Fish Float, Not Fly. Why are They Falling from the Sky?!

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I was over at Michael Sword’s thoughtful and thought-generating blog (Cosmic Chaos - Addendum) a couple of weeks ago and he was writing about Fortean Falls – unexpected objects falling from the skies. We’ve all heard about these reports and they seem to occur every year somewhere or other. In fact, they’ve been on the radar of human awareness for centuries or more.

Throughout history these falls have ranged from unpleasant body parts (meat over Kentucky) to duck-and-cover snakes and then out-of-place stuff like fish and even apples last year. So yeah, we’ve all heard about strange falls and most of us have heard of the best explanation for these occurrences too. The outright best must be the idea that vortices (tornado-style) have been created by extreme weather conditions and suctioned up the animals or objects from land and sea. Swirling around on high, the objects are launched up into the atmosphere and temporarily suspended there before the wind vortex dissipates and they hurtle down on the wings of gravity with a...

Splat. Splash..Thud...

As explanations go, I like it. It makes sense and can be tested scientifically. It makes more sense than ordinary animals and fruit appearing in extraordinary ways out of thin air. One of the poorer explanations was logged by Charles Fort and involved a fly-by of buzzards disgorging their last meal on the poor townsfolk below in the case of the Kentucky meat-fall.

Mike Swords is very good at teasing the edges of reality with tricky questions so he asks why are these falls limited to one group of objects or one group of animals? For example, with falling apples, where are the falling twigs? With falling fish, where are the different fishes? What makes a spontaneous wind vortex or waterspout appear selective in its’ choice of objects it transports?

Well, the obvious answers would be, like birds of a feather, fish swim together and perhaps folk were too busy seeing apples to notice the twigs? A twig on a street isn’t remarkable and apples are.

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Out of curiosity, I roamed around the webz and looked for examples of Fortean Falls where I could check as much data as possible. Old cases would be out because they had no photos or they had no weather data. Foremost in my mind was the sheer likelihood that the vortex-explanation would be supported by bad weather at the time.

A great incident occurred recently in Australia in February 2010 and involved not one, but two falls of fish on two back-to-back days.

NEWSBREAKER Christine Balmer, who took these photos of the fish on the ground and in a bucket, had to pinch herself when she was told ``hundreds and hundreds" of small white fish had fallen from the sky.

"It rained fish in Lajamanu on Thursday and Friday night," she said, "They fell from the sky everywhere.

"Locals were picking them up off the footy oval and on the ground everywhere.

"These fish were alive when they hit the ground."

Mrs Balmer, the aged care co-ordinator at the Lajamanu Aged Care Centre, said her family interstate thought she had lost the plot when she told them about the event.
"I haven't lost my marbles," she said, reassuring herself. "Thank god it didn't rain crocodiles."

It's raining fish....no really!

Raining crocodiles! What a picture! Well it didn’t take long for a meteorologist to put the best explanation on the table. It was one of those waterspouts at work once more.

Weather bureau senior forecaster Ashley Patterson said the geological conditions were perfect on Friday for a tornado in the Douglas Daly region.

He said it would have been an ideal weather situation to allow the phenomena to occur - but no tornados have been reported to the authority.

"It's a very unusual event," he said. "With an updraft, (fish and water picked up) could get up high - up to 60,000 or 70,000 feet.

"Or possibly from a tornado over a large water body - but we haven't had any reports," he said.

Same source as above.

These are the fish and were apparently ‘spangled perch’
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A lot is made in the news about Lajamanu being hundreds of miles away from the nearest river and that leads us to find the account even more amazing. ‘It’s as if they appeared from nowhere!’ is what we’re supposed to think. This is actually tabloid BS because there are small bodies of water closer than that as you can see in these photographs (scroll down)..

We can check out the weather conditions for Lajamanu and the Northern Territories and see whether any extreme weather conditions were recorded at the time. The first place I looked was the Australian Government’s Bureau of Meteorology to see if any storms had occurred in the area at the time. As you can see from this image below, the last storm was two days earlier than the first fall. Now, it’s hard to imagine these critters being in the air for at least 48 hours. Even less when we notice how Alice Springs is 100s miles away. No way could fish be kept in the air for two days and hundreds of miles!

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Australian Meteorological Bureau (February 2010)

On the two days in question, we can see what the weather was like according to the local weather station. It poured down and here are the records for the two days.

