3 - Out of the Blue

Frogs that Fly and Fish that Rain

In Marksville, Louisiana, they still remember the day J. Numa Damiens burst into the offices of the local paper brandishing a fish. The date was 23 October 1947. J. Numa had telephoned the office a few minutes before, and was incensed at the scepticism shown by the hard-bitten smalltown journalists on the Weekly News to his extraordinary tale.

The fish, he claimed, had fallen from the sky. It was just one of hundreds which had rained down from out of the blue. They were all over Main Street, in the yard of the director of the Marksville Bank, in Mrs J.W. Joffrion's property next door, on rooftops everywhere. Three of the town's most eminent citizens had even been struck by cascading fish as they walked to work. The morning rush-hour had been thrown into chaos: cars and trucks were skidding on a carpet of slithery scales.

The journalists heard their visitor out as he waved the fish in front of their faces, crying, 'Here's one of 'em; take a look and then see if you think I'm talking through my hat.' It certainly sounded very strange, but surely fish couldn't really have rained from the sky. Not on peaceful little Marksville, Louisiana. With their deadline upon them, and no time to check the story, the journalists wrote a rather flippant account of J. Numa Damiens' visit for that week's edition, and concluded it with this folksy appeal to their readers: 'Please, Sister and Brother, won't you come to our rescue and tell us what's ailing folks who say fish are raining from heaven on a clear sunshiny day!'

It turned out that the paper had been wrong to scoff. By the time it hit the news-stands, eyewitnesses to the fish-fall had come forward with their own amazing tales to tell. Thirty years later, many of them could vividly recall what happened.

Said Anthony Roy Jnr: 'As I left the house to go to school that morning, I went through the back of the house, and as I got near the garage I heard something fall on the tin roof of the garage and simultaneously something hit me on my head and on my shoulders, and when I looked down I saw they were fish.'

Mrs Eddie Gremillion was ill at the time: 'I was in bed, not feeling good, and I didn't get up early. But my maid came early and she was out in the yard. She ran in excited like anything, and she's a black maid but that day she was white with excitement, and she came and she told me, "Miss Lola, Miss Lola," she said, "it's raining fishes. It's raining fishes."'

Mrs Elmire Roy's maid also panicked: 'When the fish fell on the tin roof, my maid, whose name was Viola, ran outside with me, and she was so upset, and she kept saying, "Lord, Lord, it must be the end of the world."'

Sheriff 'Potch' Didier was another witness. He was driving through Marksville at the time. 'I saw the fish fall out of the sky,' he said. 'I kept driving. I was very amazed.' At one house, the yard was 'just absolutely covered with fish. And just about that time some other people started getting here and everybody was just amazed at the whole thing, and we just couldn't believe it, believe that the fish had just dropped out of the sky.'

Yet the Marksville fish-fall, astonishing as it was to the citizens of the town, is not unique. All kinds of weird showers have been reported over the centuries, notably of fish, blocks of ice, and frogs. We marvelled at many such mysteries in Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World, but could offer little in the way of satisfactory explanation. However, recent work by researchers studying fresh cases and re-evaluating many from the past has provided a new understanding of how it is that fish and frogs can rain from the sky.

In the past, many experts flatly rejected the claims of eyewitnesses. For example, in 1859 a sawyer called John Lewis from the Aberdare Valley in Wales told this story to the local vicar, the Reverend John Griffith:

On Wednesday, February 9, I was getting out a piece of timber, for the purpose of setting it for the saw, when I was startled by something falling all over me - down my neck, on my head, and on my back. On putting my hand down my neck I was surprised to find they were little fish. By this time I saw the whole ground covered with them. I took off my hat, the brim of which was full of them. They were jumping all about.

Lewis added that the fish had arrived in two showers, about ten minutes apart. He and his workmates gathered some of them up and sent a few to London Zoo, where they were put on display. Although they proved a popular attraction, not everyone was impressed. J.E. Gray of the British Museum told the Zoological Magazine: 'On reading the evidence it appears to me most probably to be only a practical joke of the mates of John Lewis, who seem to have thrown a pailful of water with the fish in it over him.' Edward Newman agreed: 'Dr Gray is without doubt correct in attributing the whole affair to some practical joker.'

