Can it rain frogs?

search and really yeah. And then there's a lot of um raining different things. Mouse pads out there available, yeah, at e retailers like Etsy and Zazzle and stuff like that. Basically, if you type something in Zezel will be like, well, you know, we'll put that on a mouse pad for you, you know. Um. And there's an adorable umbrella out there, a see through umbrella with with frogs all over it. That's cute. Uh no, they're not and they're actually it

didn't show up there in this article. There's triplets holding them. Yeah, three times the adorable So um, Chuck, I ran into a lot of um descriptions of crazy stuff happening over the course of history here on planet Earth. Um, as far back as I could see, there was a guy named Athanas He lived in the fourth century BC, and he was a traveler and writer. And he mentioned that in the area that is now Dinar, Turkey, Uh, it frequently rained fish and frogs frequently. And not only did

it frequently do it. Once it rained frogs for three days there. He said, wow, ye, and so much so that the villagers had to leave because it was they were just inundated with frogs. They poisoned the water. Um, whenever they tried to cook. There was like frogs and their frogs everywhere, and it was raining frogs. Sounds like the ramblings of a fourth century BC Greek madman. Right, sure, okay,

that we'll say that. But what about Bergen, Norway in fifteen seventy eight and fifteen seventy nine, when it rained supposedly yellow mice and lemmings. It rained lemmings supposedly, Now that's been widely discredited. But what about Memphis, Tennessee January eighteen seventy seven It rained live snakes, some as big as eighteen inches long. And this one was reported in Scientific American. Yeah. Uh, Pliny the Elder, which is the

name of a beer as well. I found out an I p. A even Um first century a d reported rains of flesh, blood and wool. Yeah, wool eighteen seventy three. Kansas City, Missouri, rain and frogs. Australia rain and fish yeah, Acapulco night raining maggots you yeah, uh, tadpoles jellyfish and Tasmania jellyfish. Yeah, that's scary, scary. The one of squid that's b s. It was some guy who found a single squid. Yeah. So while we're talking about all these

are documented cases of it raining, crazy crazy stuff. It's rain blood before supposedly when really it was an algae um. But it did in India and Russia, and the people in Russia found that they had the biggest crop yield ever thanks to the blood rain. No weird. Yeah, um, but all these are documented cases and you can for the most part throw a lot of them right out the window, like the Lemmings one in Bergen, Norway it

was just a lie. Other ones um like, uh, there was a report of rain, I believe in London, somewhere in Great Britain. Um. So it's London or the rest of Great Britain like that. Um, that's where some guy, some doctor came out into his garden and there's a bunch of frogs there, and the day before it had been dry and he had a high garden wall, so the only way they could have gotten there was rain. So it rain frogs in Great Britain that year. There's

a lot of stories like that. People are just stupid. I didn't notice that that. A lot of the stories were people didn't actually witness it, but they just assume there's tadpoles all over my car, so it must have rained them exactly. Um, you know, it's not the most illogical conclusion. Even one of my personal heroes, Charles Fort, through his goofy hat in the Ring forty Times is

the greatest magazine ever created. Um, Charles Fort said that there was something called a super Sargasso Sea that was suspended above the earth, and every once in a while this it would dump some of its contents in the form of rain on the earth, and that's how you got raining frogs. Yeah. That was from the Book of the Damned. Yeah, and by damned he meant excluded. I found out, Yes, I didn't realize that. Yeah, I didn't

either until today too. Um with a snakes one that wasn't scientific American man live snakes foot and a half long. I caught a snake the other day in my yarn from the sky. No, no, no no, I was just doing the weeds and I saw and he was a copper head. He was oh wow, it was deadly. But I picked him up like Steve Irwin, and Emily was very impressed. It's so bad. Then I took him across the street and displaced him. Displaced him with extreme prejudice. No, I

just you know. I did the trick, and I snuck it behind him and I grabbed him behind the head and took him away. The poisonous snake popped his head clean off. He was fine. Field dressed him and ate him on the spot. He wasn't that big. But you're gonna get some mail for letting a poisonous snake go in the neighborhood. It was already in the neighborhood. I just moved them to a to a empty wooded open wooded land. But you didn't exercise extreme prejudice and to

