From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeartRadio.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, they call me Ben.
We're joined with our guest super producer Max the freight Train Williams. Most importantly, you are you. You are here. That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. We're only happy when it rains, and we're calling it folks. We decided, yeah, we're calling it complicated. We decided off air that it's time for a break from the gloom and doom of recent yet crucial episodes. Did you guys
catch some of the awesome storms over the weekend. We were going to record this on a Friday, it's stormed on a Thursday, but the weekend really came through with some epic nature.
Seriously, like the kind of stuff that knocks things over.
Let's just say, yeah, it's nothing compared to Beryl, which everybody you know in Mexico and Texas and a bunch of other places in the Caribbean got slammed with. But the lightning and thunder was intense.
Yeah, that's hurricane barrel. Yeah, as we get into this, I'm immensely interested. I don't think we've ever talked about this explicitly with each other on air, But would you guys describe yourselves as more rainy day people or more sunny day at the beach type dudes?
Thunderstorm on the beach is like my coach's amazing well on the Okay, I guess so maybe I don't know, but yeah, sure there could be an opportunity where that might be cool. I could see Previson saying I'm in a place that is safe, right ish at least from the lightning, as long as I get to see it, and.
Watching watching from a cool patio, which protective stuff.
Yeah, not dipping your toes while holding a lightning rod.
No, no, we we we already know a Ben who did that experiment or something like you.
Know which Ben it is this shall not be named. I do. I like a stormy evening. I like watching it from a protected porch. But man, the other night I was doing that very thing and it got a little like, okay, you better go on inside before we get you know, sucked right off of this porch up in the Never Never landed Oz. Which one is it that the weather takes you to? Yeah, I think it's awesome. It's Oz. Yes.
Uh. And you know whose world is it? The world is yours, as Nas would say, everybody gets their own personal weather preferences. Uh. You know. I was on the road recently and had that exact moment that Matt is describing. There's nothing quite as I was watching the violent poetry of nature. And I think all of us are old enough to remember when talking about the weather was like this social dog whistle for a boring conversation, for small talk.
I like to make my regular dad joke when I picked the kid up and I say, hey, hot enough out there for you. It's just you know, because I'm at Dad.
This happened. I was outside playing my son just earlier today and it was beginning to get super hot, and my neighbor walked. I watched her walk out of her house and to go to the other house across the street where her sister lives, and she just said, sure, is hot out here. I was like, yes, it is all right.
It reminds me of that episode where Dennis and Mack moved to the suburbs.
Yeah, yeah, a.
Storm, Wally, a storm unrelated you guys. Matt in particular, I saw the Instagram algorithm served me up the SNL clip where Christopher walk In plays Ernold Langish and I thought you made that up entirely. I thought that was your bit, and I felt betrayed. No, man, it was very good. No, I think I knew you were lifting it from us and now, but it was very They really go on with that bit. Is that what they call like a shaggy dog bit where it just keeps going, grinding it into the ground a bit.
It reminds me of Bob Odenkirk's excellent textbook on how humor works. And you have this sort of algorithm where a joke becomes unfunny and you push through the nader of an audience appeal and it reaches a higher apex. It's froller history. I mean it also now it seems, though increasingly chaotic to talk about the weather. Let's be honest. You know, the science has proven each summer is largely becoming hotter than the last. Normal weather patterns are becoming
more unpredictable. Even the old school classics like El Nino In tonight's episode, we decided to do something a little different. We're looking into some old school kind of paranormal activity or extraordinary events. We're looking at weather of the past. We're gonna get weird with rain. Here are the facts old schoolhouse stuff works. Do you guys want to talk about rain but precipitation, Yeah, condensation, the water cycle, the
water cycle. Yeah. Because look for everybody who is hearing this and saying, these three Jabbroni's are out of their necks on this. Sunny days at the beach are the best. The only reason sunny days at the beach are possible is because of rain. The world depends on rainy weather.
Yeah, whether you like it you hate it, that's absolutely the case. And here in the spirit of how stuff works is how this stuff works. To have rain, you gotta have clouds. Clouds for them from water or ice that evaporates on the surface of the earth, or from plants that give off water and oxygen during photosynthesis. And there and rents and repeats it is. Yes, it is a cycle.
Guys. Imagine how boring Earth would be if water just stayed where it was. It was just like water is here and not other places, there would only be plants right around the ring of that water, and everything else would be so boring.
Yeah, so thankfully water is on this weird sisophia and curse situation. You know, we've got to in our notes for this episode, we have a lovely little infographic of the water cycle, which.
You might remember from your elementary school or middle school textbooks, right right.
It is known, as they used to say in Game of Thrones. Also, we had an episode that I re listened to because our pal doc code named Doc Holiday asked me about it. We had an episode on plant intelligence, and when I listen back, we spend a while just fanboying on how awesome photosynthesis is.
I do remember that, and I do think it's insane the way plants do have an inherent sentience about them. How these things just fricking work. You know, nobody has to do anything, nobody's got to push any buttons. Humans are irrelevant in the percit of fact, Humans screw it all up. If anything right.
Well, the plants talk to each other.