There are certainly reasons to be wary of frog-falls. Just because the creatures suddenly appear in large numbers at the same time as a shower, it does not mean that they have actually come down with the rain. In many cases the rain has simply brought the frogs out from their usual hiding places to enjoy the water. Early in this century, one observer put it rather quaintly:

The little creatures have doffed their tadpole tails and have wandered in their thousands far afield. During the day a crack in the ground, a dead leaf, or an empty snail shell affords them shelter, and during the night they travel in pursuit of small insects. Then comes the shower of rain. It fills the cracks in the ground, washes away the dead leaves, and chokes up the snail shell with mud-splashes. But what matter? The little frogs are all over the place revelling in the longed-for moisture ...

During a torrential downpour in August 1986, Melvin Harris of Hadleigh, Essex, happened to be out walking in the streets near his home. Shortly after the rain started he noticed a few frogs and toads, an uncommon sight in the suburbs. Soon there were dozens of them hopping about. He is certain that none came from the sky, and indeed watched several actually creeping out of nooks and crannies.

Sudden frog migrations have also caused confusion. When thousands of the hopping creatures appeared in Towyn, North Wales, in 1947, many of the townspeople believed that they had fallen from the sky. Three days after the invasion had begun, desperate householders were still trying to clear them from their property. 'They're swarming like bees,' said one weary citizen. It turns out that frog migrations are common around Towyn, for the town is situated between two marshes. One eyewitness, Jack Roberts, pointed out that 1947 was a vintage year for frogs. There were plenty of tadpoles in the spring and the summer was extremely wet.

Writer Francis Hitching discovered that a plague of frogs at Chalon-sur-Saone in France in 1922 was also almost certainly simply a mass-migration, although Charles Fort, the great collector of these and similar tales, had decided that they must have fallen from the sky. In 1979 Hitching checked the story while passing through the French town and concluded, "... it seems clear that what had happened was a migratory plague of frogs crossing the roads. Observers remembered being unable to avoid squashing them as they bicycled. No one had seen them dropping from the sky.'

In this century a few apparent 'rains' of fish were caused, as it turned out, by birds dropping their prey in flight. For example, in Australia at Forbes, New South Wales, fish -some of them weighing up to 1/2 lb - fell from the mouths of hundreds of passing pelicans on to astonished observers below, and in 1979 a golfer was struck on the head by an airborne red mullet dropped by a clumsy gull.

Yet such explanations do not account for every case. Many reliable eyewitnesses have actually described seeing fish and frogs fall when there has not been a bird in sight, let alone the large flock necessary to convey the shoals of airborne creatures that have landed on or around them.

In 1948 Mr Ian Patey, a former British Amateur Golf Champion, was playing a round on a course at Barton-on-Sea, near Bournemouth. His wife was about to play a shot. But,

just before she hit it, a fish fell down on the ground in front of us. And then we looked up in the sky and suddenly there were hundreds of fish falling in an area of about a hundred yards. They were live, they were larger than whitebait, possibly smaller than a sardine. My reaction was one of complete surprise. After all, there wasn't a cloud in the sky.

During the Second World War, Joe Alpin was stationed with the Artists' Rifles at an English stately home, Alton Towers in Staffordshire. One evening he was driving through the deer park in an army truck:

The sky suddenly darkened - very very dark indeed, like a thunderstorm. And then the frogs came, millions of them, raining out of the sky, millions upon millions of frogs about half an inch long. They fell all over us, all over the grass, all over the cars, down the neck of our tunics, on our feet, hands, everywhere. It rained frogs for at least an hour and a quarter.

At Esh Winning in County Durham in 1887 Mr Edward Cook, realizing that a storm was approaching, took shelter with his horse and rolley cart beneath the gables of a house.

In a few minutes large drops of rain began to fall, and with them, to my astonishment, scores of small frogs (about the size of a man's thumbnail) jumping about in all directions; and, as there was no dam or grass near, I could not imagine wherever they came from, until the storm was over and I had mounted the waggon again. Then I found several of the little gentlemen on the rolley, and knew they must have come down with the rain, it being impossible for them to have leaped so high.

