The resemblance to a modern (well, 1930-ish) steamroller is certainly striking. But need it be more than coincidence? I'm prepared to admit that the makers of the Nazca lines had hot-air balloons, as has been ingeniously argued. But not steam engines.
The origin - and method of manufacture - of the stone 'Giant Balls' of Costa Rica (see Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World, Chapter 3) is still an archaeological enigma. Surprisingly, it turns out that nature can make almost perfect spheres of stone. Hundreds of specimens of up to 11 ft (3 m) in diameter have been found in Mexico. They appear to be of volcanic origin, and were formed some forty million years ago when a torrent of incandescent ash cooled and crystallized. Although many of these natural spheres are almost geometrically perfect, they lack the finish of the man-made ones - though James Randi has suggested that they may have inspired their production. And, one might add, greatly assisted it: any sensible sculptor starts with a piece of rock as near as possible to the shape he's aiming at.
I am indebted to my old friend Colin Ross for information about much smaller spheres (the 'Moeraki Boulders') which occur in New Zealand. These are concretions, i.e. masses that have 'grown' from the surrounding rock by chemical precipitation over immense periods of time. Some are up to 6 ft (2 m) in diameter, and range from perfect spheres to 'highly irregular and fantastic shapes'.
Natural spheres can also be produced when rocks are trapped in holes on the beds of rivers, and strong currents continually turn them over and over. I am grateful to Hubert Siemerling for this information; he tells me that farmers in the Alps used this method to make stone cannon-balls, so the process must be fairly swift.
Never underrate Mother Nature. In this case, she has come up with several solutions to a problem which at first sight seems insoluble.
~~~~~~~
3 - Out of the Blue
Frogs that Fly and Fish that Rain
In Marksville, Louisiana, they still remember the day J. Numa Damiens burst into the offices of the local paper brandishing a fish. The date was 23 October 1947. J. Numa had telephoned the office a few minutes before, and was incensed at the scepticism shown by the hard-bitten smalltown journalists on the Weekly News to his extraordinary tale.
The fish, he claimed, had fallen from the sky. It was just one of hundreds which had rained down from out of the blue. They were all over Main Street, in the yard of the director of the Marksville Bank, in Mrs J.W. Joffrion's property next door, on rooftops everywhere. Three of the town's most eminent citizens had even been struck by cascading fish as they walked to work. The morning rush-hour had been thrown into chaos: cars and trucks were skidding on a carpet of slithery scales.
The journalists heard their visitor out as he waved the fish in front of their faces, crying, 'Here's one of 'em; take a look and then see if you think I'm talking through my hat.' It certainly sounded very strange, but surely fish couldn't really have rained from the sky. Not on peaceful little Marksville, Louisiana. With their deadline upon them, and no time to check the story, the journalists wrote a rather flippant account of J. Numa Damiens' visit for that week's edition, and concluded it with this folksy appeal to their readers: 'Please, Sister and Brother, won't you come to our rescue and tell us what's ailing folks who say fish are raining from heaven on a clear sunshiny day!'
It turned out that the paper had been wrong to scoff. By the time it hit the news-stands, eyewitnesses to the fish-fall had come forward with their own amazing tales to tell. Thirty years later, many of them could vividly recall what happened.
Said Anthony Roy Jnr: 'As I left the house to go to school that morning, I went through the back of the house, and as I got near the garage I heard something fall on the tin roof of the garage and simultaneously something hit me on my head and on my shoulders, and when I looked down I saw they were fish.'
Mrs Eddie Gremillion was ill at the time: 'I was in bed, not feeling good, and I didn't get up early. But my maid came early and she was out in the yard. She ran in excited like anything, and she's a black maid but that day she was white with excitement, and she came and she told me, "Miss Lola, Miss Lola," she said, "it's raining fishes. It's raining fishes."'
Mrs Elmire Roy's maid also panicked: 'When the fish fell on the tin roof, my maid, whose name was Viola, ran outside with me, and she was so upset, and she kept saying, "Lord, Lord, it must be the end of the world."'
