Modern Mysteries

Why do frogs sometimes rain from the sky ?

By T.K. Randall
September 10, 2015 ·  22 comments

Frogs have been known to cascade from the heavens. Image Credit: CC BY-SA 2.5 Richard Bartz One of the most recent such downpours occurred earlier this year across parts of Washington, Oregon and Idaho where residents reported rain drops that were milky white in color.

Climate scientists weren't able to conclusively source where the rain had originated however it was believed to have received its white color from ash picked up from wildfire burn scars in the region.

Rainfall like this would seem to be a freak occurrence - something that happens only once in a blue moon, yet throughout history there have been numerous accounts of strange downpours, many of which being a lot more peculiar than rain that is simply a different color.

Perhaps the most unusual of all are reports of frogs, fish or insects dropping from the sky in large quantities - a phenomenon that in ancient times was often attributed to divine intervention.

"In Paeonia and Dardania, it has, they say, before now rained frogs; and so great has been the number of these frogs that the houses and the roads have been full of them," the Greek philsopher Heraclides Lembus wrote of such an incident back in the second century BC.Similar events have also occurred recently such as in 2005 when a downpour of small frogs was reported in a small town in northernwestern Siberia. So what exactly is going on to cause this ?

The answer, most scientists agree, is that these animals are being sucked up in to the sky by a tornado, carried over large distances and then dropped again several miles away.

Raindrops with unusual colors can also usually be explained by anomalous substances being drawn up in to the sky. Red and yellow rain tends to be caused by dust and sand from a desert while black rain has been attributed to volcanic activity or pollution.

Charles Fort, a prominent researcher of all things unexplained, managed to gather more than 60,000 newspaper articles pertaining to peculiar downpours occurring in countries all over the world.

Oddly enough these intriguing phenomena are a lot more common than most people realize.

Source: Smithsonian Magazine | Comments (22)

Tags: Fish, Frog, Rain