In 1960 Grace Wright reported a similar experience to a magazine:

More than 50 years ago, I was walking along a street in Hounslow with my husband and small son when a heavy storm broke. We first thought they were hailstones until we saw they were all tiny frogs and were jumping about. My son filled a sweet-box to take home. The brim of my husband's hat was full of frogs while the storm lasted. They were everywhere.

On 28 August 1977 thousands of tiny frogs - some apparently no larger than peas - poured down on to Canet-Plage near Perpignan, France. Eyewitnesses said they bounced off the bonnets of cars.

In October 1986, The Journal of Meteorology published this vivid eyewitness account. It came from J.W. Roberts of Kettering, Northamptonshire, who, in 1919, was working at a farm during the school holidays.

I was walking between the stacks of hay and straw when there was a sudden rush of air. I looked up towards a disused quarry cutting and I saw a dark, almost black, cloud coming rushing towards me. It was a whirlwind. It picked up some of the loose straw lying about, and when it reached the buildings it seemed to stop, and the dark cloud suddenly fell down and I was smothered all over with small frogs - thousands of them about 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 inches long. I think they must have come from a lake a mile away up the cutting. Oh boy, was I scared. I ran across the footbridge over the brook right close to our house, and my mother could hardly believe me, only I had small frogs in my shirt, etc.

From earliest times, the theory usually advanced to explain these weird falls has been that the frogs and fish are carried aloft by freak winds, tornadoes or waterspouts. The creatures fall back to earth when the wind weakens. Tornadoes and whirlwinds certainly do play extraordinary tricks.

For example, when a tornado passed through the Brahmaputra district of India in March 1875, a dead cow was found up in the branches of a tree, about 30 ft from the ground. After a tornado had hit Oklahoma in 1905, the Associated Press reported that 'all the corpses in the track of the storm were found without shoes'; at Lansing, Michigan, in 1943, thirty chickens were found sitting in a row stripped entirely of their feathers; and on 30 May 1951 people clearing up after a tornado at Scottsbluff, Nebraska, found that a bean had been driven deep into an egg without cracking the shell. At St Louis in 1896 a whirlwind was reported to have lifted a carriage into the air.

It was apparently then carried along for 100 yards before being allowed to float back to earth so gently that the coachman's hat remained firmly on his head! In Tornadoes of the United States, Snowden D. Flora tells the remarkable tale of two Texans, known only as Al and Bill, who chanced to be at Al's home in Higgins, Texas, on 9 April 1947 when a tornado struck.

Al, hearing the roar, stepped to the door and opened it to see what was happening. It was torn from his grasp and disappeared. He was carried away, over the tree tops. Bill went to the door to investigate the disappearance of his friend and found himself, also, sailing through the Texas atmosphere, but in a slightly different direction from the course his friend was taking. Both landed about two hundred feet from the house with only minor injuries. Al started back and found Bill uncomfortably wrapped in wire.

He unwound his friend and both headed for Al's house, crawling because the wind was too strong to walk against. They reached the site of the house only to find that all the house except the floor had disappeared. The almost incredible part of the story is that Al's wife and two children were huddled on a divan, uninjured. The only other piece of furniture left on the floor was a lamp.

If the wind can lift two beefy Texans and an Indian cow into the air, fish and frogs must present no problem, and many fish- and frog-falls do turn out, on close investigation, to occur at times when unusual winds are recorded. This is certainly true in the case of the Marksville fish-fall. We know this because, by a remarkable coincidence, one of the first people to reach the fish-strewn streets of the town was a biologist working for the US Department of Wild Life and Fisheries.

A.D. Bajkov and his wife had been having breakfast in a restaurant when a bemused waitress told them that fish were raining down outside. The Bajkovs rushed to the sidewalk, their food forgotten, and at once set about identifying the airborne shoal.