Sheriff 'Potch' Didier was another witness. He was driving through Marksville at the time. 'I saw the fish fall out of the sky,' he said. 'I kept driving. I was very amazed.' At one house, the yard was 'just absolutely covered with fish. And just about that time some other people started getting here and everybody was just amazed at the whole thing, and we just couldn't believe it, believe that the fish had just dropped out of the sky.'
Yet the Marksville fish-fall, astonishing as it was to the citizens of the town, is not unique. All kinds of weird showers have been reported over the centuries, notably of fish, blocks of ice, and frogs. We marvelled at many such mysteries in Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World, but could offer little in the way of satisfactory explanation. However, recent work by researchers studying fresh cases and re-evaluating many from the past has provided a new understanding of how it is that fish and frogs can rain from the sky.
In the past, many experts flatly rejected the claims of eyewitnesses. For example, in 1859 a sawyer called John Lewis from the Aberdare Valley in Wales told this story to the local vicar, the Reverend John Griffith:
On Wednesday, February 9, I was getting out a piece of timber, for the purpose of setting it for the saw, when I was startled by something falling all over me - down my neck, on my head, and on my back. On putting my hand down my neck I was surprised to find they were little fish. By this time I saw the whole ground covered with them. I took off my hat, the brim of which was full of them. They were jumping all about.
Lewis added that the fish had arrived in two showers, about ten minutes apart. He and his workmates gathered some of them up and sent a few to London Zoo, where they were put on display. Although they proved a popular attraction, not everyone was impressed. J.E. Gray of the British Museum told the Zoological Magazine: 'On reading the evidence it appears to me most probably to be only a practical joke of the mates of John Lewis, who seem to have thrown a pailful of water with the fish in it over him.' Edward Newman agreed: 'Dr Gray is without doubt correct in attributing the whole affair to some practical joker.'
There are certainly reasons to be wary of frog-falls. Just because the creatures suddenly appear in large numbers at the same time as a shower, it does not mean that they have actually come down with the rain. In many cases the rain has simply brought the frogs out from their usual hiding places to enjoy the water. Early in this century, one observer put it rather quaintly:
The little creatures have doffed their tadpole tails and have wandered in their thousands far afield. During the day a crack in the ground, a dead leaf, or an empty snail shell affords them shelter, and during the night they travel in pursuit of small insects. Then comes the shower of rain. It fills the cracks in the ground, washes away the dead leaves, and chokes up the snail shell with mud-splashes. But what matter? The little frogs are all over the place revelling in the longed-for moisture ...
During a torrential downpour in August 1986, Melvin Harris of Hadleigh, Essex, happened to be out walking in the streets near his home. Shortly after the rain started he noticed a few frogs and toads, an uncommon sight in the suburbs. Soon there were dozens of them hopping about. He is certain that none came from the sky, and indeed watched several actually creeping out of nooks and crannies.
Sudden frog migrations have also caused confusion. When thousands of the hopping creatures appeared in Towyn, North Wales, in 1947, many of the townspeople believed that they had fallen from the sky. Three days after the invasion had begun, desperate householders were still trying to clear them from their property. 'They're swarming like bees,' said one weary citizen. It turns out that frog migrations are c
ommon around Towyn, for the town is situated between two marshes. One eyewitness, Jack Roberts, pointed out that 1947 was a vintage year for frogs. There were plenty of tadpoles in the spring and the summer was extremely wet.
Writer Francis Hitching discovered that a plague of frogs at Chalon-sur-Saone in France in 1922 was also almost certainly simply a mass-migration, although Charles Fort, the great collector of these and similar tales, had decided that they must have fallen from the sky. In 1979 Hitching checked the story while passing through the French town and concluded, "... it seems clear that what had happened was a migratory plague of frogs crossing the roads. Observers remembered being unable to avoid squashing them as they bicycled. No one had seen them dropping from the sky.'
