyewitnesses of "incomprehensible fires and shaking of the air" returned from the war, telling their relatives and friends about the "shaped miracle", thanks to the rumors that had run away, the townspeople were amazed to their hearts' content. Yes, and there was something to be surprised about. Ivan Lagunov, for example, said that the ice, perfectly cut cube, almost nailed it, crumbled, dumped half a bucket of juvenile chebak underfoot. Nikolai Zhdankin, sitting with his bride at the edge of Lake Imandra, had no doubt that the ice shell, which outwardly resembles a large red spindle, did not fall from above, but flew out of the water column, in clouds of gray smoke through which blinding blue, in the form spark rings.
Zhdankin was afraid to touch the shell that fell five meters from the shore. He waited until it melted. He collected the watery brown gruel in a tin and hid it in the attic of the brigadier's house. There I also placed a metal rod, "ice filling".
Only in 1947, when the artels blocked the roof of the house of the widow of the Highlander who died near the Eagle, Zhdankin remembered about the "cache". The men, out of curiosity, threw a rod into the fire on which they cooked dinner. The rod burned out instantly, blindingly bright like electric arc welding. The contents of the tin, slightly dried, were set on fire with a match, front-line sapper Ivan Lagunov immediately determined that only smokeless gunpowder could burn like this.
CHURCH BELL MORTAR
A truly incomprehensible incident occurred in Kherson in 1806 in the courtyard of the Spassky Cathedral, about which land clerk Taras Glebko left a curious note, from which it followed that on the morning of May 24, when thunder rumbled and a heavy downpour was about to fall, a mortar fell on the porch of the church, “all over it can be seen worked from a small church bell, as the cast prayer letters were visible. The people who came running, seeing that the object was covered with a crust of ice as thick as an index finger, called the bell ringer as an assistant to check if all the small bells were in place.
The bell-ringer Ivan Prikhodko descended, in confusion and fright, told that everything that rings on the spot and is suitable for business, but the ropes leading to the bell tongues are pretty icy. Is it in the heat? While the ice, without melting, kept for exactly 15 hours, the parishioners, without the assistance of the city authorities, looked for who and where could throw the mutilated bell. The family of the Gorokhovs was found, who recognized in the bell that had fallen from heaven their mortar, bought from some vagrant for a pittance.
ALL TIME PUZZLE
The fall from the heights of hollow ice spheres, monolithic pieces of ice, ice with man-made fillings has been called a mystery for all time by the British meteorologist Dr. Richard Griffiths. Meanwhile, it was this scientist, who fell under his feet on April 2, 1972 during a walk "out of the void" a monolithic piece of ice weighing two kilograms, managed to deliver it to the laboratory of the Manchester Institute of Science and Technology in a car refrigerator. Comprehensive analysis showed the structural uniqueness of the sample, its rarefaction with air oxygen bubbles, which made it look like a sponge, only unusually dense. The crystal lattice was also strikingly different from the crystal lattice of ordinary ice. This categorically excluded the separation of the sample from the icy fuselage of the aircraft.
It is hoped that the collection of artifacts frozen into the ice will greatly help the group of American physicists from Wisconsin, which for ten years was collected from the fjords and stored in an industrial freezer by the Swede Christian Altman, who is confident that heavenly gifts are from aliens. Scientists don't think so. Their task is different: to understand how massive objects are carried by air currents into dense layers of the atmosphere, freeze through and fall to the ground in the form of single or paired precipitation.