We know that. What is it those networks of mushrooms underground, It's it's like a neural network. It's absolutely mind boggling, and to your point, often made been the closest thing that I think we can see to alien life on Earth is the way mushrooms talk to one another and are so incredibly resilient and just magical creatures.
But you know where, you don't find mushrooms in the clouds in the sky.
All of us, super Mario lied to everyone.
They also apparently are not found in golden floating bricks with question marks on them that you punch and then they just pop right out and make you big.
And we can say that, we asked the mycologist.
He said, we did. So.
Look, this is what blows my mind about today's episode. My understanding from those classes when I was a kid is that water evaporates in the form of a gas which is extremely light, and it floats up into the air because the air is a little more dense than this stuff that's going up there, so it's able to go way way up into the atmosphere. But it's not like it condenses and hangs out and becomes a cloud and then just rains. Right, there's other stuff up there.
Yeah, the water vapor turns into clouds as it's slowly falling down like him in a parachute, and when it when it is cooling, it transforms again from that gash estate from water vapor into liquid water or the slightly edgy or hardcore version of that ice. But the problem is vapor can't do this alone. It's not a water Vapor is not a lone wolf operation. It needs a solid of some sort to kind of glom onto. Right. So this could be anything, because earth is very dirty
moola spaghetti. So it could be dust, it could be pollen. It could be another drop of water that has already become liquid. It could be another little crystal of ice, the tidiest crystal of ice.
Some forms of pollution can even do a.
Lot of them, some of them, some of them humans put there on purpose. Some extra clouds. So in the cloud, more water condenses. There's a feedback loop these droplets, this presence of liquid water grows. When it gets too heavy for what Matt is describing here, it can no longer stay suspended in the cloud. So these droplets fall to the earth as and that's the point where all the
farmers say whoopee. Or somebody's sitting on a porch sip and iced tea looking at the rain from their patio, just mutters to themselves, we needed.
This, yeah, conall, oh yes, I'm so glad that you're here with me on this pause, drinking this iced tea stand out. It is hot, and I do believe I have the vapor.
This positively laps the humidity, so guys the Okay, So when when it becomes like dense and heavy enough to be a droplet of water, that's when it starts to fall, or when it as it as it's falling, it freezes, right, it becomes it can become hail and other things like that. There's all I know. I don't look, I'm not I'm no meteorologist, but that stuff up there isn't that heavy?
Right?
Well, that's the thing, man. Uh. Heavy is a matter of context, right, okay, right, because the environment is not a vacuum. It's this coagulated soup of different things sort of arguing with each other. So as these things finally, it's not as though a cloud generates a single droplet the way it takes a gallon of water to make one almond. It just it reaches a collective threshold. Water takes collective action.
I'm just picturing a gallon of water making an almond. And that's the most absurd, delightful thing I've thought of all day, think about like, like, you know how we don't think of water as being particularly heavy or water drople that's being particularly heavy. But I a towel, or if your clothes are soaking wet, it's heavy. Yes, it builds up over time.
But I'm just imagining if you were to cut a cloud in half. Right as we're talking about this moisture condensing towards the bottom of wherever that cloud is, right, the where the atmosphere is pushing up against the bottom of that cloud, and then the pressure of the water vapor that's condensing down onto that layer. That's when you get the ring coming out, right, But it's it's more of a I like what you're the way you're putting that, guys.
But it still is kind of baffling to me, just the fact that there's that much weight up there just to hang stupid.
It's super It is objectively a ridiculous thing. Science.
Yeah, I'm surprised that there isn't a science. Maybe there is, and I just don't remember it. But I used to work at a science center and one would think there'd be a quick and easy way to sort of generate a cloud simulation because I want to know what it feels like to rub my hand through a cloud.
Oh you can do it, Yeah, yeah, you can do it like a for example. I'm not gonna give a personal anecdote here, but it is, uh, it is possible to reach a high enough elevation such that you walk through low hanging clouds in certain parts of the world and it's a ghostly.
Does it feel just like a fog.
It feels like going to a church if you believe in God.
It's amazing. That's pretty cool. But I imagine though, because of the scale in our you know, comparative smallness, that you wouldn't notice it. It's not like you'd walk through it and get wet necessarily. You know, you might feel a little dampness, but it's not like you're going to emerge from the other side of one of these things like covered and droplets of water.
Not dripping, but definitely damp. It definitely is like it is a ken to walking through a classic London drizzle or Pacific Northwest drizzle. But then if you get to the elevation above those very low hanging formations. You look down and it looks like you are above the clouds. It's real trip sick. It's kind of sick.
We should go.
We we talked already a little bit about how amazing this is is, how weird it is. Farmers love it. People waiting for the bus are probably saying, damn it when you see those thunderclouds, really like to be crass. When the as falls out of a thunderstorm, and we've all been there, so crass, that was so crass. What would kind of lingus think? And if.
We're saying colonel Angus, we're saying angus just.
Like early American accents, to be sure. So to the earlier question here, just to sew up the science, if the air in a giving cloud on Earth is below the freezing point of water zero degrees celsius or for some other weird reason, thirty two degrees fahrenheit, we didn't
make the rules. Ice crystals form. And if the air all the way down to the surface of the ground is also below those temperature thresholds, then boom, boom boom, you have snow, You get your white Christmas, your Donner party, whatever.
