The strange enigma of unusual fallings

Tadpoles, blackbirds, apples, sprat and meat. What, you may well ask, is this rather absurd list?

Whilst it might read like the toppings on the world’s worst pizza – incredibly enough, they are actually all things reliably witnessed to have fallen from the sky. You know the story here. Incongruous things tumble from the sky, spurring the more biblical minded cry ‘told you so’, whilst sciency-types with, you know, analysis and facts smile politely as they invariably put it down to ‘unusual weather conditions’.

Never has this been so clearly seen than in the fantastically named ‘aflockalypse’ which occurred at the turn of 2012. As 5,000 dead blackbirds rained down in the small town of Beebe, Arkansas a certain breed of Christian hardliner grabbed at their favourite doomsday prophecy and started wringing their hands. And if that wasn’t enough to convince them, it soon became apparent that the deaths of thousands of other birds and millions of fish had also been reported in Arkansas. As you can imagine, in their minds, the end became increasingly nigh.

As it is, this didn’t come to pass. Nothing more, say the ornithologists, than mass wildlife deaths – unusual, but not supernatural. “This is a classic example of freak events coinciding,” said zoologist Peter Boeckmann “In the United States, the reaction is: ‘Oh no, doomsday is coming!’ In Sweden, they say, ‘let’s call the veterinary authorities.’”

Clearly there are very few ‘mass-fallings’ like this that can’t be explained away with a stiff breeze a particularly nasty looking cloud – yet there is one which stubbornly refuses to give up its secrets.

The great Kentucky meat shower (…and honestly we are not making this up) is almost exactly as disgusting as it sounds. On March 3 1876 large hunks of flesh were reported to have fallen from the sky over Olympia Springs in Bath County, Kentucky. Reports at the time suggested it looked like beef, yet despite its appearance there was no agreement on what meat it was. Two ‘gentlemen’ who tasted it judged it to be mutton or venison, whilst a local hunter identified it as bear meat.

Now, ‘reports’ sounds disconcertingly vague – but at least one of these was in the journal Scientific American, which should at least tell us that the event was being taken seriously at the time. Indeed it was in this fine bastion of scientific communication that we see the first attempt to explain this bizarre happening. The answer, according to Leopold Brandeis – a scientist who had analysed samples sent to him – was “no more or less than nostoc”.

This is a type of cyanobacteria present on the ground that can swell into a translucent jelly-like mass when rain falls on it. Importantly for this particular mystery, this often gives the impression that it was falling with the rain. Case closed you might smugly say. Perhaps, yet when Brandeis passed the meat sample to the Newark Scientific Association for further analysis, they announced in the publication Medical Record that the meat had been identified as lung tissue from either a horse or – petrifyingly – a human infant. This prompted them to the horrendous conclusion that the meat was vomited up by vultures. And, as was pointed out at the time, this is entirely plausible – vultures are known to vomit as a defensive mechanism when threatened. In the end however, the case remained distinctly unsolved.

But there is another – much more common form of ‘unusual falling’ that until recently has dodged a scientific explanation. Blood rain. This is where it is the rain itself, rather than any beast (partial or whole) contained within, attracts attention.

The latest example of this phenomenon was in august last least year in a smattering of sleepy Spanish villages – and now a team from Spain think they have got to the bottom of this…with not a dismembered mammal, displaced fish or vomiting vulture in sight.

Publishing in the Spanish Royal Society of Natural History Journal, the team from University of Salamanca say the reddish staining is caused by Haematococcus pluvialis, a freshwater green microalgae that is capable of synthesising a red carotene pigment called astaxanthin when in a state of stress.

And ‘in a state of stress’ it may well be. The team think the algae may have come from North America – who amongst us can honestly claim never to have gone off-colour with stress after a long haul flight?