May 31, 2012 • 25 mins
If you've seen the movie Magnolia, you've seen what it looks like to rain frogs. While there are reports of frogs, fish and even squid raining down that are questionable, science has figured out how it can - and does - rain frogs sometimes.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you Should Know
from house Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me is always as
Charles W. Chuck Bryant and this, friends is stuff you
(00:23):
should know. It's rain and frogs. Hello, do you Yeah?
I got a lot of those during the search for this.
Oh really yeah, during research for this, you've got it's
raining men references. Yeah, kept coming up and that predictive
search and really yeah. And then there's a lot of
(00:44):
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.
(01:06):
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
(01:30):
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
(01:57):
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,
(02:20):
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
(02:44):
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.
(03:08):
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
(03:31):
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,
(03:52):
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
(04:13):
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.
(04:34):
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
(04:56):
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
(05:17):
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.
(05:39):
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
(06:00):
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
(06:23):
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
(06:48):
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
(07:08):
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
(07:28):
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,
(07:50):
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
(08:11):
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
(08:33):
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.
(08:54):
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
(09:16):
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
(09:36):
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
(10:00):
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.
(10:24):
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
(10:44):
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,
(11:04):
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,
(11:29):
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
(11:49):
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
(12:13):
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
(12:34):
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.
(12:55):
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
(13:18):
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
(13:39):
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
(14:00):
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.
(14:20):
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.
(14:41):
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
(15:03):
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
(15:23):
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,
(15:45):
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
(16:07):
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,
(16:33):
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,
(16:54):
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
(17:19):
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
(17:42):
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
(18:04):
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,
(18:28):
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,
(18:50):
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,
(19:11):
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
(19:34):
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,
(19:57):
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
(20:20):
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
(20:40):
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
(21:01):
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
(21:22):
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
(21:45):
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
(22:08):
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.
(22:29):
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
(22:49):
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
(23:13):
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
(23:33):
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
(23:54):
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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
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(24:18):
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(25:01):
Are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you Should Know
from house Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me is always as
Charles W. Chuck Bryant and this, friends is stuff you
(00:23):
should know. It's rain and frogs. Hello, do you Yeah?
I got a lot of those during the search for this.
Oh really yeah, during research for this, you've got it's
raining men references. Yeah, kept coming up and that predictive
search and really yeah. And then there's a lot of
(00:44):
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.
(01:06):
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
(01:30):
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
(01:57):
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,
(02:20):
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
(02:44):
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.
(03:08):
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
(03:31):
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,
(03:52):
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
(04:13):
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.
(04:34):
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
(04:56):
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
(05:17):
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.
(05:39):
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
(06:00):
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
(06:23):
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
(06:48):
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
(07:08):
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
(07:28):
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,
(07:50):
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
(08:11):
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
(08:33):
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.
(08:54):
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
(09:16):
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
(09:36):
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
(10:00):
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.
(10:24):
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
(10:44):
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,
(11:04):
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,
(11:29):
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
(11:49):
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
(12:13):
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
(12:34):
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.
(12:55):
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
(13:18):
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
(13:39):
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
(14:00):
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.
(14:20):
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.
(14:41):
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
(15:03):
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
(15:23):
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,
(15:45):
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
(16:07):
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,
(16:33):
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,
(16:54):
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
(17:19):
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
(17:42):
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
(18:04):
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,
(18:28):
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,
(18:50):
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,
(19:11):
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
(19:34):
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,
(19:57):
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
(20:20):
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
(20:40):
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
(21:01):
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
(21:22):
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
(21:45):
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
(22:08):
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.
(22:29):
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
(22:49):
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
(23:13):
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
(23:33):
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
(23:54):
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
(24:18):
impact on your life. We love hearing stuff like that. Um,
we would love it if you would let us know
about it. You can tweet to us at s Y
s K Podcast. You can hit us up on Facebook
at Facebook dot com slash stuff you Should Know, and
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(24:39):
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