Fishy tale: The story of fish falling out of the skies above Sri Lanka seems indisputable. Videos taken in the district of Chilaw show people collecting the little fish in buckets.
By Steff Gaulter
In Qatar more rain seems to fall from my air conditioning units than from the sky. Sometimes the units spit ice, and once or twice as a special treat, they’ve thrown a cockroach at me. In parts of the world which are wetter than Qatar, it seems that nature is just as fickle; at the beginning of the month it wasn’t cockroaches, but small fish which rained down on western Sri Lanka.
Tales of creatures raining from the skies have been told throughout history. The Roman natural philosopher, Pliny the Elder, wrote about storms of fish and frogs in the first century AD. For years many people assumed that these stories were myths, or at least exaggerations, but nowadays there is no doubting the truth surrounding these tales. There are simply too many stories and too much evidence supporting them.
Certainly the story of fish falling out of the skies above Sri Lanka seems indisputable. Video taken on May 5 in the district of Chilaw shows people collecting the little fish in buckets. The video also proves that some of the little creatures were alive when they came out of the sky, as when water was added to the buckets, the fish swam around, gasping for breath.
The strange thing is that no one has ever seen creatures getting sucked up into the air, they’ve only ever been seen falling from the sky. How they get into the sky is therefore assumed rather than proved. It’s believed that a tornado must move across a coastal region or a river, and suck the sealife out of the water. The strong winds in the upper atmosphere can then carry the creatures vast distances before they eventually fall back to earth.
Sealife falling out of the sky is more common than you might think, and it’s not only limited to fish. In 2012, prawns rained down on Sri Lanka; in May 1981, frogs were seen falling from the sky in Greece; and back in 1881, hermit crabs pounded the city of Worcester in the UK.
However, one of the most mystifying downpours of sealife was in the Australia town of Lajamanu. The town is about half way between Darwin and Alice Springs, in the Tanami Desert. Despite its desert location, fish fell across the town on not one but two consecutive days in February 2010.
What makes this even more remarkable is that Lajamanu is 525km (325 miles) from the nearest river. Even more amazing is the fact that locals had already reported seeing fish raining on their house in 2004 and 1974. Despite its distance from water, Lajamanu is clearly a very fishy place!
Most things that are sucked up into the atmosphere will have to be quite light. The Sri Lankan fish were between 5 and 8cm (two to three inches) in length, approximately the same size as the Spangled Perch which fell in Australia. We can therefore stop worrying about the chance of a shark or whale falling on our heads!
Having said that, it’s best not to under estimate the strength of winds within a thunderstorm cloud, something that one man, Lieutenant Colonel William Rankin, could never forget.
In 1959, Bill Rankin was flying his fighter jet above the eastern US state of North Carolina, when his plane ran into difficulties. After failing to restart his engine, he was forced to eject from his aircraft, despite the ominous looking thunderstorms which were hovering below. He hurtled towards earth, expecting the built-in barometer on his parachute to deploy after about three or four minutes’ free fall.
However, after just 10 seconds he ploughed straight into the towering anvil of a cumulonimbus cloud.
As soon as Bill Rankin was inside the storm cloud, the temperature dropped dramatically. The dense grey cloud obscured the sun, while the extreme cold and wind began to inflict frostbite on his body. After what seemed like several minutes, his parachute deployed, but unfortunately the volatile storm had caused it to deploy prematurely.
The updrafts within the cloud were so strong that the pilot was thrown upwards towards the top of the cloud, before gravity dragged him downwards again. This didn’t happen once, but over and over again. Lightning flashed all around him, with the thunder so loud he felt it, rather than heard it.
The air was so saturated with water, that every intake of air caused him to splutter and choke. He began to worry that he would drown. All the while, he was being pelted by hailstones, which he worried would rip his parachute to shreds.
Eventually Bill Rankin noticed that the ferocity of the conditions was easing, and he was gently drifting out of the bottom of the storm, mercifully with his parachute still intact. When he reached the ground, he calculated he had been hurtling up and down within the thunderstorm for approximately 40 minutes.
If the updrafts within a thunderstorm can keep a man airborn for 40 minutes, we can only imagine how long they could keep a small creatures in the air.
Suddenly 525km from the nearest river doesn’t seem like such a large hurdle. However, the frequency of the fishy rain is still something that has me intrigued.
