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SHOWER OF CANDY — A very uncommon and curious phenomenon is recorded as having occurred in some sections of Lake County on the nights of September 2d and 11, 1857. It is said that on both of these nights there fell a shower of candy or sugar. The crystals were from one-eighth to one-fourth of an inch in length, and the size of a goose quill. Syrup was made of it by some of the lady residents of the section. If this is a canard, it is surely a sweet one.
Boston Transcript, March 21, 1922 — clipping sent to me by Mr. J. David Stern, Editor and Publisher of the Camden (N.J.) Daily Courier —
"Geneva, March 21 — During a heavy snow-storm in the Alps recently thousands of exotic insects resembling spiders, caterpillars and huge ants fell on the slopes and quickly died. Local naturalists are unable to explain the phenomenon, but one theory is [246/247] that the insects were blown in on the wind from a warmer climate."(18)
The fall of unknown insects in a snow storm is not the circumstance that I call most attention to. It is worth noting that I have records of half a dozen similar occurrences in the Alps, usually about the last of January, but the striking circumstance is that insects of different species and of different specific gravities fell together. The conventional explanation is that a wind, far away, raised a great variety of small objects, and segregated them according to specific gravity, so that twigs and grasses fell in one place, dust some other place, pebbles somewhere else, and insects farther along somewhere. This would be very fine segregation. There was no very fine segregation in this occurrence. Something of a seasonal, or migratory, nature, from some other world, localized in the sky, relatively to the Alps, is suggested.
Writing in American Entomologist recently (Spring 2010 "Frequent Flyer Miles"), May Berenbaum says pilots have long known insects can fly very high.
"Beginning in 1926, Tanglefoot-coated slides were affixed to airplanes to collect insects, with famed aviator Charles Lindbergh contributing to the data-collection effort by carrying sticky glass slides on his 1933 flight crossing the Atlantic at 2,460 to 5,410 feet and over Greenland at 7,870 to 12,135 feet."
Now 12,000 feet is pretty high, but the all-time champ is, of all things, a termite!
In Berenbaum's article, she mentions a 1961 study by J.L. Gressit in which an insect trap was placed on a Super-Constellation airplane. That plane flew 116,684 miles sampling the air, catching whatever was up there, and, Berenbaum says, "the trap managed to capture a single termite at 19,000 feet." That's the record.
You wonder how a little critter can survive the wind, the cold, the absence of company. "Wind dispersal at great heights can be rough on insects," Berenbaum writes. And yet they are very tough. Of 1,610 insects captured by another team of scientists led by L.R. Taylor in 1960, 97 percent were alive and undamaged, 2 percent were alive and damaged, and 1 percent were dead. The flying corpse was, it turns out, a rarity.
Shower of Sulphur. — The inhabitants of the village of Thames Ditton, Surrey, were, on Friday night, October 18th, 1867, a good deal startled at witnessing a very strange phenomenon, which had the appearance of a shower of fire. The shower lasted about ten minutes, and during the continuance afforded a brilliant light. Next morning it was found that the waterbutts and puddles in the upper part of the village were thickly covered with a deposit of sulphur. Some of the water has been preserved in bottles.
A dark red cloud appeared over the village of Buliavino on the line from Moscow to St. Petersburg and towards the evening a rain, red in colour, fell in torrential amounts. Those villagers that caught the rain in pots and pans were in no doubt that the liquid was blood. Towards midnight the rain became normal in appearances and continued in varying intensity for two further days. While livestock seemed unaffected by the incident, all the fields of the village turned first a bright orange and then blackened as if covered by soot. With the loss of their spring grass the villagers were set to abandon their homes when they noticed a new growth of vegetation. The new grass seemed to grow at twice the speed and produced a crop of a quality never before seen. Vegetables grew to enormous sizes and the people of the place experienced vibrant health and fitness for many years to come. Those that had saved the red fluid in jars or bottles sold it for a medicine that was said to restore vitality to those that drank it. A bottle of the fluid was allegedly dispatched to the court of Tsar Alexander the First but what he did with it is not known. (Source: Reported by a Cossack soldier on route to Novgorod 1827 /Essay: Cossack Tales and Folklore – 1866 Russian)
JOAO PESSOA, Brazil (AP) -- It rained beans the other day, Brazilian Rancher Salvador Targino insisted, as he showed newsmen and local officials the small vegetables that fell suddenly on his property. '"That's what happened, alright," said Delmiro Maia, a federal agriculture official assigned to Paraiba State. Maia speculated that a recent storn swooped up a pile — of beans from Western Africa — and dumped them over Northeastern Brazil Targino boiled some of th beans and said they were to touah to eat.
Colma, Oct. 27. -- The civil aeronautics authority and the Broadmoor district police are today investigating the case of the monkey which fell out of the sky. The animal landed on Mrs. Faye Swanson's clothesline and did severe damage, mostly to itself.
Mrs. Swanson, who lives at 723 Stonyford drive in Broadmoor Village subdivision, said she walked into her backyard yesterday at 8:05 a.m. and found a dead monkey on the ground. Her clothesline was almost bent to the ground and pieces of monkey still clung to the plastic covered cable line stretched between a pair of four by four wooden posts. The posts were cracked at each end. "Who's going to pay for having my clothesline fixed?" Mrs. Swanson asked.
The five-pound body of the monkey was taken to the SPCA headquarters at Coyote Point for an "autopsy" into the cause of death. Everyone agreed he had "fallen from a great height." Chief Savage declared preliminary indications are that the monkey died of heart failure during his drop. But the big question remains--was it dropped from an aircraft, or are monkeys dropping from the sky because of the H-bomb tests in the South Pacific?
A check with Pan American World Airways, which specializes in carrying animals aboard its Pacific clippers, quickly denied any responsibility for this particular arrival. Other airlines also failed to yield information concerning the deceased monkey's origination. Maybe he was just an airline hitchhiker, someone suggested, and lost his grip.
On 24 April 1985, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that starfish — another rarity in the annals of falling creatures — had fallen on parts of St. Cloud, Minnesota three days earlier. It was supposed that students from the nearby State University had thrown then off a high building, a mile away, into the wind, but they turned out to be a type found only hundreds of miles to the south, off Florida.
originally posted by: theantediluvian
a reply to: muzzleflash
I'm sure I have a few more that you haven't heard of. Most people have heard of fish and frogs falling but there's stories of snakes, rats, lemmings, an alligator from the modern era, a shark from fairly recently, golf balls. Also, mussels, massive amounts of seeds, hay, wheat, paper money, coins, documents, a sex doll, a couple of dead folks, lots of meat, bee poop, worms, squids, rocks, nuts/berries, various unidentified fibers and more.
I really wish ATS had a forum for general Forteana. I even came up with an image for it:
I'd be good for at least 3 posts a week in it.
originally posted by: Phage
a reply to: theantediluvian
I'm glad elephants don't fly.
I really got into those sort of stories in 7th grade. Then I learned about verification and stuff.
examination of recent fallout of yellow-coloured globules over three Sydney suburbs showed they were the excreta of bees.