This is a worthy account of the
sky fall phenomena that continues to seriously confound.
What we know is that on rare occasions, frogs and fishes fall from the
sky. Less commonly in admittedly a class
of rare events, we also have worms and apples noted and orange eggs (presumably
fish roe?).
If we set aside the apples, the one commonality here is a plausible air
water interface. Worms are on the
surface in the dewy morning and in such numbers as to source the prescribed
event. In fact is plausible to gather
fish, worms and frogs in the predawn hours.
Even a natural apple fall is there at that particular time and
place. Thus we do have a specific
characteristic for this set of objects falling from the sky. They all would be available for gathering in the
very early morning. There is a common
time and place now defined.
Knowing that it is then sufficient to postulate a violent air flow
working the interface and drawing in the water dense objects that are all of
neutral buoyancy. That is the other clear
commonality here. Specific gravity is
approximately one.
Once removed from the interface the objects are then carried in violent
updrafts high into the atmosphere and sustained there until the weather events
abate even hours later.
Thus we have narrowed down the initial conditions and pinpointed an
agent of causation with the needed energy.
What matters most though is uniform density. Debris of other density would separate out.
Otherwise it all points to a violent air flow passing through a pond environment
which is often adjacent to apple trees.
It is really not all that unreasonable at all.
AFTER THE FALL: CHARLES
FORT AND OUR STRANGE SKIES
Paul Thomas Anderson, in his
movie Magnolia, with its climatic rain of frogs plummeting out of the sky
and pummeling people, windows and automobiles, did more to memorialize the odd
phenomena of “falls” than anyone since Charles Fort.
Still, despite this now
iconic, onscreen moment, falls still qualify as perhaps the least well-known
and most whimsical in the entire realm of the paranormal—a strange happening
that lacks the rabid following enjoyed by ghosts and UFOs. And Fort, a kind of
professional, philosopher-crank—a whimsical human being, it might be said—still
seems similarly unable to get his due. For instance, in my proposal
for Fringe-ology, I promised editors I would use Fort as a kind of
launching point for the entire enterprise. That claim, on my part, received
some gentle pushback. One editor in particular, who I shall not name, professed
to “love Fort” but argued that he “was more a great personality and curator
than a thinker.”
It is true that Fort’s
reputation rests largely on his role as the ultimate chronicler of all things
odd. But to me this pursuit to catalogue the strange itself reveals Fort to be
a novel thinker—and moreover, committed enough that he built his life to
accommodate his strange, singular passion.
For most of his young
adult life, as the 1800s bled toward the 1900s, Fort engaged in menial day jobs
and sporadic fits of journalism, breaking up furniture for firewood while
buying armfuls of newspapers and scouring the stacks of the New York Public
Library, making notes on “anomalous phenomena” at a time when literally no one
else in recorded history had ever engaged in such a practice. Ultimately, a
modest inheritance from an uncle allowed him to commit to writing and research,
full-time. And the results, The Book of the Damned, Lo!, Wild
Talents, and New Lands, suddenly and roughly formed the boundaries of what
we now call “The Paranormal.”
Odd creature reports of
humanoids and animals. Hauntings. Airships (which later came to be called
UFOs). Psychic phenomena. All the biggies found their way into Fort’s pages.
And yes, to that unnamed editor's point, those old writings admittedly did move
in fits and starts. Fort was a passionate but often graceless writer, more bull
than ballerina. But his efforts reveal a great depth of intelligence, and a
unique, rigorously upheld commitment to, well, a lack of commitment.
Consider this passage:
“I’d not like to be so
unadvanced as to deny witches and ghosts,” he writes in The Book of the
Damned, “but I do think that there never have been witches and ghosts like
those of popular supposition.”
Fort, as he often does, leaves
this statement behind quickly, on his way to some other place. But the meaning
of this passage is entirely clear once even a few whole pages of Fort have been
read, pretty much no matter where one starts or ends: To Fort, nothing was
worse, nothing betrayed greater intellectual dishonesty or emotional fragility,
than dogmatism. Whether the dogma he confronted was religious or scientific, he
had at it with a hacksaw. So, while he clearly held grave doubts about “witches
and ghosts” he was simultaneously committed to maintaining an open mind on the
subject and to considering all the possibilities.
The roots of all good
scientific and philosophical thinking rest comfortably in this couple of
sentences, I think. But there is something more in his books, besides: Today,
skeptics cleave to explanations that generally reduce down to “superstition.”
But Fort would reject that—rightly, I should think—as useless dogma. The way to
address these topics is with a light heart, a serious mind and a willingness to
hear out every possibility, no matter how outlandish.
Finally, Fort seemed to
anticipate pretty much everything that has happened in this field since he
began studying it in the late-1800s: Namely, that anomalies of various kinds
would continue to keep cropping up; that believers would embrace them and
define them without enough supporting evidence; and that skeptics draped in the
mantle of science would simply deny them outright.
