Weird Weather

One overcast day in 1939 a thunderstorm broke out in Trowbidge in Wiltshire, but this was no ordinary shower. As the heavens opened up, people at the town's open air swimming pool were astonished to see hundreds of small frogs falling down from the sky. "It was a job to walk on the path without treading on them", according to one woman reported in The Times.

Over the years all sorts of animals and plants have showered down during thunderstorms, possibly sucked up from rivers and lakes by tornadoes (or their watery equivalents - waterspouts) into thunderclouds and then dumped miles away in heavy rain. Another sort of shower of wildlife might be easier to explain. Dozens of dead birds have occasionally been seen plummeting out of the sky, sometimes partly frozen. These poor animals were probably swept up high in the powerful updrafts of a thundercloud, then frozen like hailstones before gravity took over.Giant pieces of ice have also been reported crashing to earth, and these are often blamed on ice falling from aircraft. But the largest recorded ice fall was 20 feet long and fell on Scotland in 1849 - long before aircraft were invented! They might be hailstones which have somehow joined into a massive lump of ice but nobody really knows.

But most common of all are rains of blood which have been reported all over the world ever since biblical times. An important clue to their cause came in July 1968 in southern England, when a shower coated everything in red gritty dust. It was fine sand blown up from the Sahara and carried over a thousand miles inside a massive high pressure systems before falling in a rainshower.

Weird Sights in the Sky

An almost clear blue sky can put on some remarkable displays of magic - and can even help change the course of history. In 1461 Edward IV was about to fight a Lancastrian force at Mortimer's Cross in Herefordshire when his army saw a fantastic vision - three suns were lined up in a row in the sky. His men panicked but Edward took the sight as a good omen and rallied the troops to victory.