VIDEO: Weirdest Things That Have “Rained” From the Sky

Weird rain is one of the more bizarre and still largely unexplained phenomena that is periodically and continually reported from all corners of the globe.

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There have been numerous accounts of frog rain, fish rain, squid rain, worm rain, even alligator rain.

As weird as these phenomena may seem, there are scientific explanations for them.

According to Wikipedia, rain of flightless animals and things has been reported throughout history. In the first century AD, Roman naturalist Pliny The Elder documented storms of frogs and fish.

In 1794, French soldiers witnessed toads fall from the sky during heavy rain at Lalain, near the French city of Lille. Rural inhabitants in Yoro, Honduras, claim ‘fish rain’ happens there every summer, a phenomenon they call Lluvia de Peces.

French physicist André-Marie Ampère was among the first scientists to take seriously accounts of raining animals. Addressing the Society of Natural Sciences, Ampère suggested that at times frogs and toads roam the countryside in large numbers, and that violent winds could pick them up and carry them great distances.

Sometimes the animals survive the fall, suggesting the animals are dropped shortly after extraction. Several witnesses of raining frogs describe the animals as startled but healthy, and exhibiting relatively normal behavior shortly after the event. In some incidents, the animals are frozen to death or even completely encased in ice.

There are examples where the product of the rain is not intact animals, but shredded body parts. Some cases occur just after storms having strong winds, especially during tornadoes. However, there have been many unconfirmed cases in which rainfalls of animals have occurred in fair weather and in the absence of strong winds or waterspouts.

Given that waterspouts do not actually lift anything (the water droplets visible in the column are merely condensation), it is implausible to suggest they are capable of lifting fish from below the surface of the water and high into the sky.

A better accepted scientific explanation involves tornadic waterspouts: a tornado that forms over land and travels over the water. Under this hypothesis, a tornadic waterspout transports animals to relatively high altitudes, carrying them over large distances.

This hypothesis appears supported by the type of animals in these rains: small and light, usually aquatic, and by the suggestion that the rain of animals is often preceded by a storm. However, the theory does not account for how all the animals involved in each individual incident would be from only one species, and not a group of similarly-sized animals from a single area.

In the case of birds, storms may overcome a flock in flight, especially in times of migration. The image to the right shows an example wherein a group of bats is overtaken by a thunderstorm.

In the image, the bats are in the red zone, which corresponds to winds moving away from the radar station, and enter into a mesocyclone associated with a tornado (in green). These events may occur easily with birds, which can get killed in flight, or stunned and then fall (unlike flightless creatures, which first have to be lifted into the air by an outside force).