In 1881, a thunderstorm in Worcester, England, brought down tons of periwinkles and hermit crabs.
During the early morning hours of a day in November 1896, a deluge of dead birds fell from a clear sky above Baton Rouge, Louisiana. They fell in such numbers that contemporary accounts say that they “cluttered the streets of the city”. The birds included wild ducks, catbirds, woodpeckers and many birds of strange plumage, some of them “resembling canaries”. The birds were all dead and fell in heaps throughout the city. The only plausible theory advanced as to the source of the birds was that they had been driven inland by a recent storm along the Florida coast and had been killed by a sudden change in temperature around Baton Rouge. The editors of the Monthly Weather Review stated that storms and temperature changes were common, but bird falls were most assuredly not.
A Korean fisherman, trolling off the coast of the Falkland Islands, was knocked unconscious by a single frozen squid that fell from the sky and konked him on the head.
In 1877, several one-foot-long alligators fell on J. L. Smith's farm in South Carolina. They landed, unharmed, and started crawling around, reported The New York Times.
Sometime around 1990, a Japanese fishing boat was sunk in the Sea of Okhotsk off the eastern coast of Siberia by a falling cow. When the crew of the wrecked ship were fished from the water, they told authorities that they had seen several cows falling from the sky, and that one of them crashed straight through the deck and hull. At first, the story goes, the fishermen were arrested for trying to perpetrate an insurance fraud, but were released when their story was verified.
In January 1969, hundreds of badly injured ducks came crashing to the earth in St. Mary’s City, Maryland. Wildlife officials surmised that the ducks had received their fatal injuries, which included broken bones and mysterious hemorrhages, while they were flying. What may have caused the damage, or why so many ducks were flying in one large mass, was unknown.
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