The day it rained animals!

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By the know laws of nature, frogs, fish, mice and periwinkles do not fly. Yet all have fallen from the shies for no apparent reason, and without explanation.

At Sutton Park, Birmingham, in June 1954, shoppers in a crowded street were astonished by a deluge of tiny, pale frogs. They bounced of umbrellas and hats, fell into shopping baskets, and hopped so profusely about the road and pavements that screaming woman dashed into the stores to escape them. By the time the downpour stopped, as suddenly as it had begun, hundreds more had hopped away into sewers, alleys and gardens.

But the shower was nothing compared to what happened centuries beforehand in Sardinia. According to ancient Egyptian books in the library at Alexandria, a frog-fall on the island lasted three days. Frogs clogged the roads and ponds, blocked doors and poured into houses. The people could do nothing to stop the invasion. A Greek scribe wrote: ' All vessels were filled with frogs. They were found boiled and roasted with everything the Sardinians tried to eat. The people could make no use of water because it was all filled with frogs, and they could not put their feet on the ground for the heaps of frogs that were there. Those that died left a smell that drove the people out of the country.'

Flakes of meat up to three inches square showered down on the American sata of Kentucky from a clear blue sky in March 1876. One astonished fieldworker boldly ate some, and said they tasted like mutton.

In May 1890, a shower of bright red rain drenched Messignadi, Calabria, southern Italy. The Italian Meteorological Society identified it as birds blood.

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Fish up to five inches long fell on Aderdare, South Wales, in a dense downpour in February 1859. They covered the roofs of houses and children scooped them up in the streets. Specimens sent to the British Museum were identified as minnows, and put on show at the zoo in Regent's Park, London.

A terrible thunderstorm swept the English city of Worcester in May, 1881. A donkey pulling a cart was struck dead by lightning in Whitehall, and hailstones tore leaves from trees and battered crops to the ground. In Cromer Lane, gardener John Greenhall raced to shelter in a shed, and watched astonished as the hailstorm suddenly turned into a deluge of periwinkles. They bounced off the ground and shredded the leaves if his plants, covering some parts of the ground to a depth of several inches. When the storm had passed townsfolk flocked to the area and collected the molluscs for hours. One man filled two buckets. Another picked up a huge shell and found it occupied by a hermit crab.

A rain of sprats, smelts and whiting fell on the country of Kent at Easter 1666. Some traders cheekily picked them up and sold them in Maidstone and Dartford.

Hordes of yellow mice tumbled from the sky over Bergen, Norway, in 1578. Thousands fell into the sea and swam ashore like a tide. Norwegian legend has it that such showers are nature's way of replacing lemmings lost in periodic mass suicides when they rush over cliff-tops into the ocean.

What can be the real reason for these amazing falls of live creatures? The most common explanation is that they have been up by whirlwinds and waterspouts elsewhere on the Earth's surface, and then carried by the wind to be dumped unexpectedly where least expected. But if that were so, why are frogs not accompanied by some evidence of their environment, such as pond-weed, mud or tadpoles? How can the wind select only sprats or whiting from an ocean full of different species of fish?

Charles Fort, a 19th-centuary American writer, believed that such living showers originated in some kind of immense Sargasso Sea or spread species to new parts of the globe. Sadly, nobody has yet located Fort's aerial sea. If comets were the vehicles that brought humans to Earth, could they still be raining life down on the planet?

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