In this century a few apparent 'rains' of fish were caused, as it turned out, by birds dropping their prey in flight. For example, in Australia at Forbes, New South Wales, fish -some of them weighing up to 1/2 lb - fell from the mouths of hundreds of passing pelicans on to astonished observers below, and in 1979 a golfer was struck on the head by an airborne red mullet dropped by a clumsy gull.
Yet such explanations do not account for every case. Many reliable eyewitnesses have actually described seeing fish and frogs fall when there has not been a bird in sight, let alone the large flock necessary to convey the shoals of airborne creatures that have landed on or around them.
In 1948 Mr Ian Patey, a former British Amateur Golf Champion, was playing a round on a course at Barton-on-Sea, near Bournemouth. His wife was about to play a shot. But,
just before she hit it, a fish fell down on the ground in front of us. And then we looked up in the sky and suddenly there were hundreds of fish falling in an area of about a hundred yards. They were live, they were larger than whitebait, possibly smaller than a sardine. My reaction was one of complete surprise. After all, there wasn't a cloud in the sky.
During the Second World War, Joe Alpin was stationed with the Artists' Rifles at an English stately home, Alton Towers in Staffordshire. One evening he was driving through the deer park in an army truck:
The sky suddenly darkened - very very dark indeed, like a thunderstorm. And then the frogs came, millions of them, raining out of the sky, millions upon millions of frogs about half an inch long. They fell all over us, all over the grass, all over the cars, down the neck of our tunics, on our feet, hands, everywhere. It rained frogs for at least an hour and a quarter.
At Esh Winning in County Durham in 1887 Mr Edward Cook, realizing that a storm was approaching, took shelter with his horse and rolley cart beneath the gables of a house.
In a few minutes large drops of rain began to fall, and with them, to my astonishment, scores of small frogs (about the size of a man's thumbnail) jumping about in all directions; and, as there was no dam or grass near, I could not imagine wherever they came from, until the storm was over and I had mounted the waggon again. Then I found several of the little gentlemen on the rolley, and knew they must have come down with the rain, it being impossible for them to have leaped so high.
In 1960 Grace Wright reported a similar experience to a magazine:
More than 50 years ago, I was walking along a street in Hounslow with my husband and small son when a heavy storm broke. We first thought they were hailstones until we saw they were all tiny frogs and were jumping about. My son filled a sweet-box to take home. The brim of my husband's hat was full of frogs while the storm lasted. They were everywhere.
On 28 August 1977 thousands of tiny frogs - some apparently no larger than peas - poured down on to Canet-Plage near Perpignan, France. Eyewitnesses said they bounced off the bonnets of cars.
In October 1986, The Journal of Meteorology published this vivid eyewitness account. It came from J.W. Roberts of Kettering, Northamptonshire, who, in 1919, was working at a farm during the school holidays.
I was walking between the stacks of hay and straw when there was a sudden rush of air. I looked up towards a disused quarry cutting and I saw a dark, almost black, cloud coming rushing towards me. It was a whirlwind. It picked up some of the loose straw lying about, and when it reached the buildings it seemed to stop, and the dark cloud suddenly fell down and I was smothered all over with small frogs - thousands of them about 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 inches long. I think they must have come from a lake a mile away up the cutting. Oh boy, was I scared. I ran across the footbridge over the brook right close to our house, and my mother could hardly believe me, only I had small frogs in my shirt, etc.
From earliest times, the theory usually advanced to explain these weird falls has been that the frogs and fish are carried aloft by freak winds, tornadoes or waterspouts. The creatures fall back to earth when the wind weakens. Tornadoes and whirlwinds certainly do play extraordinary tricks.
