April 11, 1998
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An old joking reply to, "It's raining cats and dogs outside."
The expression may be an exaggeration, but it's only a slight
one.
An 1844 report tells of a rainy day in Selby, Yorkshire, when
small frogs began dropping out of the sky in large numbers. Townspeople
were able to hold out their hats and catch the tiny amphibians
as they fell. In their 1982 book Living Wonders John Michell
and Robert J. M. Rickard, record a number of such natural curiosities.
Decades before the Selby incident, 1789 to be exact, the Reverend
Gilbert White of Selborne, England, a writer on natural history,
concluded that the idea of frogs and toads falling out of the
sky was a "foolish opinion" and declared it was the
cooling effects of a sudden rainstorm that had tempted the creatures
to hop out of their places of concealment on the ground. In 1877
a shower of baby alligators landed in South Carolina and such
infant saurian showers have also descended in other parts of the
Carolinas. One of the reptiles was even discovered in the air
sack of the dirigible Macon in 1934, over the skies of California.
Reports have continued to surface. A 1929 waterspout in the Gulf
of Mexico picked up a mass of fish and dropped them onto the decks
of a nearby fishing boat. In 1956 a Mrs. Faye Swanson of San Mateo,
California, went out in her backyard one October morning to discover
the body of a dead monkey that appeared to have fallen from the
sky and ripped through her clothesline before striking the ground
and perishing. Investigators later determined that there had been
no planes in the area that morning. And from the Wall Street Journal
of August 25th, 1969, comes a story out of the Indonesian island
of Lombok, that tells of farmers standing in their fields and
watching, they say, as hordes of rats dropped from above and scattered
among the crops, doing great damage.
Such heavenly outpourings seem to go back at least to the third
century A. D., when the Greek writer-philosopher Athenaeus told
of tiny animals dropping from the sky. And, of course, one of
the ten plagues afflicting Egypt in the time of Moses was a rain
of frogs. Whirlwinds, waterspouts, tornadoes, even spontaneous
generation have been called up, to account for animal life falling
from the sky or appearing in dirigible airbags. Whether you consider
natural explanations, or Twilight Zone theories, I would like
to submit, for your consideration, that a more modern reason may
be the real culprit.
I can just imagine Pharaoh walking over to the portico of his
palace, watching frogs rain from the sky onto the desert sands
for a few moments, then turning back and remarking to one of his
priests, "That El Niño has a lot to answer for."
© 1998 David Minor / Eagles Byte