But because the ice crystals remain that ice crystals, right.
They don't encounter any other temperature changes. However, again, being a messy, chaotic bowl of spaghetti, the atmosphere can intervene, so something maybe falling and encounter sort of a layer cake of different temperatures, and that's where we get stuff like like kale or sleet or what's our favorite in Atlanta, Back when it snowed here, they used to scare people with wintry mix.
Ooh, a wintery mix sounds like a delicious milkshake.
Oh, it's like the freezing rain, right's yeah, somewhere in between and once it gets down here a black eyes.
Guys, we don't know what the hell that stuff is.
Okay, it's sort of a mix, if you will, shout out to Key and Peel's excellent black Eyes sketch by the way. But you know, as we mentioned, there's a lot more to this. We are not the meteorologist you're looking for, but that's kind of the gist, and that's what informs our conversation tonight. For the entirety of human history, people have struggled to predict the weather accurately. We're not meteorologists, but I kick it with several meteorologists and they are eternally irritated because.
They have to point in nothing. They just have to know where the thing is on the green screen. It's a wild skill set.
They also get angry letters all the time.
It's because people either blame them for the bad weather that they predicted accurately, or they blame them for whatever they didn't quite nail because you know, I mean, weather prediction isn't always an exact science because you know, conditions can change.
Well, it can't be right because it's trying to tell the future.
Yeah right, it's a real kobashi maru. That's for you, Max Free Tran Williams. I mean, it's weird because we see this as such a big part of human culture. We were very fortunate as a civilization to spend at least a little bit of time in a world where conversations about weather were boring. But past human civilizations prayed
about weather. They sacrificed people to weather. There is an entire pantheon of gods across the globe entirely associated with different types of weather, like gods you pray to for rain, god you pray to when you want the rain, to stop gods you pray to for like to create, to prevent or create natural disasters.
It's wild, guys. I recently had a bit of a home maintenance whoopsie by somebody that I hired off the internet. What might that make stake again? And came down into my studio to find a water feature had been installed non consensually, and it really made me think of, like, we need water to survive, We need water for our plants to grow. A water can also destroy everything.
M Yeah, it's true, and it was here before humans and we'll probably be here after humans are gone in some form. We also we should mention just a shout out to an earlier series of episodes that in modern history people figured out technological ways to modify the weather provable ways that work. Asterisk because right now those methods are still imperfect and potentially dangerous. We talked about we talked about this in our book to Stratospheric aerosol injection. You guys, remember that.
One that's the weather control or cloud seating, right.
One hundred percent, that's what we're talking about. With bonding water vapor to pollutants, you can shoot stuff up and sis ai takes this to the nth degree. They're like, hey, let's reproduce. Let's solve global warming by making fake volcanic eruptions.
Yeah, there, what is it? There were so many rumors about NASA having a cloud machine, right, but it's just I will my understanding is just testing with some rocket
materials and some science and tech going on there. But there's some fascinating video of some official NASA gadgetry, like huge factory size things where it looks like they are just generating clouds on the ground which then raise up into the sky to make clouds, which you know, it's not really a thing necessarily, but it's also a thing. It's kind of weird.
Yeah, it's super cool. What could go wrong? Says Humanity.
It's sort of like playing god in a way. I mean, it's you know, and the usually when people do that, things do tend to go wrong, whether it be with like cloning or various things like that. But there are a lot of things that could go wrong.
It turns out, yeah, one hundred percent, shout out to the Olympics in China. But also there are growing concerns about large scale changes to Earth's ecosystem and weather patterns, so we can understand how most conversations about the weather are usually going to be focused on the present and the fearful future today. But what if we told you, folks, the weather, rain in particular has always had its own strange moments, and some of those moments remain a mystery
even as we record this evening. Folks check it. It's Monday, July eighth, and we're pretty sure a storm is on the way here.
I'm not here to you, guys, according to the AI over at weather dot.
Com, I'm gonna be okay, Oh good, Here's where it gets crazy.
Yeah, over the span of history, a lot more than water has rained on the earth. I think we all read about this, right. You see it in like time lifebooks or documentaries and so on.
Weird rain of.
Fishes, certainly, and if you've seen any really good movies over the you've probably seen depictions of weird stuff falling from the skies of magnolia.
But it's also it's a biblical image too. I mean, the idea of rains of frogs is I believe, one of the plagues from the Bible. So you know, it does feel like it has the significance, and it probably is something that actually did occur and then was just sort of pegged and then lumped into these plagus. But it really was just kind of a weird weather phenomenon, like the was it the Kentucky meat meat.
Rain whatever, that Kentucky meat shower.
Yeah, we'll get into that. It's a it's a weird one.
So we know we know that we'll lean on the Library of Congress in the US here. We know that there have been reports of raining frogs and fish dating back to pre recorded civilization. Library of Congress also goes on to add, of course, it doesn't rain frogs and fish in the sense that it rains water. No one has ever seen frogs or fish vaporized into the air before a rainfall. So already we see there's a bit
of an unexpected mystery here. But we know what's a mystery people are wrestling with for quite some time.
