Raining Animals

For nearly 2,000 years, and from nearly every part of the world, there have been reports of showers of rain which contained large quantities of live frogs, fish, or other creatures, and the reports still occur with quite startling regularity. An early reference to Weymouth in The Travels of Peter Mundy in Europe and Asia, Volume 3 part 1: 1634-1637 ((1919), 10-11) concerns, unusually, small snails, and implies that it was a regular occurrence and that the people found them in their hats because they ‘dropp out of the ayre’, and Reginald Scot (1584: book 13, chapter 18) provides another early English reference. Raining animals is a relatively rare meteorological phenomenon, although occurrences have been reported from many countries throughout history. One hypothesis that has been furthered to explain this phenomenon is that strong winds travelling over water sometimes pick up debris such as fish or frogs, and carry them for up to several miles.

Fishes falling From The Sky in Singapore

However, this primary aspect of the phenomenon has never been witnessed or scientifically tested. The animals most likely to drop from the sky in a rainfall are fish and frogs, with birds coming third.

Sometimes the animals survive the fall, especially fish, suggesting a small time gap between the extraction and the actual drop. Several witnesses of raining frogs describe the animals as startled, though healthy, and exhibiting relatively normal behavior shortly after the event. In some incidents, however, the animals are frozen to death or even completely encased in ice. These occurrences may be evidence for the transport of the victims to high altitudes, where the temperature is below zero, and they show how powerful meteorological forces can be.

The potential violence of this phenomenon is shown by examples where the product of the rain is not intact animals, but shredded body parts. Some cases are caused just after storms having strong winds especially during tornadoes. However, there have been numerous cases in which rainfalls of animals have occurred in fair weather and in the absence of strong winds or waterspouts.Various explanations have been put forward, including an early belief that the sun draws up frogspawn, which then hatches in the clouds.

Modern theories usually involve some sort of localized waterspout or whirlwind which sucks up the contents of a pond or other body of water and deposits them at a distance, but this still leaves many questions unanswered. Forteans revel in this type of phenomenon: widely reported, suitably mysterious, on the edge of science but not (yet) accepted by the scientific establishment. We can thus claim fish falls, and related phenomena, as still in the realms of folklore, at least for the time being.

(Source : Wikipedia)