For example, when a tornado passed through the Brahmaputra district of India in March 1875, a dead cow was found up in the branches of a tree, about 30 ft from the ground. After a tornado had hit Oklahoma in 1905, the Associated Press reported that 'all the corpses in the track of the storm were found without shoes'; at Lansing, Michigan, in 1943, thirty chickens were found sitting in a row stripped entirely of their feathers; and on 30 May 1951 people clearing up after a tornado at Scottsbluff, Nebraska, found that a bean had been driven deep into an egg without cracking the shell. At St Louis in 1896 a whirlwind was reported to have lifted a carriage into the air.
It was apparently then carried along for 100 yards before being allowed to float back to earth so gently that the coachman's hat remained firmly on his head! In Tornadoes of the United States, Snowden D. Flora tells the remarkable tale of two Texans, known only as Al and Bill, who chanced to be at Al's home in Higgins, Texas, on 9 April 1947 when a tornado struck.
Al, hearing the roar, stepped to the door and opened it to see what was happening. It was torn from his grasp and disappeared. He was carried away, over the tree tops. Bill went to the door to investigate the disappearance of his friend and found himself, also, sailing through the Texas atmosphere, but in a slightly different direction from the course his friend was taking. Both landed about two hundred feet from the house with only minor injuries. Al started back and found Bill uncomfortably wrapped in wire.
He unwound his friend and both headed for Al's house, crawling because the wind was too strong to walk against. They reached the site of the house only to find that all the house except the floor had disappeared. The almost incredible part of the story is that Al's wife and two children were huddled on a divan, uninjured. The only other piece of furniture left on the floor was a lamp.
If the wind can lift two beefy Texans and an Indian cow into the air, fish and frogs must present no problem, and many fish- and frog-falls do turn out, on close investigation, to occur at times when unusual winds are recorded. This is certainly true in the case of the Marksville fish-fall. We know this because, by a remarkable coincidence, one of the first people to reach the fish-strewn streets of the town was a biologist working for the US Department of Wild Life and Fisheries.
A.D. Bajkov and his wife had been having breakfast in a restaurant when a bemused waitress told them that fish were raining down outside. The Bajkovs rushed to the sidewalk, their food forgotten, and at once set about identifying the airborne shoal.
They were freshwater fish native to local waters', Bajkov later reported in a letter to the American journal, Science. He found large-mouth black bass, goggle-eyes, two species of sunfish, hickory shad, and several kinds of minnows. There were more shad than anything else. Bajkov collected a jarful of prize specimens for distribution to museums. Like a good scientist, he also took careful note of the weather conditions.
The actual falling of the fish occurred in somewhat short intervals, during foggy and comparatively calm weather. The velocity of the wind on the ground did not exceed eight miles per hour. The New Orleans weather bureau had no report of any large tornado, or updrift, in the vicinity of Marksville at that time. However, James Nelson Gowanloch, chief biologist for the Louisiana Department of Wild Lif
e and Fisheries, and I had noticed the presence of numerous small tornadoes, or 'devil dusters' the day before the 'rain of fish' in Marksville.
A more obvious connection between a fall and unusual weather conditions was noted in a letter sent to the East Anglian Magazine in 1958. The writer, H. Bye, had overheard a conversation between an old farmhand and a group of workers. The farmhand was telling them 'that at West Row and Isleham, on the Cambridge/Suffolk border, when he was a young man, a waterspout was seen over the River Lark. Some hours afterwards there was a heavy thunderstorm and it rained frogs.'
A waterspout also blew up near the site of another English frog-fall in 1892, according to Symons's Monthly Meteorological Magazine:
During the storm that raged with considerable fury in Birmingham on Wednesday morning, June 30, a shower of frogs fell in the suburb of Moseley. They were found scattered about several gardens. Almost white in colour, they had evidently been absorbed in a small waterspout that was driven over Birmingham by the tempest.
In 1982 Michael W. Rowe, writing in the Journal of Meteorology, revealed that he had discovered a graphic account of fish cascading from a waterspout. It occurs in a book called The Excitement, published in 1830. According to the story, some travellers were sailing through the Strait of Malacca in about 1760, when:
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