T Mean temperature (°C)
TM Maximum temperature (°C)
Tm Minimum temperature (°C)
SLP Mean sea level pressure (hPa)
H Mean humidity (%)
PP Precipitation amount (mm)
VV Mean visibility (Km)
V Mean wind speed (Km/h)
VM Maximum sustained wind speed (Km/h)
VG Maximum wind gust (Km/h)

Climate data February 2010

So we can see it rained heavily and that the wind speed maxed out at 24.1 km/h. According to the Beaufort Scale this is a ‘moderate breeze' and worlds away from tornado weather.

It seems like the waterspout or wind vortex is a good explanation that doesn’t quite fit the data in this case.

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When i was younger, i may or may not have thrown eggs off the 35 story balcony. My ability to throw the egg and the substantial height in which the egg had to fall allowed it to travel quite a distance. I presume people may have a similar impression that eggs were falling from the sky.

I was under the impression there was a case of a scuba diver being scooped up by a water bomber and deposited tens of miles in land were no lakes were present creating a mystery....of course this could be just a myth.

Recently, Fire Marshals found a corpse in a rural section of California while they were assessing the damage done by a recent forest fire. The deceased male was dressed in diving gear consisting of a recently-melted wetsuit, a dive tank, flippers, and facemask. Apparently the man had been participating in recreational diving fairly recently.

............Classified Urban Legend 17 October 1997

If your looking for a purely natural event to explain these occurrences, these processes you have described are the only methods that come to my mind.



I could see that these events have sufficient energy to lift creatures even fish if they were swimming close to the surface.

so i am gonna come from a different angel just for the sake of it. Even though i believe this scenario is highly unlikely i think about it sometimes and i think about it when im on ats mostly. The matrix, if we live in a digitized world and God is our software programmers maybe there was a small glitch and instead of rain falling it was fish, or maybe a digitized school of fish was meant to be placed in the ocean but it got placed 70,000 feet up. Like I said before i don't believe truly we are digital living in a digital world but sometimes i see and hear things that make me wonder

reply to post by MDDoxs


i heard the story of the scuba diver was explained a diver got scooped up by a fire helicopter in a lake and then got droped on the fire wrong place wrong time

reply to post by MDDoxs
I guess I'm just trying to say that maybe not all falling critters can be attributed to storms, waterspouts or strong winds. I mean maybe! Who knows?

It isn't the usual thing I write about and fully expected to link the flying fish to a recent storm. It was surprising to find the available weather data did not support the most likely explanation.

And yeah, I've launched a few eggs in my time too and crab apples with a tennis racquet that must have utterly baffled at least one poor witness. Great fun.

Probably one of the most interesting topic of strangeness I know.

Fish, bones, flesh and blood, frogs, insects, pennies, hazelnuts, there are dozens of types of things that have fallen out of the sky for a decent period of time with only a few having any hint of a realistic explanation.

Very cool topic to discuss.

reply to post by Kandinsky


I think i may see the angle you are coming from here. Thus i will reference the movie Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy and suggest the use of infinite probability drive.

Please find the following video



Maybe aliens visited our planet using this type of technology and spontaneously created fish and other objects high up in our atmosphere

or a planes cargo hold spilled all its contents

reply to post by DocHolidaze
These odd falls do lend themselves to speculation don't they? Mike Swords wondered about Tricksterish origins. For my money, I'll sit on the fence for some of them and accept the weather phenomena for most.

Your Matrix idea reminds me of a painting by a German artist whose name escapes me right now, I'll post it if I can find it. Aside from that, it's an interesting idea and similar to the moving/changing city in Dark City. Glitches in a Matrix, foolishness by Tricksters or the errors of our set-designers?

reply to post by MDDoxs
I've only recently been listening to the old Hitchhikers' radio show

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

Douglas Adams

reply to post by Kandinsky

reply to post by MDDoxs
I've only recently been listening to the old Hitchhikers' radio show


There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

Douglas Adams

I think i may be about to learn the universal truth!, hold onto your seat belts things are going to get weird

Very interesting theory, I offer this quote from a good friend

“There are no accidents... there is only some purpose that we haven't yet understood.”
― Deepak Chopra, The Return of Merlin

Well I guess you could say time travel. If you think about time travel and how in order to do this you would leave the realm of existence. If you traveled a day into the future just to take a small leap you would leave the realm of existence for 24 hours. Meanwhile the realm of existence would keep pace with its normal existence. The earth would have spun 360 degrees. It would have traveled 2,592,000 km in 24 hours in its orbit around the sun. The galaxy would have traveled unknown amount of distance in 24 hours in its orbit. The universe would have traveled unknown amount of distance in 24 hours in its orbit. When you reappeared from 24 hours of nonexistence you would be in deep space some where unless you knew how to teleport back to the correct position you were in originally.

