The strange, still-unexplained meteorology behind the world’s most documented impossible weather

On a June afternoon in 1873, the residents of Kansas City watched frogs fall out of a clear sky. Not a handful. Witnesses described a genuine downpour of small frogs striking rooftops and umbrellas hard enough to be heard, covering the streets in numbers that made walking without stepping on one a genuine difficulty. The newspapers reported it as fact, because it was a fact, witnessed by an entire town in broad daylight. A year later, in Albany, New York, a boy was born who would spend the rest of his life reading exactly this kind of event out of newspaper archives by the thousand, and who would eventually give an entire category of ignored, inconvenient reality his own name.

The Man Who Collected What Science Threw Away

Charles Fort inherited a modest fortune from an uncle in 1916, quit journalism, and spent most of the following decade and a half in the reading rooms of the New York Public Library and the British Museum, filling shoeboxes with index cards. Each card recorded an event that had been reported, sometimes by multiple witnesses, sometimes in respectable scientific journals of the day, and then quietly excluded from the tidy version of reality that textbooks preferred. He published the results in 1919 as The Book of the Damned — damned not in the theological sense, but in the sense of evidence a discipline had convicted of not existing and sentenced to be ignored. Falls of frogs, fish, and occasionally stranger things sat near the center of his collection, cataloged with a lawyer’s patience and a mystic’s suspicion that the tidy version was hiding something.

Fort was not a scientist, and he made a habit of proposing theories he likely didn’t fully believe himself, if only to demonstrate that a wild idea could explain the data at least as well as the era’s confident dismissals. His favorite provocation was the Super-Sargasso Sea — an imagined region above the atmosphere where matter accumulated, “derelicts, rubbish, old cargoes from inter-planetary wrecks,” occasionally spilling back down to Earth. Nobody, including Fort, expected this to survive scientific scrutiny. What he actually wanted was for someone to take the reports seriously enough to explain them properly, and more than a century later, that explanation is still incomplete.

The Respectable Answer, and Its Genuine Cracks

Strip the mystery away for a moment and the honest mechanism is this: a waterspout crossing a shallow pond or coastal shelf can lift small, light animals bodily along with the water itself, carry them for miles inside a rotating column most people never notice forming, and set them back down, occasionally still breathing, once the storm loses the energy to hold them. The mainstream account is meteorologically real and worth stating plainly. This is not speculation. Documented modern cases exist, including a fish fall in Texarkana, Texas in 2021 and a recurring, well-photographed pattern of fish rains in the town of Lajamanu, Australia, reported across multiple separate decades. The physics of an updraft strong enough to lift a live frog is uncontroversial.

What Fort noticed, and what remains a genuine problem for the tidy version of this story, is the astonishing consistency of the falls themselves. A waterspout crossing a pond does not selectively vacuum up only the frogs while leaving the algae, the twigs, the loose gravel, and the half-drowned insects behind. Real storm debris is a mess. Reported animal falls are almost never a mess. Witnesses overwhelmingly report one species, sometimes remarkably uniform in size, falling in a contained area — a pattern closer to a delivery than debris. Fort’s own dry rebuttal to the waterspout theory has aged well: nobody has ever documented the corresponding half of the event, a pond suddenly emptied of its fish population, a lakebed with a suspicious frog-shaped absence. “A pond going up would be quite as interesting as frogs coming down,” he wrote, and he was right that the interest has always run in exactly one direction.

Some documented cases raise the harder problem directly: the animals involved sometimes belong to species with no known population in any nearby body of water, which a straightforward local-updraft mechanism struggles to explain without invoking a storm system that traveled improbably far while keeping its cargo alive and sorted by species. A competing hypothesis holds that witnesses are occasionally misreading a mundane event — burrowing animals surfacing during unusually heavy rainfall and being mistaken for objects falling from above rather than emerging from below. That theory accounts for some land-based reports well. It accounts for reports of live fish and marine crustaceans considerably less well, since a fish does not burrow.

What a Century of Explaining Still Hasn’t Closed

None of the available theories are foolish, and none of them, individually, cover every documented case without leaving a residue of genuine anomaly behind. Detecting the actual mechanism at work has proven almost impossible for a structural reason rather than a lack of scientific interest: nobody has ever managed to point recording instruments at a waterspout at the precise moment it happens to be crossing a body of water containing exactly the right animals in exactly the right concentration, mid-formation, with a camera already running. Every documented case is reconstructed after the fact, from what fell rather than from the process that lifted it. That is not a failure of meteorology. It is closer to trying to map the interior of a black hole by studying only what occasionally leaks out the far side.

Historically, before anyone reached for updrafts or Fortean speculation, cultures encountering these events reached for older vocabulary — omen, portent, a message the sky was sending that required a priest rather than a barometer to interpret. The instinct wasn’t unreasonable. Something is genuinely being delivered, from somewhere, by a mechanism nobody has fully mapped, landing with a specificity that ordinary chaos doesn’t usually produce.

Charles Fort never claimed to have solved it. He mostly wanted the record kept honestly: the falls happened, repeatedly, across at least two centuries and several continents, witnessed by people with no shared motive to lie, and the tidy explanation on offer has never quite covered every case on file. A century of respectable science has narrowed the mystery considerably. It has not closed it. Somewhere, right now, a storm system nobody is watching may already be deciding what to deliver next, and where.

Further Reading:

• “The Book of the Damned” — Charles Fort, full text via the Internet Archive — Fort’s original 1919 catalog of anomalous phenomena, including his documentation of animal falls.
• “It’s Raining Fish, Again, in a Remote Australian Town” — ABC Australia — Coverage of the recurring, well-documented fish falls in Lajamanu, Australia.
• “Waterspouts” — National Weather Service — The National Weather Service’s official explanation of waterspout formation and mechanics.
• Fortean Times Magazine— Official home-page for Fortean Times magazine.