Given these facts, I’d argue
that defining Fort as “more a personality and curator” than a “thinker” because
he did not write in a traditional, philosophical form reveals a sorely limited
perspective of what it means to “think” at all. Fort gets us to a place we need
to be, at times by circuitous means, through sleight of hand and indirection.
But he gets us there. And in the end, when I wrote Fringe-ology for
HarperCollins, I stood on many pairs of shoulders. But in order to get started
at all, I clambered upon the shoulders of Charles Fort.
I give you that background as
an introduction to the 10th-ranked development
in Fringe-ology because Fort and Falls shall remain connected,
forevermore. A surprising number of unlikely things fall from the sky. And Fort
had the temerity to not only capture them for posterity but to question the
official explanation, which is that a whirlwind or storm picked the objects up
in one place and deposited them back down in another.
I ran across reports of
several falls this year.
Orange eggs fell from the
sky in Alaska.
Fish seem to fall from
the sky, with some regularity, in Lamanju, Australia.
Worms, last spring, In
Scotland.
Apples in Coventry.
The worm fall, for starters,
is instructive. The report described the fall of a great many worms from what
the leading witness described as a “cloudless sky.” Teacher David Crichton was
leading his class through warm-ups for a soccer lesson (they call it football
in the article, of course), when they heard a soft thudding noise in their
midst. Many worms were lying on the ground. As reported by STV, “the class then
looked to the cloudless sky and saw worms falling on to them.”
Crichton subsequently
collected many of the worms, tallying more than 100.
The phenomenon of falls has
its own Library of Congress entry, which puts forward the tornado- or
storm-based theory. But for another possibility I’ll refer to the inimitable
Brian Dunning, of Skeptoid.
I praise Dunning
in Fringe-ology, and he does his level best to explain falls
while expressing grave doubts about the whirlwind or weather-based explanation.
If the wind is picking up animals, why is it so damn selective? Why just worms,
and not dirt? Why just fish, or frogs, and not grass, sticks, twigs or other
debris or… something of the same approximate weight and size?
In The Book of the Damned, Fort writes, more than a century before
Dunning:
According
to testimony taken before a magistrate, a fall occurred, Feb. 19, 1830, near
Feridpoor, India, of many fishes, of various sizes—some whole and fresh and
others "mutilated and putrefying." Our reflex to those who would say
that, in the climate of India, it would not take long for fishes to putrefy,
is—that high in the air, the climate of India is not torrid. Another
peculiarity of this fall is that some of the fishes were much larger than
others. Or to those who hold out for segregation in a whirlwind, or that
objects, say, twice as heavy as others would be separated from the lighter, we
point out that some of these fishes were twice as heavy as others.
So, let’s set aside the whirlwind explanation as insufficient in the judgment
of the philosopher-crank (Fort), the skeptic (Dunning), and the journalist
(me). But Dunning, in one of his podcasts, has offered up a separate answer.
His thesis is that the animals in question were already there. Then something
happens—like a rainfall—to draw attention to their presence. The problem, of
course, is that Dunning’s explanation is refuted by numerous reports.
First, let’s turn again to Fort, who tells of fish found flopping “atop
haystacks”, or covering the “roofs of houses”; of frogs “seen to fall”; of one
frog-storm in Kansas City, Missouri, that was so great the frogs “darkened the
air”; of frogs found in impossible places for a Dunning-like migration to be
remotely possible, like the “city of London” and “a desert.”
This central mystery of Charles Fort’s work, all these years later, still holds
up. And in the last year, since I finished my own book, falls continue to
confound. Clearly, the idea that the insects or animals were already on the
ground doesn’t fit Crichton, or his students, who observed the worms falling
from the sky. It also wouldn’t explain the fish, in one of the other accounts I
listed, which fell in the desert, hundreds of kilometers from water. One source
in that story even claims the fish were alive when they hit the
ground.
I am a fan of Dunning. But
like many skeptics, in this instance he chose to interpret the data that most
readily yielded to a simple explanation and simply ignored the data that
didn’t.
This doesn’t, of course, mean UFOs are responsible. It also, obviously, doesn’t
mean anything particularly outlandish has to be happening at all. In
short, the lack of a great, definitive explanation or explanations that account
for all the cases—like the fall of worms from a cloudless sky on a “clear, calm
day”—doesn’t mean no such information will ever be found. But it does mean
that, for now, we must give this victory to mystery.
Author’s Note: As the year
wound down, I started thinking about the most important things to happen in the
realm of the paranormal since I finished writing Fringe-ology in the
late fall of 2010. I’ll post a new item here roughly every week, though many of
my top 10 will only be found on my website, stevevolk.com.
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