Now if these fish were in the Bermuda Triangle and time traveled for brief seconds or minutes where would they reappear when they came back into existence? In orbit falling? Miles from where they first time traveled?

Questions of time travel and the blinking out of existence and reappearing without a teleportation device and a deep understanding of the universe and its orbits for locations could lead to fish falling from the sky. Just an idea that could really drive someone crazy thinking about the possibilities.

reply to post by JBA2848
If we step away from the weather explanation whatever ideas present themselves are inevitably going to be pretty *out-there.* Pockets of reality blinking out from one location and appearing elsewhere in time and space? It's an idea...

Imagine a guy walks out of his house and becomes a John Doe washed up on a beach in Europe or a popsicle in space?

I'm joking with that, but it's fertile ground for the imagination with out-of-place stuff dropping in from Elsewhere.

reply to post by Kandinsky


Inception maybe?

Maybe we have been injected into the consciousness of a greater being. Life is exciting sure, but maybe this being decided to throw in falling fish into the game.

reply to post by Kandinsky


Ships in the Bermuda Triangle travel for a brief second in time and ends up under water with no damage miles from where they were last seen. A object travels in time and ends up trapped in stone under ground. It does make you wonder.

But I would go with the normal theory of a tornado or water spout. I just thought I would throw some thing out there to make people think of the possibilities.

reply to post by JBA2848
I would too.

However, the falls occurred at 6pm on one day...a full 70 minutes before sunset - daylight. Nobody reported seeing tornadoes or waterspouts. The wind speed was breezy and the last storm was two days ago and 100s of miles away. Cue Twilight Zone theme or should it be ?

Dr. Percy Collett was a medical doctor and missionary who worked with the people in the Amazon River Basin of South America.

A boy in the jungle asked Dr. Collett to pray for food, this is what happened:

"In one meeting, on the Rio Tigris which lasted 10 days, people were getting baptized in the Holy Spirit. Then they asked God for food, and a wind came through the jungle and then settled over the lake and it threw fish and water all down over the people, and they cooked the fish over a fire and ate it."

"Collett and 250 Indians and missionaries at Boavista Mission in N.W. Brazil prayed for eight days to God to show them Heaven. On the 9th day everyone saw angels in the sky and on the 10th they were all "struck down by the glory of God".

MP3 (@ 28min.)

List of MP3's (pca01.mp3)

www.abovetopsecret.com...

If it's raining fish it can only be because,

God likes me and has answered my prayers ! (Luv fishies.)

Seriously, Great thread. This has been going on a long time. It's either totally natural or cargo that got ejected from a high flying airplane.. most of these are explainable. The really good ones are the ones that's very hard to explain like the COW in this article. www.oddee.com...

reply to post by Kandinsky
Awesome subject, for which I can come up with no viable explanation so far.

Were these falls limited to such items as you mention, then we could *possibly* shoehorn an explanation - but with such a consistently-exclusive nature of one type of item ranging over such a bizarre course (the flesh-falls always particularly bothered me), no naturalistic explanation seems to make sense.

Sometimes, the items in question also happen to be completely foreign to the area - so far removed as to seem impossible to account for by storm pick-up & depositing (they flew...in the clouds...for thousands of miles!).

Long live fortean events, and may they never be explained as such would make the world a more-boring place!

The only fish that float are the dead ones. The live ones swim.

reply to post by Kandinsky


Its not that the tornadoes are selective, the human mind is.

Not to say that your line of questioning is rediculous, but what are you gonna remember.. falling twigs... or fish.

No doubt some falls were staged, many people have staged many paranormal events. Humans in general are big fat liars who just want attention.

I'm going to go with the quantum explanation. In one of the parallel universes we have learned to teleport objects. Like all machines it is prone to snafus, unfortunately when they occur, there is a slight time hiccup and viola we get fish or meat or apples. Other items also fall. www.abovetopsecret.com... Must be using the teleporter for transporting goods to the great alternate Walmart.