Yeah. So it's like they're tadpoles when they're up in the clouds, right, and then they start to fall down towards the bottom of the cloud, and then they start to turn into frogs as they fall.
There's a different kind of cloud seating, right, Yeah, it is sorry that. But you know, to someone who's not maybe as in the know about how these processes work, it could seem like that, like the heavens are producing a rain of these creatures where they do not belong, and it is signifying something very dark and sinistern.
M heracle these Lembus, Greek philosopher back in the day, he wrote the following. In the second century BC, he said in Peotia and doug danie it as they say before now rain frogs, and so great it's been the number of these frogs that the houses and the roods have been fulled of them, And then plenty of the elder co signs it later in the first century AD or CE. Pick your poison. You can find weird accounts of animal rain, particularly fish and frogs, in the vast
majority of human culture at some point. As was noted earlier, there is an armchair theory that this kind of phenomenon could explain one of the tales of biblical plagues, the plague of frogs. It could also explain a good event like the rain of Mana, which is a different thing, right, Manna falls from heaven and saves the starving well.
I think it's no coincidence that we haven't seen or heard tell of rains of like kittie cats or puppy dogs for example. I mean, these are creatures. Well, we'll get into some other weird ones, but it does seem in general that aquatic creatures tend to be the best candidates for this kind of thing.
Important clue. Yeah, and we also know just objectively if we put on our X files investigator hats. This is vastly different from stories of UFO or UAP abductions because a lot of animal rain episodes have been conclusively proven with multiple witnesses and documentation, or the better way to say it is a lot of weird animals have been sighted during and after storms and thereby associated with rain. We'll see why. This is not just hair splitting. This is like a big piece.
Of the puzzle. So as an example, in seventeen ninety four, one hundred and fifty French soldiers near the village of La Land found themselves assaulted by seriously gnarly heavy rain. An absolute downpour during a storm, along with a massive barrage of frogs raining down from the sky and popular mechanics, tends to be the authority on these kinds of things
had this to say. I've had closer inspection revealed that many of the toads, a great number of which were discovered in the folds and creases of the men's hats and uniforms, still possessed tails.
Hmmm, So they were young frogs. Maybe they weren't even frogs completely yet to maybe they were still of the tadpoling variety. I don't know, you know, yeah, but this stuff, this non aqueous rain, So like non water rain, there's some weird ones, and there are some that you know, a lot of these instances like occurred one time like this one, right, this is like a tail of some crazy time when some frogs rain down in the seventeen hundreds.
But there are other instances that occur often, almost like clockwork, predictable.
Yeah, even up to four times a year. We've got to go to euro Honduras. What a setup, Matt, Because this again differentiates from the UFO abduction kind of comparison. Right, what if you could predict that at a certain point, starting in maybe May or June, there was one town that always consistently had UFO sightings, landings, and abductions that's what's happening with the Juvia de peseses or the let's see Aguacero de Pascado, the downpour of fish that happens
in this place in Honduras, euro Honduras. It's happened for more than a century, but less than four hundred years as far as we can find, and they lean into it. They have a huge party in May or June. They call it the Festival of the Rain of Fish or the Festival of the Downpour of Fish. There's a parade, there's a carnival, there are people dressed like fish. It's this wholesome LOVECRAFTI and insmith thing, and you gotta go.
It's a real cloud even a chance of meatballs situation.
Right, Yeah, well that's the thing. I mean, you could certainly eat the frogs as well, but to some a rain of fish that's a that's kind of a bonus. I mean, you can't gather those suckers up and you got your sere eating good for a week.
Depending on the fish.
To be fair, the species that I've seen associated with this particular place and this downpour is probably not a fish that you're gonna want a file at. It's they're pretty tiny and not not like baby fish, right if you're imagining that. But they're small fish, not a lot of meat.
Up I throwback.
Yeah, another clue. I mean, that's the that gets us to the main mystery. Right, think about the weight.
You have thought about the.
Weight the like. Obviously, frogs and fish are heavier than air. That's why they don't permanently levitate. They can't evaporate up into clouds, and they can't suspend themselves there to you know, f a f o and reproduce. So what gives In some cases people said, hey, weird rain. This whole phenomenon or non aqueous rain as it would later say, it is entirely attributable to spiritual causes. The gods are either
super happy with us or they're super pissed. And now we're on non judicial punishment kind of thing.
Right, Yeah, what's that movie from the eighties The gods must be crazy? Yes, I think that that's I think that offense. But that would be one inference to draw from this situation.
Yeah, wow, now we kind of we do sort of know a little bit about this. If you have ever read about the rains of fish and frogs or amphibians in particular. Then you have almost certainly read reputable sources or heard reputable journalists say that the mystery has been explained, as we're going to find that is not entirely true. I mean, it's an explanation that sounds really solid at first glance, especially if you're not a marine biologist, nor
an oceanologist, nor a meteorologist. Knowing the current theory about what could form these incidents also convinces us there's not really a way to stop it, nor outside maybe Honduras, a way to predict it over the long term. We have another clue that comes to us courtesy of a French scientist who is famous for some other things. But he got he got what we call it, he got his chops in. He dropped a hot verse on the discourse.
