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). Dirt-toting rains are more common. In 1902, a massive dust storm kicked up in Illinois blew to the Eastern Seaboard, where it met up with thick rain clouds over New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania. The resulting strange rain was short but shocking for those caught in it: The sky rained mud. “People who were on the street were covered with mud spots,” wrote a New York Times correspondent from the Finger Lakes region of New York. “Clothes hanging on the line were smeared.” In Aurora, New York, the Reverend George P. Sewell wrote that the storm front was forty miles across and “discolored or soiled everything exposed to it.”
In recent years, in certain parts of the world including Australia’s Lajamanu in the Northern Territory and the village of Yoro in Honduras, people who remember fish rains from childhood have experienced them again as adults, grabbing buckets to collect dinner from heaven. Yoro has begun an annual carnival, Festival de la Lluvia de Peces, to celebrate the phenomenon. Australian scientists have some of the best long-term data on fish falls, beginning in the 1920s, but not enough to explain them definitively. Modern meteorologists agree with Dr. Gudger’s theory that tornadoes and waterspouts are the most likely culprits. In one of the few reports of multiple species falling from the sky, in June 1957, thousands of small fish, frogs, and crawfish rained down on an Alabama town called Magnolia Terminal. A tornado reported around fifteen miles to the south was likely responsible, speculates the severe-weather guru Dr. Greg Forbes. But he and other scientists acknowledge it doesn’t explain why an air current would pick up only small frogs or fish and not every other algae and creature from the same pond.
The strange rain of Labor Day 1969 in Punta Gorda, Florida, especially begs the question. During an otherwise normal rainstorm, golf balls seemed to hail onto the rooftops and roads; at least that’s what local police lieutenant Clarence Walter claimed to the St. Petersburg Times, which ran the story under the header “Streets, Gutters a Duffer’s Dream.” The newspaper reported that “dozens and dozens and dozens” of golf balls lined the sidewalks, streets, and gutters following the rain, but gave no theories why. Popular Mechanics magazine speculated that a waterspout could have sipped up a ball-filled pond, then dropped its catch on the town. It seemed like an appropriate strange rain for golf-enthused southwest Florida. Often, the rain that falls upon us is simply returning what we’ve released to the earth.
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Judging by sheer number of words published on the subject, no one person has given more thought to strange rain than Charles Hoy Fort. He was born in Albany, New York, in 1874, the oldest son in a wealthy family of grocers. As a boy, when Fort expressed far more interest in natural history than the family business, his father tried to beat shopkeeping into him. Instead, Fort became ever more rebellious and questioning, and eventually left home to make his way as a writer.
In the early 1900s he tried science fiction, including a novel about beings on Mars controlling life on Earth. When his fiction did not sell, Fort began work on what his biographer Jim Steinmeyer calls “the first book of oddities.” Fort’s 1919 The Book of the Damned was forerunner to popular collections such as The Guinness Book of World Records (first published in 1955), Ripley’s, and National Geographic’s Weird but True series. Those quirky lists are irresistible to kids. But Fort’s work was not kids’ stuff. He was out to needle the establishment—not only religion and philosophy but also science, which he claimed was a sham for excluding bizarre facts too messy to fit its theories. Those included frog and fish falls, mysterious lights or airships reported in the sky before airships were invented, and perhaps his greatest obsession, colored rains—red rains, yellow rains, “rain so black as to be described as a ‘shower of ink.’ ”
Fort spent years digging up reports of strange rain, combing through archives in the New York Public Library and the British Museum. He ultimately collected some 60,000 newspaper clippings about these and other unusual occurrences, describing them as “damned” because, without a logical explanation, scientists tended to dismiss them. He would meticulously source his weird findings like a good researcher, carefully citing dates and publications that corroborated rains of toads, frogs, snakes, eels, spiders, stones, pebbles, salt, cinders, coal, and gelatinous goo. But then he would ridicule the official theory and toss in some wild speculation from the sci-fi-writer side of his brain: Perhaps there was an invisible “Super Sargasso Sea” overhead, he would declare, a dimensional crossroads where things suddenly materialize or disappear: “derelicts, rubbish, old cargoes from inter-planetary wrecks; things cast out into what is called space by convulsions of other planets.”
