It’s faint, but there’s two of them!

Strange “Rain”

If you were to think about what comes from the sky, you would most likely think of water in the form of rain, sleet, snow, or hail. However, sometimes extraordinarily bizarre things rain down from the heavens. Here is a list of several of the strangest “rains.”

1.       Fish: Reports of Fish raining down from the sky have been occurring since 200 AD. More recent incidents that have been recorded are the following: In 1947a Biologist was notified by his waitress at the café which he was dining at that “Fish were falling from the sky.” When he ran out he was able to grab several of the fish as they fell. The fish were 2-9 inches long, and were icy to the touch. In 1984, a builder noticed that there were almost a dozen fish on the roof of a man named Ron Langton’s house. Other fish also rained down on three other locations in London that night. Finally, in 2010 hundreds of fish rained in Lajamanu, Australia.

2.       Blood:  Blood rain or red rain occurs when blood seems to fall from the sky. Sightings have occurred since 8th century BC. In the past the appearance of blood rain was seen as a bad omen, and was used to foreshadow events. There are several theories as to what blood rain is. Scientists have said that it may be caused by an unidentified form of life without DNA, red dust suspended in water, or by the presence of micro-organism. Sunspots and Aurorae may also be to blame.

3.       Raw Meat: There have been several instances where raw meat has fallen from the sky. The most famous incident was the Kentucky Meat Shower on March 3rd, 1876.  During this time several flakes of red meat, thought to be beef, mutton or venison, rained down near Rankin, Kentucky.

4.       Frogs: One of the most common types of bizarre “rain” is frogs. Frogs have more recorded incidents than any other types of objects that have fallen from the sky, and the amount of the falling creatures is much larger. In 1977, thousands of frogs fell prior to a heavy storm in Carnet-Plage France. On September 23rd 1973, “tens of thousands” of small frogs fell during a storm in Brignoles France. In 2010, tadpoles rained down on a town in Japan.

5.       Golf Balls: Several dozens of golf balls fell on the town of Punta Gorda off the coast of Florida in 1969.

6.       Yellow Rain: In 1978 yellow rain fell on villages in Laos. No one knows what the cause of this rain was, however some suspect it was either a substance that fell from planes, a chemical weapons attack, or caused by a phenomenon known as mass defecation flights, where honeybees rained down yellow bee feces.

7.       Money: On October 8th, 1976, a plane dropped 500 lire, 1,000 lire, and 10,000 lire notes down on the citizens of Piazza Venezia in Rome. In another instance, a German woman was able to collect a decent amount of money as it fell from the sky as she was driving.

8.       Human Waste: Gerry and Leroy Cinnamon of Woodinville, Washington were shocked when, on October 18th, 1992, several baseball sized chunks of greenish ice came crashing through the roof of their living room. As it began to melt, it started to smell horrible. Two days later the Federal Aviation Administration confirmed that the green chunks of ice were actually frozen human waste from a leaky United Airlines sewage system. Similarly, chunks of waste have also fallen in Tennessee (where it weighed 25 lbs!), in Denver, and Chicago.

9.       Hay: The town of Devizes in England was in for a surprise when hay began raining down in handful size lumps in the center of town.

10.   Sharks: In 2012 a shark fell on a golf course in Southern California. It was able to be transported back to the ocean where it was released.

Other Strange Things: Some other strange things to have fallen from the sky include snakes, spiders, maggots, seeds, nuts, stones, mud, birds, and non-dairy creamer.

The Petersburg correspondent of the Richmond Dispatch says: "When people remarked to each other, at four o'clock yesterday morning, that it was raining cats and dogs, they had no idea that it was raining frogs also; but it was. Either the frogs came along with the storm, or else came out of the earth in some parts of the city in multitudes greater than ever were seen in this corner of the earth. The lower streets and the depot yards of the Atlantic, Mississippi and Ohio and the Richmond and Petersburg railroads were so dense with these creatures that it was almost impossible to walk without treading on them. They were not larger than five-cent pieces, and kept up a constant hopping, as if they were trying to get back home. Most of them must have died. If they had been full grown, and had met that fate, the air would have been poisoned by such a contribution, and malaria would have resulted. It is believed that the high wind which prevailed during the storm swept this plague of frogs from a neighboring swamp. Great interest was excited by their appearance.”