Oh yeah, well this is his theory. Ready quote, Sudden gusts of violent wind could lift large groups of frogs high into the air, and then when the burst of wind dissipated, they would rain back to the ground in one swift action. Or that's me adding that in one swift action. But that's what that's what this person is imagining.
Let's say a tornado right, or part of a hurricane or a water spouch some some thing that causes wind to rise upwards rapidly could sweep up a whole bunch of frogs, maybe in a little pond, or a bunch of fish that are swimming near the surface, and take them all the way up in the air and drop them right back down.
Yeah, this reminds me of two I think we talked about it on a video we did recently, or one of our YouTube videos. There was a very down to earth scientific explanation for Moses's parting of the Red Sea that it was just kind of a very what's the word, I guess, serendipitous weather event that created this phenomenon that happened to be very very good fortune for Moses and the Israelites, but did not necessarily involve Moses waving his
staff and parting the Red Sea. It was a meteorological anomaly, which is I guess what you could call these things as well.
Yeah, weather used to make history. No humans make weather. It's an interesting situation. The French scientists. We're talking about this guy named Andre Marie Amber, most notably famous as the guy who discovered electromagneticism. He was doing a lot of stuff. Oh wow, Yeah, that's why we call it amps sick. Yeah, also really into frogs. I don't know if he ever ate frogs himself. Have you guys ever had a good plate of frog?
Like?
Yeah, they're good. I know they get sort of stereotypically associated with the French, but I believe it is a part of traditional French cooking more so than other cultures. But yeah, I have and it's true. They do taste like chicken. Mm hmm.
Yeah, if you cook them right, don't cook them wrong, look it up, look up the recipe before you get them in the pan.
And then they taste a little froggy.
Otherwise I was gonna say, is that a dangerous thing? Is that like undercooking chicken, they.
Can't taste rubbery and gross and frogs?
Yeah, yeah, that's the thing I mean. Also, you know, cook your food, etc. Cooker food kids, cook your food kids. Our buddy Andre was not far off to get the real answer. We have to bust this important misconception, and this is the crux of the problem with the theory. Not all rain is actually rain. In fact, the majority of what people are witnessing we could call counterfeit animal rain.
Imagine you walk outside after a storm. You've had your little cozy time on the patio right with some coffee or some tea, and then when you get outside you see a lot of weird animals laying on the ground, a bevy of them, a cavalcade. You would naturally assume the animals were dropped by the storm. However, if we go back to again an excellent summation by the Library of Congress, we see a really good We see a really good exploration of what actually occurred in counterfeit animal rate.
And this is way more on the skeptical side. So here we go, ready quote. Because of the popularity and mystery surrounding stories about raining animals, some people falsely report an animal rainfall after seeing large numbers of worms, frogs, birds on the ground after a storm. However, these animals did not fall from the sky. Instead, storms fill in worm burrows, knock birds from trees and roofs, wash fish onto the shores of rivers and ponds, and drive frogs
and other small animals from their habitats. People who live in suburban or urban environments tend to underestimate the number of organisms living around their homes. Therefore, they may suspect that animals came from the sky rather than from their natural habitats. So I see that as a possibility in some of these right. That makes a lot of sense
to me. If you notice a bunch of birds lying on the ground dead after a big storm, and we've seen that numerous times throughout history, where it's reported, you know, in the news, we'll see that pop up on the subreddit about news, We'll see it pop up in the Guardian other places where the bunch of birds were dead after a big storm, or you know, something occurred that killed a lot of these birds, they're everywhere. That makes sense. The frogs make a ton of sense. We've lived in
the South. We've seen, like after a big rainstorm or something, bunch of frogs are just hanging out. A bunch of toads are like out now because of the rains, right, but generally they're not all dead, at least in my experience.
The fish thing only makes sense to me if there was some kind of minor flooding or something that caused enough water or run off or something to like sweep over a lawn or a neighborho hood or something and then go away relatively quickly to where the fish ended up on the lawn somewhere.
Yeah.
Yeah, No, you're making a great point, because the fish and amphibians, the avians and the amphibians live in a liminal space, right. One is sort of in the freeport between the land and the sea or the land of water, and the other one is in the you know, in the terminal between the land and the air. And so what looks like animal rain may actually be two distinct phenomena.
In the first, the animals get moved along the ground or they get knocked down off the eaves, often of things as we'll see in an etymology joke we're saving for the end. And in the second, the one people tend to believe most often, these animals, these fish especially get sucked up by and we could say they get non consensually redistributed together.
That's again, they get gentrified.
Well, and I mean, you know, like I was saying that that that storm that we had here in Atlanta, in the Atlanta area the other night, I mean it got to a point where it was literally knocking cans and all kinds of things over from my you know, kind of covered porch. I mean it is absolute. They call it a force of nature. Anything that's like really really strong and unmanageable and completely out of control is often referred to as being a force of nature. That's what we're talking about here.
But but there are other there are other things that have happened where people have witnessed in the recent past, things like fish falling from the sky, not just the after effects of fish on the ground, but fish falling like Australia.