Many of Fort’s pet phenomena, including frog and fish falls and colored rains, have since been accepted by science—if not entirely explained. In 1981, U.S. Secretary of State Alexander Haig cited yellow rain as evidence when he accused the Soviet Union of supplying chemical weapons to Communist Vietnam and Laos to use against the Hmong people, in violation of the Geneva Protocol and 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. The biologist and bee expert Thomas D. Seeley, now at Cornell, thought the description sounded like the massive “defecation flights” of honeybees known to send bee poop and pollen in rainlike showers of yellow. He later worked with the Harvard chemical-weapons expert Matthew Meselson to denounce the government’s claim and show “physical and biological evidence that yellow rain is the feces of Southeast Asian honeybees.” Refugee workers and Hmong people who survived horrific experiences regardless of whether chemical attacks occurred believe they did occur. Other scientists and former CIA agents remain divided or uncertain. Fort could have told them he knew of reports of yellow rain in history stretching back to 1695 in Ireland.
Fort likewise collected many reports of red rain. He was incensed by the scientific explanations that they must be associated with Saharan sandstorms. “My own impositivist acceptances are: That some red rains are colored by sands from the Sahara desert; Some by sands from other terrestrial sources; Some by sands from other worlds, or from their deserts—also from aerial regions too indefinite or amorphous to be thought of as ‘worlds’ or planets.”
Falls of red rain and red dust are well documented today. Meteorologists do link most of them to the great Sahara. Weather satellites show the dust sweeping for thousands of miles into the Atlantic Ocean, gusting north to call children to write “Wash Me” on the cars of Wales, or blowing south, where it can weaken formation of hurricanes that otherwise might wallop the eastern United States.
In at least one intriguing case, though, blood-red rains have been colored by something more mysterious. For more than a century along the southwest coast of India in the state of Kerala, people have observed red rains so rich they can stain white clothes pink. Conventional wisdom had it that Kerala’s red rains were caused by dust from a distant desert. But after a red rain in the summer of 2001, when researchers analyzed scarlet rainwater collected around Kerala, they found it contained no dust. It was full of microscopic red particles that looked like biological cells. Other scientists suspected they were spores from abundant algae that cover trees in the region. But physicists Godfrey Louis and Santhosh Kumar found that the pigmented particles (stored in laboratories, they maintain their deep red color these years later) did not contain the flagellae usually found in algae cells; other scientists have also disproved the algal-bloom theory.
Louis and Kumar hypothesized that the 2001 rain was linked to a meteor airburst that occurred over Kottoyam the day the red drops began to fall. The scientists caused a stir when they wondered if the red particles could be extraterrestrial in origin. Their latest study has been published with a team of astrobiologists and molecular biologists in the U.K. who were initially skeptical of the claims. The team found that the red rain cells survive and grow after incubating for two hours at 121 degrees Celsi
us (250 degrees Fahrenheit); most forms of life on Earth grow in a temperature range between 10 and 45 degrees Celsius. When exposed to the extreme heat, the red cells began to produce daughter cells. Additionally, the team reported that the fluorescent luminosity of the red cells bears “remarkable correspondence with the extended red emission observed in the Red Rectangle planetary nebula and other galactic and extragalactic dust clouds.”
The scientists suggested an extraterrestrial origin. Others remain skeptical, but this much is certain: Charles Fort at last would have had a scientific theory he could buy into.
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At the University of Oklahoma in Norman, environmental engineering professor David Sabatini always starts off his “Introduction to Water” class by asking students: “What’s the purest water on Earth?” Rain is usually the most popular response, followed by mountain streams and snow. The answer is distilled water; made for microchips and not to drink. (The human body needs all the ions that water picks up from the earth, and our taste buds like them, too.) Like Isaac Newton unweaving the rainbow, Sabatini methodically debunks the students’ responses, beginning with the rain.