They were freshwater fish native to local waters', Bajkov later reported in a letter to the American journal, Science. He found large-mouth black bass, goggle-eyes, two species of sunfish, hickory shad, and several kinds of minnows. There were more shad than anything else. Bajkov collected a jarful of prize specimens for distribution to museums. Like a good scientist, he also took careful note of the weather conditions.

The actual falling of the fish occurred in somewhat short intervals, during foggy and comparatively calm weather. The velocity of the wind on the ground did not exceed eight miles per hour. The New Orleans weather bureau had no report of any large tornado, or updrift, in the vicinity of Marksville at that time. However, James Nelson Gowanloch, chief biologist for the Louisiana Department of Wild Life and Fisheries, and I had noticed the presence of numerous small tornadoes, or 'devil dusters' the day before the 'rain of fish' in Marksville.

A more obvious connection between a fall and unusual weather conditions was noted in a letter sent to the East Anglian Magazine in 1958. The writer, H. Bye, had overheard a conversation between an old farmhand and a group of workers. The farmhand was telling them 'that at West Row and Isleham, on the Cambridge/Suffolk border, when he was a young man, a waterspout was seen over the River Lark. Some hours afterwards there was a heavy thunderstorm and it rained frogs.'

A waterspout also blew up near the site of another English frog-fall in 1892, according to Symons's Monthly Meteorological Magazine:

During the storm that raged with considerable fury in Birmingham on Wednesday morning, June 30, a shower of frogs fell in the suburb of Moseley. They were found scattered about several gardens. Almost white in colour, they had evidently been absorbed in a small waterspout that was driven over Birmingham by the tempest.

In 1982 Michael W. Rowe, writing in the Journal of Meteorology, revealed that he had discovered a graphic account of fish cascading from a waterspout. It occurs in a book called The Excitement, published in 1830. According to the story, some travellers were sailing through the Strait of Malacca in about 1760, when:

They were surrounded with waterspouts, one of which was very near, and they fired to disperse it. The roaring was tremendous, and presently a torrent of water poured on the ship, which brought down with it many fish and weeds; yet the water was perfectly fresh; a phenomenon singularly curious.

Fish have actually been seen inside or emerging from waterspouts and whirlwinds. E.W. Gudger of the American Museum of Natural History, an avid collector of reports of mysterious showers, was told by his friend, E.A. Mcllhenny of Avery Island, Louisiana, of 'a small waterspout on a fresh-water distributary in the Mississippi delta, which broke just in front of his fishing boats and then filled boats with water and fishes'.

Michael Rowe also dug out this tiny paragraph from The Times of 23 January 1936: 'Violent whirlwinds accompanied a storm which broke over Florence on Monday, and among various objects which were seen spinning in the air were some big fish which had evidently been drawn from the River Arno.' Rowe collects reports of whirlwinds and often writes to local papers appealing for information. A letter in the Manchester Evening News brought this response from E. Singleton, who reported seeing fish and frogs actually 'taking off' at Newton-le-Willows, Lancashire, in 1947:

I saw flocks of birds suddenly appear from behind me. Looking back, the reason was obvious, for approaching rapidly was a whirlwind which was carrying all sorts of debris. I threw my two children to the floor and lay on top of them while the wind passed by about 30 yards away. It travelled directly over a huge pond which was locally known as Thompson's Pit. Half the water together with fish, frogs and weed was carried away and was found deposited on house tops half-a-mile away.

Sometimes, ponds, lakes and rivers are completely emptied of water by the wind. Snowden D. Flora, in Tornadoes of the United States, notes an example: 'When the destructive tornado of June 23, 1944, passed over West Fork River, West Virginia, the water was actually sucked up and the river left dry, momentarily, at the place where the storm crossed it.'

Another collector of meteorological curiosities, Waldo L. McAtee of the US Biological Survey, told the Biological Society of Washington of two similar 'lift-offs'. The first was at Christiansoe on the island of Bornholm, Denmark, where 'a waterspout emptied the harbor to such an extent that the greater part of the bottom was uncovered'. The other took place at a town in France. There had been a violent storm overnight: 'When morning dawned, the streets were found strewed with fish of various sizes. The mystery was soon solved, for a fish pond in the vicinity had been blown dry and only the large fish left behind.'

