Life's Great Mysteries - Does it really rain frogs? Or fish?

I went down a rabbit hole with this one, so bear with me... it'll be worth the time it takes to read it.

All the way back to ancient civilizations, people have reported seeing frogs and fish rain from the sky. And other animals, like rats, iguanas, bats, and spiders. I’ve always wanted to know why people would make such an obviously outrageous claim. I mean, even if I saw it happening, I would think twice about going around telling people what I saw. They would think I was crazy. So, why have people made these claims throughout history?

One explanation, at least with frogs, is that, after emerging from their houses after a heavy storm and seeing frogs everywhere, people made the assumption the frogs fell from the sky during the storm.

The 1999 movie Magnolia (considered by many to be a cinematic masterpiece) has a famous—and rather graphic—scene where thousands of large frogs fall from the sky. To most viewers, it was confusing, but the movie critics claimed it was the perfect ending. Go figure. Anyway, the movie was obviously fiction.

Here are some things we know for real. Ernest Agee from Purdue University said, “A tornadic waterspout is merely a tornado that forms over land and travels over the water. I’ve seen small ponds literally emptied of their water by a passing tornado. So, it wouldn’t be unreasonable for frogs (or other living things) to ‘rain’ from the skies.” So, waterspouts are likely to be the source of some of the reports of such things.

In 1873, it actually rained frogs in Kansas City, and a Scientific American article concluded it was likely due to a tornado.

In 1882, in Dubuque, Iowa, there was a frog hail storm, in which frozen frogs fell from the sky during a storm. Scientists concluded a powerful updraft must have carried frogs high into the atmosphere, where they turned into frogcicles and eventually fell onto the heads of puzzled Dubuque residents.

In 1947, a biologist from the Louisiana Department of Wildlife was eating at a restaurant in Marksville, Louisiana. A waitress came up to him and said fish were falling from the sky. Later, he wrote: “There were spots on Main Street, in the vicinity of the bank, averaging one fish per square yard. Automobiles and trucks were running over them. Fish also fell on the roofs of houses… I personally collected from Main Street and several yards on Monroe Street, a large jar of perfect specimens and preserved them in formalin, in order to distribute them among various museums.” Keep in mind this was actually a biologist saying this.

In 2005, thousands of frogs rained on a small town in northwestern Serbia. Almost laughably, a local climatologist, named Slavisa Ignjatovic, described the phenomenon as “not very unusual.” Why? Because, as he explained, the strong winds that accompanied the storm could have easily picked up the frogs.

In 2010, the people of the small Australian town of Lajamanu witnessed hundreds of spangled perch falling from the sky. Christine Balmer, who was walking home when the rain and fish started falling, said, “These fish fell in their hundreds and hundreds all over the place. The locals were running around everywhere to pick them up.”

In June of 2022, in San Francisco, anchovies rained from above. In this case, the weather was clear, and the falling fish appeared to have been chewed on. Scientists concluded this phenomenon was a result of an unusually productive year for the anchovy population, and sea birds were catching them and accidentally dropping some while flying.

A similar incident happened in Texarkana, Texas in 2021, but in this case a large flock of cormorants were disgorging their recent meal of shad while flying. The yacked-up shad were on the ground over an area of nine square miles.

So, there we have it. It does occasionally rain frogs and fish, and we have reasonable scientific explanations for almost every event. Below is a woodcut from a book titled Prodigiorum ac Ostentorum Chronicon, published in 1557, one of the first books specifically about strange phenomena. The woodcut depicts a reported raining of frogs that took place in Scandanavia.

Image credit
- Raining frogs woodcut - Konrad Lykosthenes, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons