Tags: blood, fish or frog rainfalls; blood rain in Norilsk, Russia; minnow rainfall at Mountain Ash, Wales in 1859; the American paranormal researcher Charles Fort


‘It’s raining fish or frogs, not cats and dogs.’

(Fortean /0ˈfɔ:tɪən/ noun & adjective. M20.
[ORIGIN from the name of Charles H. Fort (1874–1932), US journalist and student of paranormal phenomena + -ean.]
► A noun. A follower of Charles Fort; an investigator of paranormal phenomena. M20.
► B adjective. Of, relating to, or designating paranormal phenomena. L20.
Forteana pl. noun such phenomena collectively
 Shorter Oxford English Dictionary

[Ideally, this entry should be read after http://paulzanotelli.ch/blog/fringe/weather-modification/downpours-at-will_question-mark.html.]

I came across a reference to Charles Hoy Fort’s work on the paranormal five years ago on a French website with links to works claimed to be countercurrent. At the time, I did not even bother to jot down the title of his main work, the Book of the Damned, because I considered the subject matter to be too off the mark to be true. On 2 June 2018, however, I borrowed a French translation of a book by Herbert Genzmer and Ulrich Hellenbrand, entitled Mysteries of the world: unexplained wonders and mysterious phenomena (which is the title of the English version, as the original version was published in German), and I was so taken by the story that blood, fish or frogs had been reported to have fallen from the sky in the form of rainfalls in various countries that I sent the page describing it to a friend for his daughter to read.

A month later, I read about a ‘blood rain’ in the Russian city of Norilsk [https://yandex.com/maps/geo/norilsk/53110867/?ll=88.099011%2C69.415084&z=10]:

By the Grace of…Dust: "Blood" Rain Pours Down on Russian City of Norilsk (VIDEO)
17:15 05.07.2018(updated 17:18 05.07.2018)
https://sputniknews.com/viral/201807051066072967-dust-blood-rain-norilsk/

Almost two months later, I found more references to such phenomena having taken place in Russia when I accessed RT.com to retrieve headlines about abnormal weather patterns in that country (with simple enough a keyword combination: https://www.rt.com/search?q=rain+Russia):

Biblical scenes in eastern Russia as thousands of bugs rain from the sky (VIDEO, PHOTOS)
Published time: 29 Aug, 2018 16:26
Edited time: 30 Aug, 2018 09:40
https://www.rt.com/news/437173-rain-bugs-russia-corixidae/

Siberia going biblical? ‘Blood rain’ pours down on Russian parking lot (PHOTOS)
Published time: 3 Jul, 2018 13:26
Edited time: 4 Jul, 2018 09:32
https://www.rt.com/news/431601-norilsk-blood-rain-photo/

Russian Arctic river turning blood-red ‘not a one-time thing’, NASA satellites show
A river outside Russia’s Arctic city of Norilsk which recently made headlines for its mysterious red hue has actually changed color multiple times in the past, NASA satellites have showed.
16 September 2016 | 00:16
https://www.rt.com/news/359489-norilsk-river-nasa-satellites/

As I know that a mountain lake in northern Italy regularly turns dark red owing to some microscopic algae which appear at a certain time of the year, I accepted the explanation that the frogs or fish had been carried in the vortex of some waterspout (which the SOED defines as a ‘gyrating column of spray and water between sea and cloud, produced by the action of a whirlwind’), as explained in an article I had seen at the time on the Internet (‘Can it really rain frogs?’ by Julia Layton, https://science.howstuffworks.com/nature/climate-weather/storms/rain-frog.htm).

This despite the objections to this explanation which Messrs Genzmer and Hellenbrand give in their short account of the phenomenon, which is that the rainfall should have been ‘less selective’ and that it should have brought down not only a single species of fish (e.g. sardines in Greece in 2002; smelts, at Great Yarmouth in Norfolk, England, in 2000 – the latter example is mentioned by Colin and Damon Wilson in Strange: true stories of the mysterious and bizarre) or amphibians but also other debris (stones, plants, turf or whatever else), that in1836, at Allahabad, it was a rainfall of DRIED fish and in 1896, at Essen, it was FROZEN fish (i.e. in blocks of ice)!

Having written this, I do not know what to think now. So maybe it is safe to quote some Shakespeare: ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ (Hamlet, Act I, V, 167-8, Hamlet to Horatio). And also to go and retrieve a few lines on the subject of Fortean rainfalls.