Yet even though freak winds are almost certainly the cause of these exotic rains of fish and frogs, the scientists have not yet found all the answers. For example, who could have blamed Major J. Hedgepath, US Army (retired), for being totally baffled by a discovery he made while stationed on the island of Guam in September 1936? He told the readers of Science: 'I witnessed a brief rainfall of fish, one of the specimens of which was identified as the tench (Tinea tinea) which, to my knowledge, is common only to the fresh waters of Europe. The presence of this species at a locale so remote from its normal habitat is worthy of note.'

Indeed it is. Guam is the largest of the Mariana Islands. It lies in the Western Pacific.

The Jelly Meteors

What is gelatinous, smelly and said to fall from shooting stars? The answer is Pwdre Ser (Welsh for 'star rot'), a strange jelly-like substance which, eyewitnesses have reported, rains down from the sky.

In 1978 Mrs M. Ephgrave of Cambridge told a television weatherman about a mysterious substance which had landed on her lawn during a heavy rainstorm: 'It glided down, [it was] about the size of a football and settled like a jelly.' Other reports from earlier times describe a 'round patch as broad as a bushel, which looked thick, slimy and black' seen on Dartmoor in 1638; a 'gelatinous mass of a greyish colour so viscid as to "tremble all over" when poked with a stick' that hit Koblenz in 1844; and a 'body of fetid jelly, 4 feet in diameter' found by villagers from Loweville, New York, in 1846.

So what is Pwdre Ser? Sadly, not 'star slime', the last vestige of a shooting star, despite Sir Walter Scott's assertion, 'Seek a fallen star and though shalt only light on some foul jelly.' There are probably several more mundane explanations. Some examples - if the jelly was not actually seen falling - may be colonies of blue-green algae, known as Nostoc commune, a fungus called Tremella mesenterica, or even leftovers from the innards of frogs and toads devoured by birds.

Few samples have been analysed by scientists. The Cambridge jelly, for example, apparently disappeared overnight, but more than two centuries earlier, in 1712, the Reverend John Morton of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, boiled some Pwdre Ser and found it contained fragments of animal bones and skin. He also added two valuable observations: that he had seen a wounded gull vomit a jelly-like substance which turned out to be a ball of half-digested earthworms; and that a friend, Sir William Craven, had watched a bittern do the same thing.

In 1980 Dr G.T. Meaden, Editor of the Journal of Meteorology, seized a rare opportunity and sent a small sample from a blob of colourless jelly found in the garden of Mr Philip Buller at Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, for analysis. The scientist, Mr T.J. Turvey, had only about 1 dessertspoon (10 ml) of the stuff to work on, but he was still able to isolate all kinds of material in it, including plant debris, freshwater algae, roundworms and bacteria. His conclusion: that it was material which a creature normally found near fresh water, such as a heron, might first have swallowed and then regurgitated.

These, then, are clues which point to a solution to the Pwdre Ser mystery. Yet the full answer must wait for the day when a scientist can both observe and catch a falling 'star slime'.

Arthur C. Clarke writes on 'Icebergs of Space':

One of the subjects we investigated in some detail in Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World (Chapter 2: A Cabinet of Curiosities) was that of objects falling from the sky. This has been happening for centuries before the coming of the Air Age, and has involved an amazing range of materials -as well as living creatures, such as frogs and fish. In some cases there can be little doubt of the explanation. On the theory 'What comes down must go up' we asked for eyewitness reports of such 'lift-offs' and, as you have seen, were happy to receive some.

The most spectacular and perhaps well-attested of all falls, however, consist of ice, sometimes in masses far too large to be explained as abnormal hail formations. This is a genuine mystery - but now, at last, we have an answer, though it may not be the only one. It involves a distinguished visitor whom I am sure you will all remember. If you don't see the connection at first, please be patient ...

The week before Christmas, 1985, I made my first serious attempt to locate Halley's Comet. According to the Ephemeris in The Handbook of the British Astronomical Association, it would be almost directly above Colombo soon after sunset; unfortunately, a rather misty sky was suffused with light from the waxing moon, so I had no great expectation of success.