Yes, like the recent cases in Australia. And we're going to dive into or we're going to fall into more of that. After a brief word from our sponsors, we returned with the actual animal rain theory and the bizarre complications surrounding. We've returned the actual animal rain theory, all right. The leading thing is this, storms are most often way stronger than the average person assumes.
Think about it.
You're probably not in the clouds during a storm. You don't see all the you don't beat me here, Max, you'll see all the crazy shit that's going on. We're down on the ground, boots on the ground, right, and we don't see the terrifying ingredients that are that are part of the recipe that can lead to things like hurricanes or typhoons and things that can lead to strange rain. And this is where we get to what we call
the tornadic or tornadic waterput theory. Maybe we go to the BBC to set us up absolutely.
The BBC puts it thusly. Given strong enough winds in thunderstorms, for example, small whirlwinds and many tornadoes may form. When these travel over water, any small items of debris in their path, which as fish or frogs, may be picked up and carried up for several miles, up to several miles rather. Greg Carbon of the National Weather Service notes that it is possible, especially when you look at the power of some thunderstorms and tornadoes, because they contain what
he refers to as a tremendous vertical component. That's the wind we're talking about that can suck things up and deposit them far from where they were picked up. We've all seen Twister the movie. I mean, it carried a cow, y'all, a cgi cow. And we're looking forward to Twist Stirs, the movie coming soon to a theater near you.
Yeah, I mean, we're gonna talk about this, But guys, I think tornado is one thing. These in very strong storms, even with these wind gusts, with the with some of these what do they call them, like small little whirlwinds that go up. I still don't see that vertical pressure and force digging deep enough within water to even pick up frogs and tadpoles and stuff. And maybe that's just I can't see it, just because I don't understand.
Well, there's some experts that would agree with you, and they can't see it either. And I do see what you're saying. You're talking about those water spouts that occur over open water. They would have just enough power to kind of sustain themselves, it feels like, and then kind of peter out. But I don't anywhere and how love far would these things travel? Like, you're not, are they
gonna shoot them up into the sky? I don't. That just doesn't seem like they would have enough outward pressure outward to have that kind of trajectory, because it would literally require shooting them up into the sky like some sort of cannon.
Yeah, you know, you guys are raising some particularly astute points here. I mean, let's look at this. We got the gist of this idea. We've been using words like possible in theory, but this, you know why, there are problems with it. There are significant issues. It may well be what's happening multiple times a year out there in Honduras, but it's not a silver bullet solution by any means.
This theory does not explain why so many incidents seem to have only a single type of animal or species falling. It also does not explain, to Matt's earlier point, incidents where deep sea animals end up raining on the surface. Further, it doesn't explain how these animals could survive the fall because gravity is real. Right, if they're dropped, you know, from such great heights, to quote whatever Emo song that is from, they should thank you. They should be splattity, right,
I'm using the technical nomenclature. They should not be flipped in and flop it in around.
And in Magnolia they do just that. In the film. There is some splatting of frogs when they fall in that scenario. But in that scenario it almost is meant to be like this Deis x Makina that kind of guides the plot and it's sort of this like divine intervention. If you are meant to kind of take it as a spiritual occurrence.
Yeah, which, and there's nothing wrong with that, because spirituality is just a framework people put on the world around and within them, you know, So if you choose to encounter it that way, then that's perfect that if that satisfies you philosophically. I mean the idea that when we look at the science tornadic water spouts, tornadoes forming over water, this makes sense for some of the cases we're talking about because the animals involved or victimized, or often small,
they're light in weight. There is no record of a pod of you know, humpback whales occurring after a storm as far as we know, right in conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com if there is a whale rain. But it also to your earlier point, Noel, it doesn't explain why a water spout could carry fish over long distances with that vertical push instead of instantly just throw them out in every single direction, like when you hit grass with a weed eater.
You know what I mean, guys, I'm imagining the POV of a small spangled perch getting sucked sucked up in a water spout somewhere near Australia, and you get sucked way up in there. But then you think you're just gonna fall to the ground, but no, no, no, you land in this almost water like soupiness. That is the cloud like beginning to rain as it's condensing.
A cumulo nimbus it.
Yeah, dude, do you think the do you think the fish could swim around in that like that liminal space for just a moment before it fell again?
I hope. So that's beautiful because then if a fish, if the right fish goes up and then comes down successfully, then we have our UFO story. Right then you have our fish profit in our religion, there's another ocean.
Ye swim with me.
But that's a that is a okay, that is a myth making concept from a real story that happened in March twenty ten where apparently in this small Australian outback town, a bunch of fish, the spangled perch, we're falling from the sky and it was witnessed by multiple people who live in that town. There's only six hundred and fifty residents there, but they watched the fish falling, so it wasn't they discovered the fish dead. Afterwards, they saw those
fish falling down and Here's a quote. Here's a quote for somebody who was there. When I told my family, who live in another part of Australia about the fish falling from the sky, they thought I'd lost the plot. But no, I haven't lost my marbles. All I can say is that I'm thankful it didn't rain crocodiles.
Yeah, and didn't you say perch, Matt, I mean.
