Rains of Fish
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[edit] Introduction
Rains of fish, or occasionally frogs, crabs, or shrimp, have been reported from all over the globe.
[edit] Discussion
[edit] Charles Fort
In the early 1900s, Charles Fort, the famous collector of accounts of odd happenings, suggested that there was an ocean orbiting the earth that occasionally dropped fish on us. We do not know whether this was a joke, or indeed, as many maintain, that Charles Fort's entire career was one big piece of performance art: but we would, in any case, rule out this hypothesis on the grounds that NASA would probably have noticed any such ocean by now.
[edit] Overland Flow
Occasionally, reports of "rains of fish" based on finding fish stranded a long way from water are the result of a mistake: after heavy weather, small fish can migrate by overland flow. Small spangled perch have been observed to migrate ten miles along a rut in a road after a storm, until the water seeped away, leaving them stranded (Shipway, B., 1947, Rains of fishes?, Western Australian Naturalist. 1(2):47-48). Someone coming across the aftermath of such an event might well come to the conclusion that the rain had included fish.
However, this still leaves us with the multiple eyewitness accounts of seeing the fish actually fall out of the sky, and who, as evidence, can produce the fish. Unlikely though this sounds at first, this is quite probably what happened.
[edit] Meteorological Phenomenon or Hoax?
There is, in fact, a very good reason why fish should fall out of the sky. Tornadoes suck up water (in which case they are known as "waterspouts"); it would be remarkable if they did so without sucking up small aquatic life forms; when the tornado died down, it would deposit them as debris in the wake of the dying storm.
There are many features supporting this interpretation. First, the fish are invariably reported as being small: this is consistent with them being transported by wind, but would make things harder for a hoaxer, since such small fish can't be bought at a fishmonger's. Second, the fish are the right sort of fish for the region: parals fall on Kerala, India[1]; baby shrimp fall on California[2]. Also, they are fish from shallow marine waters or from inland waters, not fish that live in the depths. Thirdly, the rains of fish accompany heavy weather; some are preceded by weather warnings of waterspouts, as with the Californian shrimp; or even by the observation of a nearby waterspout. Finally, we find the geographical distribution of rains of fish just as we should expect on this hypothesis: common in coastal Britain, unknown in the Great Basin Desert of the U.S.A.
Now, we grant that all these things could be achieved by hoaxers, but this would require every hoaxer from California to Kerala to be carrying out a hoax consistent with the waterspout hypothesis. Even if they are all aware of the hypothesis, it is not in the psychology of the hoaxer to produce something which is explicable, and has all the scientists nodding and saying: "Oh, yes, we could have told you that".
Another point against the "hoax" hypothesis is the worldwide nature of the reports: hoaxes, from Bigfoot to crop circles, tend to be culturally specific and geographically localized. And, most telling of all, we feel, are the large numbers of witnesses attesting to many of these events. You would be hard put to get a dozen people to swear that they'd seen a UFO land in their village, a much more remarkable and newsworthy event; by contrast, you often get dozens of people at a time quite ready to say that they saw fish fall out of the sky.
In light of these various considerations, it is, we feel, reasonable to conclude that yes, sometimes it really does rain fish.
[edit] Further Reading
- Rains of Fishes, E .W. Gudger, Natural History, 1921
- Showers of Organic Matter, Waldo McAvee, Monthly Weather Review, 1917