Another observation hazard was the glare of floodlights from the garden of my next-door neighbour, the Iraqi Ambassador. (His concern for security was understandable: a few days later the papers reported a shootout at his front gate with the local Iranians.)

I fitted my 8-in Celestron with the lowest-power eyepiece available (x 50 - even lower would have been better to look for a faint but fairly large object) and set it up on the flat roof, lining up the polar axis by the tiles, whose orientation I'd determined years ago. Such a crude procedure was hardly good enough for astrophotography, but quite adequate for visual observations. When the clock drive is switched on, an object will stay in view for an hour or more before drifting out of the field.

Now I had to aim the telescope at the exact point in the depressingly luminous sky. Luckily, there were some convenient signposts available - the brilliant planet Jupiter, and the stars in Aquarius, particularly the brightest one, Alpha, which is almost exactly on the Equator. By a stroke of luck, so was the comet on the night of 20 December, so once I'd found Alpha Aquarius only a very slight north-south correction should be necessary.

The conditions were such that I couldn't locate the third magnitude star Alpha visually. No problem; first I got Jupiter in the centre of the field, and adjusted the telescope's right ascension and declination (the celestial equivalents of longitude and latitude) circles so that they agreed with the planet's tabulated position in The BAA Handbook. Then I moved east and north along the two circles to RA 22 hours 05 minutes plus 1/2 degree - and there was Alpha in the low-powered finder telescope.

It was nowhere near the middle of the field (after all, I'd only aligned the polar axis by eye) so I made another slight adjustment to compensate for the remaining error. Now I was sure that I was in reasonable agreement with the celestial coordinate system, and was ready for the final step.

Very carefully, I slewed the telescope through the calculated arc - about 10 degrees eastwards and a smidgen north. Then, holding my breath and covering my head with a black cloth like an old-time photographer, I peered into the eyepiece.

I didn't really expect to see anything. Quite apart from the poor seeing conditions, my field of vision was only 1/2 degree across - about the size of the moon, which is much smaller than most people realize. (Try covering it with your thumbnail some night.) It was more than likely that the residual errors of adjustment had caused me to miss my target, which meant that I'd have to do some searching.

I could hardly believe my luck - there it was, shyly but unmistakably lurking at the edge of the field! A slight twist of the declination screw, and it was properly centred. Honesty compels me to admit that it was not a conspicuous object; just a bit fainter, and it wouldn't have been visible at all. But it was there, and that was the only thing that mattered.

My first glimpse of the most famous of comets, still heading for its once-in-a-human-lifetime appointment with the sun, has left an indelible photographic image in my memory. It appeared as a misty blob of light, a few times the size of the planet Jupiter as I'd seen it with the same magnification just minutes earlier. Although it grew brighter towards the centre, there was no nucleus - no starlike condensation of light at its core, as is shown by many comets. Nor was I able to see any trace of a tail, though that was not surprising. Halley was still a long way from the sun, and its witch's cauldron of volatile ices and organic chemicals had not yet come to the boil.

As I watched that ghostly apparition glimmering in the field of my telescope, I could not help thinking that a small fleet of spacecraft was on its way to meet the comet in less than three months' time. How amazed - and excited -Halley would have been by this rendezvous with the visitor that will always bear his name! And perhaps Giotto, the Vegas and the Planets, when their mountains of data were analysed - a process which could take years - would confirm that comets are indeed responsible for those massive ice-falls from a cloudless sky which have intrigued man for centuries.

Today, of course, many such events can be all too easily explained: lumps of ice up to 12 lb (5.5 kilos) in weight can accumulate on high-flying aircraft until shaken or blown off. Chemical analysis has sometimes revealed their origin; if, as in one report, there are 'traces of coffee, tea and detergent', there's no need to invoke comets (though perhaps that doesn't exclude UFOs). But we must look for another explanation in the case of the 20-ft (6-m)-diameter block that fell on an estate in Scotland. Maybe a Jumbo jet with serious plumbing problems could produce such a mini-iceberg; however, Boeing 747s were not very common at the time of the report - 1849. Comets, on the other hand, have been around longer than the earth itself; they are part of the debris left over from the construction of the solar system.

