Anyone who believes that miracles on Earth no longer occur are greatly mistaken. Confirmation of this is an unusual incident in the north of Ethiopia. Drought has been raging in those parts for two years now. Day and night, the local peasants prayed for rain to fall on the dry fields and finally waited. Downpour poured from heaven to earth. But not from rain streams, but from millions of fish, dead and still alive
Panic arose among the peasants. Many were convinced that the end of the world had come. Calmness was brought in by Saloto Sodoro, an ichthyologist of this region, who was urgently sent on a business trip to the scene. He explained to the local population that one of the tornadoes is to blame for the "fish rain". Such tornadoes, generated by the storms of the Indian Ocean, sometimes suck whole schools of fish into the funnel and rapidly carry them through the air hundreds of kilometers inland, where, as the strength and speed of the tornado's movement decrease, the fish, as if from a leaky sack, falls right on the heads of the stunned farmers.
After long and repeated explanations, the panic among the Ethiopian peasants was ended. Nevertheless, many of the locals are still inclined to see in the "fish rain" a sign from above and no, no, but cautiously look at the sky. Well, how will something else fall from there!
Residents of the Indian village of Manna in Kerala, who in July 2006 also saw fish falling from the sky, think about the same. In a short time, the area was littered with hundreds of pencil-sized small fish.
“Nobody noticed them at first. But soon we saw that the ground was covered with some kind of slippery moving creatures,”says the owner of a local store. Another villager says that he personally collected 30 fish that were cold as ice.
A similar rain of live fish fell in December 2002 on residents of the village of Korona in northern Greece. The Athenian newspapers reported on this occasion that a powerful whirlwind picked up several hundred fish from a lagoon located 15 kilometers away, along with water, and then brought them down to this village. The inhabitants of the village at first did not believe their eyes, and then began to collect an unexpected gift.
Yes, fish falling from the sky is, albeit unusual, but quite profitable for the household. The same cannot be said about frogs, which also often fall from the sky in hundreds and even thousands.
In August 2004, an unusual "rain" took place in the area of the city of Vukovar in eastern Croatia. “Frogs literally fell from the sky, after the storm and rain we saw them everywhere,” local residents told reporters. According to one of them, “in this case, we could talk about a terrible omen,” since he had never seen so many of these amphibians before.
In June 2005, the inhabitants of the Serbian city of Odzachi thought that the end of the world had come. First, a cloud of strange shape and color appeared on the horizon, and then the city was covered with a frog downpour.
People hid in their homes in panic, the traffic in the streets stopped. However, Serbian climatologists hastened to reassure the population with a hackneyed wording: a tornado lifted water from the surface of some swamp or lake, sucking at the same time the frogs that lived there. Then the whirlwind transported this floating swamp to Ozachi, where it rained the travelers on the heads of the frightened inhabitants.
Chicken slingshot.
But not only fish and frogs fall from the sky. In Australia in early 2005, plucked and possibly frozen chickens flopped onto the rooftops of two unsuspecting residents of Fletcher, Newcastle.
In both cases, as noted by the Daily Telegraph, the carcasses of the birds pierced the tiles on the roofs, which allowed experts to establish that the chickens fell to the ground from a sufficiently high height. The police were called in to investigate the strange phenomenon. However, she did not give an answer to the question of where the birds fell from.
After the first chicken fell on the roof of Stephen Leung's house on 2 January, Australian Civil Aviation Safety officials determined that the height from which the chicken had crashed to the ground was more than half a kilometer.
This allowed the experts to conclude that the bird could have fallen out of the luggage compartment of a low-flying light aircraft.
However, this hypothesis was questioned after a second frozen chicken fell on the roof of the house of Australian Warwick Slee, who lived less than a kilometer from Stephen Leung's.
Warwick Slee and his family left home for the weekend, and when they returned late on Sunday, they found the house smelling bad. The head of the family noticed three damaged tiles, climbed onto the roof and found rotting chicken remains.
“I heard about another chicken that fell on a house in the same area a couple of weeks ago, but I didn't really think about it,” said Slee. "I'm interested in knowing where they fall from."
According to Peter Gibson, an official with the Civil Aviation Safety Agency, the chances of chicks falling out of an airplane twice falling in the same area are extremely slim. “There was a chance that this could happen once, but twice in a row - it is simply impossible. I think the chickens were launched into the air from the ground,”he said.
Professor John O'Connor, head of the Department of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at Newcastle University, agreed that the chickens were most likely launched from the ground.
“Of course, there are known cases when fish, frogs and even chickens fell from the sky on people's heads, but before that they were sucked in by a tornado or a cyclone,” the scientist explained his point of view. - I think that the method of launching chickens into the air was invented by some inventors. Apparently they are shooting frozen chickens into the air to see how high they fly."
According to O'Connor, this does not require complex equipment - it is enough to make a large slingshot that can launch chickens hundreds of meters into the air.
Oh, these scientists! They are trying to explain everything with the help of available means, absolutely without delving into the essence of the phenomenon.
AMAZING "LOOKING" DEATH
Faith Swenson from California on October 26, 1996 saw the body of a little monkey in her yard. She fell straight from the sky onto a rope with drying clothes. In this case, a linen post about 10 cm thick was turned out of the ground. Nobody could explain where the body of the "flying" monkey came from.
A year later a carcass of a baby elephant weighing 400 kg appeared on the shore of Senzumara in Japan. It was found that it was not thrown from any of the sailing ships, and the animal did not belong to any of the Japanese zoos. Another mega-claw, with which the "inventors" wanted to see how high elephants fly?
In late 2002, the Associated Press reported that in Delaware, wildlife officials had found a dead deer in a forest hanging from a tall tree!
Have artiodactyls learned to climb trees? Nonsense, of course. And they all decided to write off the maniac as a cruel joke, who was immediately put on the wanted list. However, in early January 2003 in Canada in the province of Manitoba, not far from its capital city of Winnipeg, another dead deer was discovered, which was now hanging from a power line.
The press began to find out: how did such a heavy animal end up at a height of seven and a half meters? No maniac could throw it there. The journalists called the airlines, contacted the Ministry of Defense, veterinary clinics and zoos. The result - no one "hovered" in the air and space of the deer did not lose!
Researchers of the anomalous phenomenon believe the hypothesis of tornadoes and tornadoes carrying fish, frogs and other living creatures for hundreds and thousands of kilometers, only partially correct. The same fish, as you know, lives in a densely populated underwater world along with insects, snails, not counting plants, small stones, mud and everything else that makes up the habitat. In addition, a single species of fish rarely lives in the lakes. And from the sky, as a rule, individuals of the same species begin to pour.
It is difficult to imagine how whirlwinds or winds sort fish by species, preferring to carry one and reject the other. And why, together with the fish, nothing else ever falls out - water bugs, for example, algae or the same frogs?
When the inhabitants of the sea are pouring down from above, no one notes the salt rainfall before or after.
Recently, the Spanish press reported that during a thunderstorm, a rain of pink frogs fell on residents of the city of Marbella. According to journalists, thousands of cute amphibians fell right on the sidewalks, from where they rushed to streams and gardens, hurrying to hide in them.
Biologists, having studied amphibians, explained their pink color by small blood vessels that shine through pale and thin skin. The answer to the question of where the amazing pink frogs lived before the flight to Marbella hung in the air again.
Parapsychologists claim that the fall of anomalous objects from the sky is evidence of the existence of parallel worlds next to us. However, it is not yet possible to prove this version.
Gennady FEDOTOV, AN columnist