[Mountain Ash, Glamorganshire, Wales in 1859]

DISTRICT NEWS

Shower of Fish – Much excitement has been occasioned in the valley of Aberdare by the fact of a complete shower of fish falling at Mountain Ash on Friday week. The roofs of some of the houses were covered with them, and several were living, and are still preserved in life and appear healthy in glass bottles. They were from an inch to three inches in length, and fell during a very heavy shower of rain and storm of wind.
BRISTOL MERCURY, 26 FEBRUARY.  

Here is how, based on the account given to him by a local eye-witness called John Lewis, the local vicar, the Reverend John Griffith, described the unusual rainfall in a letter sent to the London Times:

On Wednesday, February 9, I was getting out a piece of timber for the purpose of setting it for the saw, when I was startled by something falling all over me – down my neck, on my head, and on my back. On putting my hand down my neck I was surprised to find they were little fish. By this time I saw the whole ground covered with them. I took off my hat, the brim of which was full of them; they were all jumping about. They covered the ground in a long strip of about 80 yards by 12, as we measured afterwards. That shed (pointing to a very large workshop) was covered with them and the chutes were quite full. My mates and I might have gathered bucketsful of them, scraping with our hands. We did gather a great many – about a bucketful – and threw them into the rain-pool, where some of them are now. There were about two showers, with an interval of about ten minutes, and each shower lasted about 2 minutes. The time was eleven a.m. The morning up train to Aberdare was just passing. It was not blowing very hard, but uncommon wet; just about the same wind as there is today (blowing rather stiff),and it came from this quarter (pointing to the S of W). They came down with the rain in “a body like”. This evidence, says the reverend gentleman, has been taken for the purpose of being laid before Professor Richard Owen,(a zoologist –Ed.) to whom he is also about to forward some of the fish. Some of these, he states were 5 inches long.
LIVERPOOL MERCURY, 14 MARCH (from the London Times)

Source: pages 1 and 2 of the Newsletter of the Cynon Valley History Society, issue 47, summer 2009 (http://www.cvhs.org.uk/hanesarchive/2009sum.pdf)

When some 60 years later Charles Fort discussed the event in his book the Book of the Damned, he rejected the explanation that the phenomenon was caused by a whirlwind (or a waterspout):

    According to the Annual Register, 1859-14, the fishes themselves had fallen by pailfuls.
    If these fishes were not upon the ground in the first place, we base our objections to the whirlwind explanation, upon two data:
  That they fell in no such distribution as one could attribute to the discharge of a whirlwind, but upon a narrow strip of land: about 80 yards long and 12 yards wide –––
   The other datum is again the suggestion that at first seemed so incredible, but for which support is piling up, a suggestion of a stationary source overhead –––
  That ten minutes later another fall of fishes occurred upon this same narrow strip of land.
    Even arguing that a whirlwind may stand still axially, it discharges tangentially. Wherever the fishes came from it does not seem thinkable that some could have fallen and that others could have whirled even a tenth of a minute, then falling directly after the first to fall. Because of these evil circumstances the best adaptation was to laugh the whole thing off and say that some one had soused some one else with a pailful of water, in which a few “very young” minnows had been caught up.
https://archive.org/details/bookofdamnedbych00fortrich/page/82/mode/2up

However extraordinary Fortean rainfalls may be, I am going to ‘let the reader down’ and not discuss the ‘frog rainfalls’ which I foolishly mentioned in the title of this entry. Rather I would invite anybody interested in this subject to start here:
https://archive.org/details/bookofdamnedbych00fortrich/mode/2up?q=frog.

And then continue on a search engine, for instance with the following keyword combination: https://www.yippy.com/search?query=frog+rainfalls+Charles+Fort.

Yet dear reader, please do rest assured because this entry might not be my only dip into the little world of Forteana. This because some claim that Charles Fort coined the word teleportation and that, from what I have gathered from my very limited research, his thinking might have been very close to the theory that the ‘universe is a digital hologram’. Finally, the thought that over a period of perhaps 25 years Charles Fort would spend every afternoon of his life going to some New York public library and perusing through periodicals for reports of strange and unexplained events which he would then dutifully file among his collection of thousands and thousands of scientific anomalies is one that I find too fascinating to not want to explore it further in a future blog entry.

Lausanne, 26th August 2020