This Month's Oddity in the News:

Raining Frogs

(and fish and other animals)

IN THE ARCHIVES:

The Real Chupacabra
75-Year-Old Mystery
History of Halloween
The First European
Resurrection of an Extinct Animal
Medieval Vampire Skull

From The Tennessee Journalist in March 2010:

A rainstorm in Minneapolis in 1901caused several inches of frogs to appear, blocking all travel in the area.

Later in 1981, the people of southern Greece woke up one morning to find their entire town covered in frogs that had dropped in the night. Fish have also been recorded to fall from the sky during a rainstorm, as was the case in Singapore in 1861.

Frogs and fish do not evaporate, do not fly, and yet somehow fall onto streets, umbrellas, and even hats and heads.

According to "National Geographic," the first explanation of these strange happenings came from the French physicist Andre-Marie Ampere who hypothesized that frogs and toads roam the countryside in large numbers and when a storm hits, the winds are strong enough to pick up the amphibians and carry them elsewhere before dropping them down as the storm dies out.       

These creatures are pretty hardy, too. Most survive, albeit a little confused, and they are not the only ones. People have been fascinated by this phenomenon since the early Bible times with Moses' plagues on Egypt.      

Read more about this article HERE.

From Discover Magazine in June 2009:

Showers (as in, actual showers) of tadpoles, fish and even frogs have confused scientists, meteorologists, and officials in central Japan’s Ishikawa Prefecture, located on the Japan Sea Coast. One resident found 13 dead carp, each around 3 inches long, on and around his car. Another reported hearing a strange noise in a nearby parking lot, then found over a hundred tadpoles covering cars in the lot.

Various objects and animals do occasionally fall from the sky: It’s called “Fafrotskies,” short for “fall from the skies.” These events generally occur when water spouts, storms, and strong winds suck objects from bodies of water and deposit them on land. But because there had been no reports of strong wind, many officials and meteorologists say this explanation can’t explain the torrent of tadpoles.

Read more about this article HERE.