kill him. That's what a lot of people are going to say they're crazy. So anyway, there's a lot of crackpots and cooks and dummies out there who say that it's rained frogs, it's rained squid. That squid one just irks me. Um, it's rained a bunch of crazy stuff people not named Pete Anderson. Yes, um, which, by the way, I finally saw there will be blood yesterday day before. Yester, you've never seen that. What do you think? There was a lot? Okay, Um, that is one word of you

a lot two words. It could be too, It depends. Uh. The crazy thing is if we're finally going to get to the point here, it actually has rained things like frogs before that. This really has happened, not just people saying, oh, there's a bunch of frogs everywhere. They couldn't have possibly come from anywhere else but the sky. There have been people who have reported frogs specifically falling from the sky

in the middle of a storm. And it's true. It happened is recently two thousand five, Yeah, and was that the Serbia where people there was a big old storm and people saw and heard frogs raining down from the sky hitting their roofs and basically apparently what like you were saying P. T. Anderson and magnolia what he depicted. It's probably a lot with something like that would look like I would imagine. So, uh, there's an explanation for this. Oh, it's not the end of the world. We're gonna go

into that. It's not one of the plagues biblical plagues, although we'll get into that. Uh. First explained by French physicist Andre Marie Empire in the early nineteenth century. He said, you know what this is. This is water spout. Yeah, it's a tornado that forms and then goes over the

water becomes part of you know, partially water. It picks up these little light things from as deep as what like three ft for a big one, and uh picks these things up because they're obviously lighter than you know. It might not be picking up like a great white shark, but it'll pick up a little fish or a little frog or a tad bowl and then as it dies out, it spits them back out when it gets over land

because it decreases in pressure. Yes for filler. Since you just explain the whole podcast, let's just talk about how water spout forms. Okay, so you've got two kinds of water spouts. You've got tornadic which is just like a tornado, and it starts with a vertical clockwise turning column of air that eventually goes down, so it's cloud to surface, right. Those are really scary ones and they're associated with storms.

There's another kind called a fair weather water spout, which can whip up on a sunny day and they go from surface to sky. But in both cases, a water spout is an example of warm air forming a low pressure area which is formed by low rising air and as it goes up, remember, cold air comes in to

fill the void. And those two things interplaying the low pressure warm air rising and the cold air um dropping high pressure dropping form of vortex which creates section in the middle and the low pressure area the difference in pressure, and that's how you can suck something up up to three ft beneath the surface, or if you're a tornado, you might suck up a dog or cow or a cow or a car. And we didn't do how tornadoes worked. We just did what it like in the eye of

a tornado, which is pretty awesome. It was good. So are we done? I don't think so. Um. Sometimes it's just a few dozen frogs. Sometimes it's hundreds, sometimes it's thousands. Sometimes it's pieces of animal. Sometimes they're frozen solid yeah, and hail. Um. And all that is the water spout got high enough into the atmosphere there it reached an area that was beneath zero. Sometimes it's not just animals.

Sometimes it's tomatoes or coal or coal. There's a guy in Manassas, Virginia who got a frozen ten thousand Deutsche mark note. Really yeah, wow, yeah frozen? Was this after they converted to the euro? I don't know you can still trade those in it? I'm sure are they completely out of circulation? I wonder I hope not for this

guy's sake. Um, So frozen is one way that they come down, which would be kind of really interesting if a frozen frog landed on your car, right, shredded like you were saying, because of the the violent wind speeds, right yeah. Um. One thing that always kind of sticks out to me, and I'm sure the answer is is because it's just not the case. But why is it that it's always just one specie. I know you're going to say that an answer, Well, I don't have an answer, um,

because I wondered the same thing. Uh. There is a professor at UM Washington University that says, um, you know, it just makes sense because they're similar size and weight, they might be all hanging out together at the one point where this thing goes down. That still didn't explain it to me though. I mean, the water spout goes down over water, it's gonna be spitting out fish and frogs and whatever else. And it's always almost always reported to be one one thing. It's like it's raining frogs

or it's raining fish, and fish supposedly are the most common. Um. Yeah, old rains fish in Australia like every day. Yeah. It's like they're like yeah, of course, Um, but yeah, why why they're not mixed together, or why they're not reported to be mixed together is the weirdest thing that is weird. Um. There's another professor from Southern Illinois that theorizes that it's not just water spouts. He said, it can be any

kind of unusual updraft. Um, anything like at a speed of sixty miles an hour plus can pick up light objects and deposit them elsewhere, So not necessarily just a water spout, although it has been observed by like you know bona fide people. Okay, like this one professor in Louisiana, he worked with the Department of Wildlife. He was eating breakfast in he saw like an average of one fish per square yard raining down. So that's that's a significant amount of fish depending on the side of the fish.