Just as rain can reflect the joy or melancholy of the person caught in the downpour, rain’s quality or cleanliness reflects the air and oceans it travels through. While many of us revel in the scent of rain from childhood, rain can also take on the sickening tastes and odors of pollution—or death. Survivors of the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 reported black rains that poured for up to seven hours after the bombings. Some children wandering in the hellish aftermath were so thirsty they collected the inky rain and drank it, succumbing quickly to death.
Surviving prisoners of the Auschwitz death camp in Poland describe rains of unimaginable misery, stinking of diarrhea. It would take survivors years to remember rain’s pleasantness, in the same way they had to relearn to use toothbrushes, eating utensils, and toilet paper—in the same way they had to relearn to smile.
Charles Hoy Fort was especially interested in black rains, which frequently fell on the British Isles in the nineteenth century. Shepherds on the upland moors gave the name “moorgrime” to the inky rains and soot that accumulated on the fleeces of their sheep. It was some of the first proof that industrial emissions could be carried for long distances. It was also a reminder that what goes up must come down; sometimes, with the air-scrubbing rain.
Some of the tales of black rains of ash and pulverized pumice that Fort collected from Europe could be attributed to Mount Vesuvius in Italy. The volcano erupted five times in the second half of the nineteenth century. But chemists linked the greasy rains that could turn a white sheep black to the soot emanating from the manufacturing cities of northern England and central Scotland—then cranking out Mr. Macintosh’s double textures and other textiles, along with a choking grime that blackened the air in London, in Manchester, and beyond. Simply put: The more pollution we pump into the atmosphere, the dirtier the rain.
In 1853, Charles Dickens opened his novel Bleak House with a soft black drizzle, “flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes,” and “fog everywhere.” Fog is essentially an eye-level cloud. If cooling air becomes saturated with water vapor, some of the vapor condenses around microscopic bits, forming droplets, which turn to fog. Given the exact same amount of water vapor, fog over a dirty city will be much thicker than fog over the sea because it gloms on to all those particles of smoke.
By Dickens’s time, it was obvious that the atmosphere over industrial cities was no longer entirely natural. In the countryside, he wrote, “fog was grey, whereas in London it was, at about the boundary line, dark yellow, and a little within it brown, and then browner, and then browner, until at the heart of the City…it was rusty-black.”
Londoners called the thick brews of smoke and fog that could alight on the city “pea-soupers” or “London Particulars.” When a pea-souper claimed 1,150 lives at the turn of the twentieth century, a physician, Harold Des Voeux of the Coal Smoke Abatement Society, dubbed the choking air “smog.” The region’s coal-fired factory kilns and boilers, along with steam locomotives and ships, fumes from lorries and buses, and the soft coal that burned in the hearth of every home, would culminate famously in London’s Great Fog of 1952. The worst pea-souper in London’s history, it was bleaker than anything Dickens could have dreamed up.
As the calendar turned to December, a cold, damp fog settled on the city, absorbing all the smoke and soot in the air. Those conditions were not unusual. But on December 5, the winds stopped blowing. A band of warm, high pressure moved in, which trapped the colder air below and held the toxic smog in place, suffocating the city.
The smog thickened and darkened until visibility was reduced to near zero. Streetlights burned all day. People made face masks for themselves and their children before venturing outside. Once out, greasy soot rained upon them, and many could not find their way home. They inched along sidewalks by feeling the walls of buildings. They abandoned their cars. Bus and trolley services were halted, Heathrow Airport and the Port of London shuttered. People, press, and politicians were so focused on the fog’s unusual consequences for daily life—criminals were exploiting it to conceal a rash of “burglaries, attacks, and robberies” and all football games were canceled, along with La Traviata when the murk filled Sadler’s Wells Theatre—they were slow to recognize the unfolding human health disaster.