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By Sarah Zielinski, Smithsonian.com, September 8, 2015

Earlier this year, a milky white rain coated cars, windows and people in parts of Washington, Oregon and Idaho. The precipitation wasn’t dangerous, but it was a bit of a mystery.

Rain isn’t pure water, because precipitation can’t form without some sort of particle to act as a nucleus, which gathers water molecules from the air until the drop gets heavy enough to fall. But sometimes rain is a lot dirtier than normal. Brian Lamb, an air quality specialist at Washington State University, and his colleagues thought that the milky rain might be due to one of the wildfire burn scars they were studying in the Pacific Northwest.

“If a windstorm comes along with the right conditions, you can produce really huge dust and ash plumes from these burn scars,” he says. But the team couldn’t trace the milky rain to one of those sites. Eventually, scientists found the source--a dust storm had whipped up particles from a shallow lakebed in southern Oregon that had a high amount of saline, similar to the composition of the milky rain.

This unusual weather in the Pacific Northwest is just the latest in a long history of weird rains that may have scientific backing, according to Rain: A Natural and Cultural History. “Frog and toad rains, fish rains and colored rains--most often red, yellow or black--are among the most common accounts of strange rain, reported since ancient times,” author Cynthia Barnett notes in the book.

Heraclides Lembus, a Greek philosopher who lived in the second century B.C., writes: “In Paeonia and Dardania, it has, they say, before now rained frogs; and so great has been the number of these frogs that the houses and the roads have been full of them.”

The phenomenon is not restricted to history. The village of Yoro in Honduras celebrates the annual Festival de la Lluvia de Peces, to commemorate the rain of small, silvery fish that allegedly happens at least once a year. And in 2005, thousands of itty-bitty frogs reportedly rained down on a town in northwestern Serbia. “The frogs, different from those usually seen in the area, survived the fall and hopped around in search of water,” according to one news story.

“Still more peculiar rains reported over history have included hay, snakes, maggots, seeds, nuts, stones and shredded meat (that last one is suspected to have dropped from a boisterous flock of feeding vultures),” Barnett writes. She even found one account of a rain of golf balls in Florida--potentially linked to a waterspout crossing over a golf course.

“I always find the frogs and the fish to be weird,” says John Knox, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Georgia. “And I’m not sure we totally understand that, but it seems that it has to be that somewhere there’s a waterspout or a tornado … something must have gone over a lake, sucked up a bunch of fish” or other material and dropped it somewhere else.

How far an object travels depends on shape, weight and wind, Knox says. In his studies of tornado debris, he has documented printed photographs that traveled as far as 200 miles and a metal sign that flew about 50 miles. “That sign went up and did the magic carpet ride,” landing in the next state, he says.

Dust, the usual culprit behind oddly colored rains, can travel a lot farther. Yellow dust that fell on western Washington in 1998 was traced to the Gobi Desert. And the Sahara can spread its dust thousands of miles across the Atlantic. “If that dust plume interacts with some precipitation, then you’ve got the ingredients where the dust is washed out in rainfall,” says Lamb. “The color of the rain will probably reflect the mineral composition of the source.”

The Saharan dust produces red rains, for instance, and the Gobi Desert yellow ones. Black rains can come from volcanoes or from pollution. Dirty, greasy rains that turned sheep black in 19th-century Europe were linked to the soot from the great manufacturing centers in England and Scotland. And in more recent history, the burning of Kuwaiti oil wells in the Gulf War in 1991 caused black rain and snow to fall in India.

Cynthia Barnett’s “Rain” weaves together science--the true shape of a raindrop, the mysteries of frog and fish rains--with the human story of our ambition to control it.

The source of colored rains is not always clear. A mysterious red rain has sometimes fallen on the southwest coast of India. “People have observed red stains so rich they can stain white clothes pink,” Barnett writes. Researchers have found tiny red particles in the precipitation that look like cells, but what those cells might be has yet to be determined.

And there is one yellow rain that fell on villages in Laos in 1978 that has people still arguing over what actually happened. Refugees claimed that the substance fell from planes or helicopters, and some experts suspected that it was a chemical weapons attack. But other scientists proposed a different cause: mass “defecation flights” by honeybees that rained yellow bee feces.

But while rains of objects or colored rains may seem odd, they are more common than we realize. In the early 20th century, Charles Hoy Fort collected around 60,000 newspaper reports that described falls of everything from frogs and snakes to cinders and salt. Even that milky rain in the Pacific Northwest wasn’t a first for the area, notes Lamb.

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