Like people say fish, Are they talking about guppies? Are they talking about crap? Are they talking about do you say crap? Is it crappy? Crappy? Are they talking about you know, swordfish? Those are really dangerous when they raigne. Uh No, I mean I think they're light because that's the whole point. Even an updraft from a water spolled to two isn't going to be picking up you know, great white sharks. Right, that's that's a movie for you,

raining sharks. What about Piranha Parana two? They flew and made it on the land, right, the original parity so not the new Paranha three double D. Is that what it's called? Jez? I know? So I guess um Acam's razor, uh teaches us. In this case, the simplest explanation is that, um, this is Satan's work, Okay, Um, what a water spout forming supposedly and just picking up things then dropping them

over land. Okay, right, um, and raining frogs is explaining it, I guess is part of this larger trend that's gripped the scientific community lately. Um, which is explaining biblical phenomenon phenomena. Um. I thought this was pretty interesting. You dug up this article on the biblical plagues. Yeah, the ten plagues of Egypt, one of which was frogs. Yes, but it didn't rain frogs.

A lot of people think that it's supposedly rain frogs. Now, what supposedly happened was apparently it's like where you know dinar and Turkey is now, they were just overrun by frogs. Um. And I guess I can imagine. There was another horror movie from the eighties about that. It was just about giant frogs and lots of them, right. Yeah, it was

like the birds, but with frogs. And a frog can be kind of unsettling when it's staring at you, especially if it's surrounded by thousands of its companions judge you yeah, um, And they'll kind of get all over everything, and they'll get underfoot and you'll step on them, and things get slippery and mucky real quick, and that was one of the plagues of Egypt. It wasn't the first one though, No, So should we explain this away? Yeah, again, it's in

vogue right now to explain away the plagues. And the cool thing is that these um, these researchers figured out or they suggest that all of these things were linked. It was a series of events of amazing events that um became what we know as the Ten Plagues of Egypt that eventually caused Pharaoh to say, hey, Moses, you guys can go back your stuff and leave. Yeah. Uh, yes, you dug this up from the Telegraph, one of my

favorite publications. And Richard Gray, the correspondent the Telegraph. You can tell these the science correspondent, look at that hairline. So they have some evidence that what kicked this whole thing off was a climate change, a climate event that happened way back in the day. Um. There was a city called um pie Rameses on the Nile Delta. It was abandoned about three thousand years ago, which they think this explanation works in concert with that abandonment of the city.

And they said that there was a dramatic shifting climate towards the end of the second rain of Rameses, Rameses, Rameses, and uh, we had a goat name ramesay. Uh, you can't just say that things like that, sure I can. Um. So they found that the end of the rain um coincided with a warm, wet climate and then switched over to a really dry period, and that was not good news for the nile. It kicked off the first plague, which was the nile turning to blood. So how did

that happen? Well, the nile supposedly dried up um and became kind of this muddy, mucky, slow moving mess, no longer vital and prime for this type of algae that we know was around back then. It's still around today called uh burgundy blood algae, and basically it sucks the life out of a mucky area, which would have caused the second plague frogs. Right, Well, then, what did you

say the name of the first plague? The river turns to blood, and so frogs suddenly infesting where the people were living because there's no place to be in the river, right, It's suddenly turned lifeless. Right, and so now the frogs are everywhere, um, which would have they're everywhere but the river, which would have led to the third, fourth, and fifth plagues, right, third and fourth, third, and fourth, which were flies and lice.