The spangled perch. They're very tiny.
Oh, I was gonna say perch is good eats? Right, it can be, but I guess I'm sorry. I don't know why I'm leaning so hard on this being some sort of like loaves and fishes gift from God kind of situation.
Yeah, yeah, which would be amazing. And also, if you have to, you can eat to survive many fish that are not tasty. It's kind of like eating a fox or crow. It's not ideal, but you know, get to tomorrow.
Yeah, even if they are a little splatted.
Even if they're a little splatty. You know, some people pay for that, Like whenever you help a friend move, just remember that a lot of people pay to go to the gym.
So that's right, which is pre splatted for your eating pleasure?
We are also going to start a pop up animal rain food truck. There's a lot of travel involved. Our hours are weird, but we'll give you a deal.
Well what wait. We work with NASA and they help us make a water spout generating machine. That machine sends the small fish that we form into the air. They pre splat cook them up for you.
Frog special.
You could be Korean barbecue style and you gotta find your own pick the way you want and then cook it your damnself and pay us for the privilege.
Dang, did you have a bad KBBQ? No, no situation.
I like Korea barbecue.
He did. My son almost died on some deliciousness.
It's also very expensive for I mean, you could just buy a bunch of meat and cook it at home. I mean I do like the butther of the banchan there on the side, it's the cheesecorn. There's there's some things that are good about it, for sure.
If you guys want to hang out off air, there are a few low key spots in town that are not gonna rip us off.
Thank you. Yeah, And did you guys hear there's a new sister location of Northern China eatery that's opening in man and downtown or closer to us than Beford Highway. It's called the Dumpling Factory. Look it up, y'all. If you know, you know, good stuff.
If you know you know. And this returns us to the theory of animal rain, and a lot of skeptics, surprisingly enough, very science forward skeptics are saying, if you know this theory, then you know it's bs a couple of them. How surprising is this will even tell you that animal rain in andend of itself is a conspiracy theory and does not exist as the theory is commonly propagated.
Let's go to Skeptoid with Brian Dunning. He says the following, and he's got a great article or podcast about the problems with the physics and the meteorology evolved with this idea of tornadoes and water spouts. He says, quote, the decreased air pressure inside a tornadic water spout can actually raise the water level by as much as half a meter, but the water itself is not sucked up inside. The visible column of a water spout is made up of
condensation and is transparent. The high winds will kick up a lot of spray from wavelets fun word on the surface, but if you look at pictures of water spouts, you'll see that this spray is thrown outward, not sucked inward and up. So this all leads into conclude that water spouts, quote simply, do not have any mechanism by which they might reach down into the water, collect objects and then transport them upward into the sky. But he wrote that to me, he wrote that before the Australian stuff.
Well, yeah, well there's also Tempico, Mexico, where it happened in twenty seventeen. Who knows, But I do agree with this. I mean that assessment is pretty astute there, especially if that is true the mechanism of sending the force sending things outward rather than up and especially well, now hold on, hold on, what if it's an up and out scenario where they're just flinging them so instead of sending.
A great glass elevator.
Because if there was a body of water close enough to one of these smaller towns that has you know, a bunch of frogs in it or something like that, that water spout could just toss them into town.
Which goes back to the thing our our French pal Andre pointed out much earlier, right, he was the first we missed this part. He was the first person in recorded Western history to compare the seasonal propagation of amphibians
with the subsequent weird rain episodes. So things like this, some sort of weather phenomenon may be happening at a frequency that humans are not aware of, and it only appears to be weird animal rain when the other conditions are right, sort of like when planets aligned, or a ven diagram, or an example of a third thing because I like the rule of thirds.
Well, okay, I've got a third thing for you. I've got a little theory, guys. Submerged objects, unidentified submerged objects. We have speculated about these trans medium things for a long time on this show, and the world is really
getting into them right now. What if the way that some of these trans medium objects function, especially the larger ones, is to create that distortion field around them, that is theorized that would allow a ship that is made of either metal or you know, other things and a ton of energy can move from air into water with no problem and back out again. What if that thing, whatever that energy field is, that it creates is some kind of stasis thing that could let's say, trap a whole
bunch of perch inside of it. Then as it travels up into the air out of the water, it's and then it's flying over some other place that that whatever that distortion field is that's being used to travel is no longer needed. It shuts down all them fish fall out the sky.
Love it well done, Greenlit. Yeah, I'm somewhat joking, But at the same time I was.
I actually could see an image of that occurring, even though it's all speculative and not real.
I don't know, man, It depends because there's no proof that that's not what's happening, right.
I don't know. I just like the image.
I want to believe the truth is out there. Oh this is so this. This is such a weird pickle, though I like it should not for nothing is Matt's theory on this pretty solid. You can't prove it's not true, right, And that's kind of where people are at with the idea of raining fish. We didn't even get to it. There are going to be future episodes because it turns out, even though we kept this contained to fish and amphibians, right,
there are many other weird rains out there. I can't wait for our episode on Star Jelly, but we do owe a shout out to the amazing author Cynthia Barnett, who wrote Rain, a natural and cultural history. You guys know, longtime listeners, we love books about cartoonishly specific things, you know.
