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"Some days ago (in August 1897) the province of Macerata, in Italy, was the scene of an extraordinary phenomenon. Half an hour before sunset an immense number of small blood-coloured cloud covered the sky. About an hour later a cyclone storm burst, and immediately the air became filled with myriads of small seeds. The seeds fell over town and country, covering the ground to a depth of about half an inch. The next day the whole of the scientists of Macerata were abroad in order to find some explanation. Prof. Cardinal, a celebrated Italian naturalist, stated that the seeds were of the genus Cercil, commonly called Judas Tree, and that they belonged to an order of Leguminosse found only in Central Africa or the Antilles. It was found, upon examination, that a great number of the seeds were actually in the first stage of germination." (Source: Saturday evening mail, Volume 28, Number 22, 27 November 1897 From the collection of the Vigo County Public Library ) Alfred Wilson Osborne and his wife like to tell the tale of a day in March 1977 when they were showered with objects from the sky. Osborne, a newspaper chess correspondent from Bristol, England, says he and his wife were on their way back home from church on a Sunday morning when they were barraged by several hundred hazelnuts plummeting to the ground. Over the next few minutes, the nuts banged and pinged on passing cars, the parked cars of a nearby car dealer, and passersby. The incident was reported in the Bristol paper with no explanation. It was a nearly cloudless day, there were no nut trees on the road where the event occurred, and the objects clearly seemed to be falling from the sky. Osborne was amazed at what he saw, but said that the most amazing thing of all was that the hazelnuts, not in season until September or October, were fresh and ripe. "I have thought that it might be a vortex that sucked them up," he said, "but I don't know where you suck up hazelnuts in March." (Unexplained Phenomena: A Rough Guide Special by John Michell, Bob Rickard, Robert J. M. Rickard) On February 12, 1979, in Southampton, U.K., Roland Moody heard an unusual whoosh outside his conservatory, but ignored it. The sound repeated an hour later, and he discovered that the glass roof was covered with thousands of mustard seeds and cress seeds coated with jelly, causing them to stick to his fingers when he attempted to pick them up. Seeds continued to fall all day,, covering Moody's garden and getting tracked into the house, and releasing the pungent aroma of mustard and cress when stepped on. Eight pails of cress seeds were collected and planted, and the plants eventually harvested. Questioning his neighbors, Moody learned that the garden of one, Airs. Stockley, had been hit with seeds the previous year as well as the current one. It had taken all year to remove the former sprouts from her flower garden. The next day Moody and his two immediate neighbors were rained upon by haricot beans, broad beans, maize, and peas. Every time Mrs. Stockley opened her door, seeds would shoot down the ten-yard hallway and into her kitchen. She collected ten pounds of beans. Police were called in, but the seeds' origin remained a mystery. Those three houses were the only ones targeted, and no "rain" fell on the sidewalk in front of them. (Source: Almanac of the Infamous, the Incredible, and the Ignored by Juanita Rose Violini ) News media in the United Kingdom reported the
fall of apples. On Wednesday November 14, 2011, it rained apples over a
main road in Keresley, the Coundon area of Coventry, a city in the
center of England. "One motorist, who was travelling with her
husband at about 6.45pm, said it was lucky the downpour hadn't caused a
pile-up. She said: "The apples fell out of the sky as if out of nowhere.
Sometimes a singular item falls down, that defies a normal explanation. Mango mystery baffles Calgary family It’s a mystery. A fast moving mango, weighing 454 grams, fell into a Calgary family’s backyard on Tuesday afternoon. It narrowly missed Lisa Egan while she was rolling up the cover on the family’s pool. “All of a sudden, out of nowhere, something hits the top of the blanket – approximately in the centre – (it was) extremely loud, it scared me,” she said. Egan noticed a gaping hole in the plastic cover before spotting the mango floating in the pool, under the cover. Amazingly, the mango wasn’t severely damaged, just flattened somewhat on one side. “At first I thought it had to be someone throwing it in the yard,” Egan said, adding she also thought her husband Duane might be pulling off a prank. But that wasn’t the case. Duane Egan doesn’t believe the mango was tossed into their pool. “My son and I, we’ve thrown apples very high into the pool, and I’ve actually thrown it right at the cover as well – trying to bust through it, and I can’t,” Duane said. “For the mango to bust right through it had to be coming pretty fast.” The Egans have considered several possibilities: maybe it fell from the International Space Station, maybe it was shot out of a mango cannon or maybe a big bird dropped it. But the couple said it probably came from an airplane since their McKenzie Towne home is under a well-used flight path for the Calgary International Airport. As for how a large piece of fruit could fall out of a plane in the first place, no one knows. And the great mango mystery of McKenzie Towne may never be solved. “Might be a very normal reason for this, but I don’t know what it is,” Egan said. Source: Global News, June 8, 2016 |