All of a sudden, the frogs are around to eat these things, so you're gonna have a lot more lice and flies. Yeah, okay, so far, so good. Now what well after that, all everybody's itching and like swatting and like trying not to slip on all the dead frogs that they've stepped on. Um, the following plagues were disease, livestock and boils, which you're gonna have if you've got

lots of flies and lies and mosquitoes spreading disease, spreading disease. Okay, so that's that's okay, that's I mean, it makes sense. But that's not like the oh yeah, of course. Um. After that we have the seventh, eighth, and ninth plagues hail, locusts, and darkness, which they think was coincidentally caused by the eruption of a volcano at Theara on the islands of Santorini, which happened thirty years ago and which they found evidence

of in Egypt. Excavating some uh some locations in ancient Egypt, they found pumics volcanic stone from the Thera volcano. Like, there are no volcanoes in Egypt. Yeah, how could there be pumas exactly? Well, they looked and they said, oh, it's from Santorini. Wow, it's kind of big. Um. So you have the um, this volcanic eruption, huge, huge volcanic eruption. UM. The ash mixing with the clouds over Egypt would have

caused hail worth writing down in the Bible. UM. And then it would have also um created locusts because it would have raised the humidity and the temperature right right, which locusts love. I thought that was a little tenuous, but it's still made sense. But then the darkness volcanic ash blotting out the sun, which we've heard could happen. Ever heard of a nuclear winner. That's right, same thing. And so there you have it. All the plagues explained,

sort of except for the last one. John, This one didn't seem to be connected to anything. It was kind of free standing if you ask me. But the tenth plague was the death of the first borns Um. The firstborn sons, I should say um in Egypt were suddenly dying mysteriously as a plague, and I think that possibly there was some sort of grain fungus that killed the firstborns who would have had first DIBs on food, so they would have been the first to die. I thought

that was a little hanky. A couple of these were little hanky, but I thought it was interesting to read, for sure. But I mean, yeah, they weren't going to be like, hey, we're gonna get front page exposure in the Telegraph by saying we've explained eight of the ten plagues of Egypt. You have to go for ten, and you got to fudge apparently if you are a researcher looking to get media coverage. So we don't know if they budged. Still that was that was not the greatest link. Well,

that's it. That was a we weird, weird episode all over the place. We talked about raining frog that was based on an article on the website. Can it really rain frogs? It can? But I have to say that just a little bit of skeptic in me says I would have to see that one to believe in me too. In the meantime, I'll just watch Magnolia very frequently. If you want to learn more about frogs and rain. You can type those things into the search bar at how Stuff Work dot com. And uh, it's time, it's weird.

Uh for a listener mail, that's right, Josh, I'm gonna call this. Uh it's a family there, that's a sly and the family stone. Um. Hey, guys, I'm a twenty four year old stay at home mother of two wonderful children. My husband is a marine who has been deployed in the Middle East for just over a year. You may be interested in somewhat surprised by how much of an effect your podcast has had on our family. Firstly, I began listening while on bed rest during my second pregnancy.

Sorry to hear that, by the way, had rested no good with us. Yeah, I quickly became addicted to the fun tidbits of knowledge that you two throughout. I began listening to your podcast in the car after my daughter was born. My husband, who isn't big on listening to people talk, also took quite an interest at this point, as well as our six year old son Man. So I think about it, though, we probably have had like a real hand in their daughter's development from the womb.

That's right. When you began talking about Kiva, I realized how wonderful this would be to teach our son about helping others all over the world while also teaching him about how money lending in percentages work. He's extremely proud and excited to be doing so much good, and he even asked if he could use his birthday money to lend on CIVA. Oh sweet kid. Um. I was so touched by this even shed a little tear. That's her

talking about me, Um, I might have got weepy. Though our son is extremely intelligent for his aid and his school doesn't seem to adequately feed his appetite for knowledge. He wanted me to let you know that he loves your podcast on animals the most and request that you include more insects and animals in your lineup. Uh, my husband listens Wait wait, this one kind of counts. Yeah, sort of. My husband listens to your podcast religiously while deployed, and even had a little baby fit when his iPod

pooped out a few months ago. Dude, you get a new one, I hope so um he has me and oh yeah, he had me immediately send him my iPod so that he could survive We often email back and forth as we don't have any opportunities to talk on the phone, and the subjects of the podcast often come up in the emails between my son and my husband. Gives them something to talk about that isn't too heavy, since I don't want my husband's sign to get too upset about the distance between them. Doesn't do any good

for a marine to have his mind office mission. Thank you so much, Kate, dan Olive and Ryan Man. That is awesome and nice whole family listening. That is awesome. I love hearing that. Hey there, Kate, dan Olive and Ryan thank you very much for listening. Guys, be careful over there. Yeah, and sorry for this one. Sorry for this episode. She'll never hear this one. She just turn it off. Um. Well, it's cool if you have a story about how s Y s ks and had an

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