Yeah, and if you're interested in i'd sort of tease the Great Kentucky meat Shower. Earlier in the episode. There is an episode of Ridiculous History on the time that gobbits of rotten meat rained down on the good people of Kentucky.
They know what they did.
You're talking about the Olympia Springs incident.
Eighteen seventy six. Yeah, also Kentucky meat shower. We're particularly in love with that because it sounds like a weird euphemism.
M hm. It really like a move, you know what I mean?
Yeah, like a move. It's a move or a noise band.
Perhaps that'd be good.
Yeah, Or you know, if you put the time stamp on it, eighteen seventy six, Kentucky meat shower could be something that God speed your you Black Emperor would write exactly, Yeah, maybe seventeen minutes long. There would be drums there would be percussion at the last four minutes.
Right yeah, and then just like a field recording with somebody ranting about how the government is out to get us all.
Yeah. It could also just be somebody in Kentucky standing on the edge of a building saving so much.
Money on their water built as well. You know how I save money of big water. I just shower in the meat.
I thought he was urinating off the side of the building.
But that's not me, that's juice.
Well, it is a meat, humane human audjue.
Jesus so released from his meat, is what I was saying.
Okay, Yes, we want to fit perfect, we want to finish the shout out. We were trying to get to a Cynthia Barnett rain and natural and cultural history, she notes, and then later goes on to prove that there are many different non fish, nonoqueous, non frog, or non amphibian rains reported over history. Hey, snakes, maggots, seeds, nuts, stones, shredded meat. It goes on and odd and on. We're gonna save some of this for future episodes, particularly star Jelly.
But yeah, get thee to our pere podcast, Pardiculous History. Check out the meat story the meat shower story because we do solve it.
Oh that's awesome. Did you guys talk about the spider rain in Australia and like how that works?
Spider rains in the meat chower?
We did. I don't know about this one, but I actually think maybe there might be a future episode in the works for this and or ridiculous history about just a lot of these different when it rained weird stories.
Well, this is definitely a when it happens because it's pretty frequent, kind of like that one town in Honduras. But spider rains. Look up mass ballooning events and if you don't like spiders, you will not like what you find, but it will be a fun thing to share with other people, you know who don't like spiders.
If you don't like spiders, no judgment, but as a representative, I do ask you to acknowledge the fundamental role that spiders play in the human ecosystem. Not all bad. It's not all bad. There's so many spider stereotypes out there. Okay, we're just gonna let us sit in that way.
I think, Well, I you know, there are a ton of spiders outside my house right now, and they are catching a lot of the mosquitos and other little creatures that I do not like so much. So yeah, thanks guys.
Better the devil, you know, they say, We also know weird rain is still a thing, like it's a group term for a lot of different phenomenon, right, But it's going to continue. And at the very least, if you want to be skeptical, or if you agree with the skeptics who reject the water spout idea, then you can say that at the very least, people will continue to
believe they have witnessed adimal rain. I really appreciate you, Matt for pointing out that there are witnesses in recent years, particularly in Australia, who are saying, no, we didn't just walk out and see fish on the ground, we watched them fall from the heavens. I think the best way for us to end tonight's episode is to ask our fellow conspiracy realists for help. If you have ever witnessed strange, non aqueous rain weird rain, tell us right in with
your stories. We want to know one what you saw, two when and where, And most importantly, we want to know if you actually witnessed strange things falling from the sky versus finding them afterward. We're super excited to hear your stories for sure.
Oh guys, what if it's what if we were going to stay in the Kobyashi Maru like Star Trek World. Here it's a transporter room and they've got a bunch of frogs or small fish that they're trying to get somewhere, and they just put in the cord and it's wrong and it just ended up over at Tempego, Mexico.
Well, that engineer is fired. But then also, you know, what if the transporter only works underwater and you have to have a big enough distortion field that you know some of the fish are going to have to go.
With Ah, I don't know, man.
Well, you know important journalism. We can't wait to hear your thoughts.
Oh.
The last thing we have to say before we get in tonight's exploration. We are thankfully pretty sure that raining cats and dogs is just a figure of speech. Looking into the etymology, it seems that it comes from the Victorian era of Europe, when dogs or and or cats small domestic mammals would be on rooftops or on second floors the eaves of buildings and the downpours the deluges would be so powerful that they would knock these animals off the building.
It's sort of like everything but the kitchen sink.
You know.
This is this idea of being the most, being very extra.
Yeah, and it's I guess it's a little bit better. We should be thankful to this language that they didn't say it's raining, you know, orphans and hoboes, because those poor guys probably got knocked off the eaves as well when the rain got too powerful. Anyway, let us know what you think. We try to be easy to fight online.
That's right. You can find us at the handle Conspiracy Stuff where we exist on Facebook with our Facebook group. Here's where it gets crazy. Join in on the conversation. You two can be part of it. We also are conspiracy Stuff on YouTube, where we have video content rolling at you on the regular, and finally on x FKA, Twitter, on Instagram and TikTok. However, we are conspiracy stuff show guys.
Imagine how elated the stray cats would be if one of these fish rings or frog greens happened.
I want a proper blood.
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