Ultimately, the Great Fog killed 12,000 people—4,000 over the five days it lingered, and an estimated 8,000 more in the months to follow—making it the worst peacetime catastrophe in British history. For many months afterward, the government tried to minimize the significance and magnitude of the deaths, and to characterize the killer fog as a natural disaster. Facing intense public pressure for action, the minister of health complained, “Anyone would think fog had only started in London since I became minister.” It would take four years, but Parliament finally passed a Clean Air Act in 1956 that created zones where only smokeless fuels could be burned, and required relocation of power stations away from cities. The United States passed its Air Pollution Control Act in 1955, seven years after the same kind of atmospheric inversion killed twenty and sickened thousands in the mill town of Donora, Pennsylvania. But the U.S. legislation and 1963 update called for nothing but research. Not until the Clean Air Act of 1970 did the federal government step in to regulate air pollution.
Great Britain has never again seen the black rains of its dark industrial history, although in the United States, a memorable black rain fell in South Boston in 1960. Engineers at the Metropolitan Transit Authority power plant combined pulverized coal and oil, creating a disastrous mess of emissions that mixed with the falling rain to produce a “black ink that would not wash off surfaces and foamed when it hit the street.” Black rains and black snow also fell in the northern mountain ranges of India’s Jammu and Kashmir in the winter of 1991; with no heavy industry in the region, scientists linked them to the burning of oil wells in Kuwait during the Gulf War. In the twenty-first century, bloggers in China have reported black rains associated with plants burning coal and poor-quality heavy oils on several occasions in Shenzhen, just north of Hong Kong. Residents reported that the rains can carry a pungent odor, cause a burning sensation to skin, corrode car paint, and leave raindrop-sized holes in flower petals.
Surely no strange rain could be as insidious as toxic black streaks falling from polluted skies. But there did turn out to be one: fresh, clean-looking rain that would also prove poisonous.
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It comes as no surprise that acid rain was first discovered in the gritty skies over Manchester. Robert Angus Smith, an English chemist, was Britain’s first alkali inspector (aka air-pollution watchdog). In 1852, he discovered a link between Manchester’s soot pollution and high levels of acidity he found in rainfall. Twenty years later, Smith described the problem of “acid rain” in a six-hundred-page book on the subject. For nearly a century, no one paid a bit of attention. Acid
rain has no discernible taste or smell, no dramatic calling card of any kind. Its harm to ecosystems, along with the statues and buildings of antiquity, are not noticeable for many years. In the 1960s, they began to reveal themselves in Germany’s Black Forest. Scientists found “a baffling form of tree cancer” metastasizing in the famous Schwarzwald.
In ten years, a third of the fir trees in the forest were dead. Half those remaining were nearly dead. “Instead of lush, dark green foliage that gave the Schwarzwald its name, many trees now have only sickly yellowy-brown needles,” wrote one researcher. Half the beech trees and half the oaks were also damaged. Elm trees were dying at age 60 rather than their normal life span of 130 years. The freshwaters in Germany’s forested mountain regions likewise were succumbing to acidity. Some streams became so toxic the fish disappeared entirely.
Acid rain—more accurately, any acid hanging around the air rain or shine—forms much like the old pea-soupers of London. But instead of smoke we can see, its pollutants are invisible gases we cannot. When industrial smokestacks release sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides high into the air, the chemical gases react with the sun, water, and other elements to form tiny drops of sulfuric and nitric acid. These drops, in turn, join up with the clouds. Winds now carry the acids through the atmosphere. Acid rain knows no geopolitical boundaries; it often travels far from the source that created it. One study found high concentrations of the flying pollutants four hundred miles off the Eastern Seaboard over the Atlantic Ocean, presumed to come from U.S. industrial hubs. When it falls back to Earth, acid rain moves through soil, trees and plants, and freshwaters, setting off a cascade of harm.
As the scientists working in the Black Forest puzzled over what was killing trees and lakes, those in the northeastern United States, Canada, Scandinavia, and other parts of Europe also saw the cancer in forests and freshwaters. The sickest areas included the Adirondack Mountains of New York and southern Norway, where hundreds of lakes became fishless. The hot spots all turned out to be upland areas well watered by rain and snow, lying downwind of industrial belts with power stations, smelters, and large cities. Other U.S. hot spots included the Ohio River Valley, the Rockies, the Great Smoky Mountains, parts of Wisconsin and Minnesota, the Pacific Northwest, and the Pine Barrens of New Jersey.
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