David Wallechinsky - The Book of Lists

The famous Kentucky meat-shower took place in southern Bath County on Friday, March 3, 1876. Mrs Allen Crouch was in her garden making soap when pieces of fresh meat the size of large snowflakes began to fall from the cloudless sky. Two gentlemen who tasted it said that it was either mutton or venison. Scientists who examined the material found the first samples similar to lung tissue from either a human infant or a horse. Other later samples were identified as cartilage and striated muscle fibres. The local explanation was that a flock of buzzards had disgorged as a group while flying overhead.

The largest meteorite fall in recorded history occurred on March 8, 1976, near the Chinese city of Kirin. Many of the 100 stones that were found weighed over 200 lb; the largest, which landed in the Haupi Commune, weighed 3,902 lb. It is, by more than 1,000 lb, the largest stony meteorite ever recovered.

On October 8, 1976, a light plane buzzed the Piazza Venezia in Rome and dropped 500-lire, 1,000-lire and 10,000-lire banknotes on the startled people below. The mad bomber was not found.

A fine blanket of soot landed on a Cranford park on the edge of London’s Heathrow Airport in 1969, greatly annoying the local park keepers. The official report of the Greater London Council said the ‘soot’ was composed of spores of a black microfungus, Pithomyces chartarum , found only in New Zealand.

About 500 dead and dying blackbirds and pigeons landed in the streets of San Luis Obispo, California, over a period of several hours in late November 1977. No local spraying had occurred, and no explanation was offered.

On the evening of May 30, 1869, the horrified citizens of Greiffenberg, Germany, and neighbouring villages witnessed a fall of fire, which was followed by a tremendous peal of thunder. People who were outside reported that the fire was different in form and colour from common lightning. They said they felt wrapped in fire and deprived of air for some seconds.

Blobs of white material up to 20 ft in length descended over the San Francisco Bay area in California on October 11, 1977. Pilots in San Jose encountered them as high as 4,000 ft. Migrating spiders were blamed, although no spiders were recovered.

In April 1953 glowing green snow was encountered near Mt Shasta, California. Mr and Mrs Milton Moyer reported that their hands itched after touching it and that ‘a blistered, itching rash’ formed on their hands, arms and faces. The Atomic Energy Commission denied any connection between the snow and recent A-bomb tests in nearby Nevada.

The July 25, 1973, edition of the Albany, New York, Times Union reported the unusual case of Bob Hill. Hill, the owner of radio station WHRL of North Greenbush, New York, was taking out the station rubbish at 4:15 p.m. when he noticed ‘twirling specks’ falling from a distance higher than the station’s 300-ft transmitter. He followed two of the white objects until they landed in a hayfield. The objects turned out to be two sets of formulae and accompanying graphs, which apparently explained ‘normalised extinction’ and the ‘incomplete Davis-Greenstein orientation’. No explanation has been made public. The Davis-Greenstein mechanism is used in astrophysics.

Rancher Salvador Targino of João Pessoa, Brazil, reported a rain of small beans on his property in Paraíba State in early 1971. Local agricultural authorities speculated that a storm had swept up a pile of beans in West Africa and dropped them in northeastern Brazil. Targino boiled some of the beans, but said they were too tough to eat.

Several thousand rubles’ worth of silver coins fell in the Gorky region of the USSR on June 17, 1940. The official explanation was that a landslide had uncovered a hidden treasure, which was picked up by a tornado, which dropped it on Gorky. No explanation was given for the fact that the coins were not accompanied by any debris.

Traffic at Mexico City airport was halted temporarily on the morning of July 30, 1963, when thousands of greyish, mushroom-shaped things floated to the ground out of a cloudless sky. Hundreds of witnesses described these objects variously as ‘giant cobwebs’, ‘balls of cotton’ and ‘foam’. They disintegrated rapidly after landing

Mary C. Fuller was sitting in her parked car with her 8-month-old son on Monday morning, September 25, 1978, in San Diego, California, when a human body crashed through the windshield. The body had been thrown from a Pacific Southwest Airlines jetliner, which had exploded after being hit by a small plane in one of the worst disasters in US history. Mother and son suffered minor lacerations.

Falls of frogs and toads, though not everyday occurrences, are actually quite common, having been reported in almost every part of the world. One of the most famous toad falls happened in the summer of 1794 in the village of Lalain, France. A very hot afternoon was broken suddenly by such an intense downpour of rain that 150 French soldiers (then fighting the Austrians) were forced to abandon the trench in which they were hiding to avoid being submerged. In the middle of the storm, which lasted for 30 minutes, tiny toads, mostly in the tadpole stage, began to land on the ground and jump about in all directions. When the rain let up, the soldiers discovered toads in the folds of their three-cornered hats.

In late October of 1889 Mr Wright of the parish of Penpont, Dumfries, Scotland, was startled by the appearance of what at first seemed to be a flock of birds, which began falling to the ground. Running towards them, he discovered the objects to be oak leaves, which eventually covered an area 1 mile wide and 2 miles long. The nearest clump of oak trees was 8 miles away, and no other kind of leaf fell.

Just before sunset in August 1897 an immense number of small, blood-coloured clouds filled the sky in Macerata, Italy. About an hour later, storm clouds burst and small seeds rained from the sky, covering the ground to a depth of half an inch. Many of the seeds had already started to germinate, and all of the seeds were from the Judas tree, which is found predominantly in the Middle East and Asia. There was no accompanying debris — just the Judas tree seeds.

About 150 perch-like silver fish dropped from the sky during a tropical storm near Killarney Station in Australia’s Northern Territory in February, 1974. Fishfalls are common enough that an ‘official’ explanation has been developed to cover most of them. It is theorised that whirlwinds create a waterspout effect, sucking up water and fish, carrying them for great distances and then dropping them somewhere else.

In February of 1965, a 50-lb mass of ice plunged through the roof of the Phillips Petroleum plant in Woods Cross, Utah. In his book, Strangest of All , Frank Edwards reported the case of a carpenter working on a roof in Kempten — near Düsseldorf, Germany — who was struck and killed in 1951 by an icicle 6 ft long and 6 in. around, which shot down from the sky.

On July 12, 1961, unripe peaches were scattered over a small portion of Shreveport, Louisiana, from a cloudy sky.