It has long been suspected that many, if not most comets consist largely of ice - or, to be more accurate, of ices. In ordinary life, the only variety we encounter is frozen water, but in the extremely cold regions far from the sun where comets spend most of their lives it comes in many other flavours. There's ammonia ice, methane ice, carbon dioxide ice (well-known in the refrigeration industry under the name 'dry ice') and still more exotic varieties. As a comet heads sunwards, most of these vaporize beyond the orbit of the earth; but frozen water can survive not only the increasing radiation but even - if the initial mass is large enough - the frictional heat caused by passage through the atmosphere.

It seems very likely that some ice-falls are of cosmic origin: they are associated with the sonic booms heard when vehicles re-enter the earth's atmosphere. It's a strange thought that the largest of all icebergs do not lie off the coast of Antarctica, but drift between the stars.

And at least once during this century, in 1908, one may have crashed upon this planet. The famous Tunguska 'event' (see page 73) has long been a mystery because no substantial meteoric debris was ever found. But a mass of ice moving at fifty times the speed of a rifle bullet could do megatons worth of damage, and leave no evidence of the crime. (I recall a murder story in which there was no weapon; it turned out to have been a dagger made of ice. As Einstein remarked, 'Nature too can be subtle.')

The idea that there is a lot of ice floating round in space has a disreputable pseudo-scientific ancestry - which may be why astronomers have been slow to accept it. The American collector of enigmas and anomalies, Charles Fort, suggested that there may be 'vast fields of aerial ice from which pieces occasionally break away'. Except for the word 'aerial' this may indeed be almost true.

These speculations on Halley's Comet have triggered a memory of more than fifty years ago. My very first attempt at a full-length science-fiction story (fortunately long since destroyed) concerned that typical disaster of the spaceways, the collision between an interplanetary liner and a large meteorite - or small comet, if you prefer. I was quite proud of the title: Icebergs of Space - never dreaming at the time that such things really existed. I have always been a little too fond of surprise endings. In the last line I revealed the name of the wrecked spaceship. It was SS - wait for it -Titanic.

Don't laugh. Sooner or later, it will happen again.

* * *

The above note was composed, believe it or not, on Christmas Day 1985; for as long as I can remember I have escaped to my office as soon as the compulsory festivities are over. Since then, there have been a few more developments.

Halley's Comet, to the surprise of everyone except Sir Fred Hoyle and Dr Chandra Wickramesinghe (who used the observations to support their controversial theory that comets may harbour bacteria and other life-forms), turned out to be very black indeed. It was not, as expected, a 'dirty snowball' - but a 'snowy dirtball'. However, it certainly did contain vast quantities of ice, and my thesis still stands. It has now received support from several unexpected directions. On 13 August 1984 a report came from Moscow headlined, FROZEN GAS METEORITE HITS RUSSIAN HOLIDAY CAMP; part of it reads:

A Russian holiday camp supervisor who narrowly missed being struck by a block of ice falling from a cloudless sky has provided Soviet scientists with their first sample of an 'ice meteorite'. Anatoly Kozhukhov heard a whizzing noise and jumped out of the path of the chunk of ice which thudded into the sand two paces away from him at a holiday camp near Kazan on the River Volga. He put the strange object in his refrigerator and called Moscow scientists, who sent a team of researchers. Their conclusion was that the camp had been struck by the remnants of frozen gas meteorites which had penetrated the atmosphere. Ice meteorites had landed on earth before but melted before scientists could analyze their chemical composition, Tass said.

Thank you, Tass; just what I've been saying. But the final remark isn't quite correct. In our Mysterious World programme scientists in England and the USA actually analyzed ice-falls that had been saved. And the Chinese had got hold of a sample a year earlier than the Russian one, for on 11 April 1983 a 100 lb (40 kilo) 'cake' of ice dropped out of the sky and splintered on the pavement in the East China city of Wuxi. By an ingenious piece of detective work the Chinese scientists were able to make its meteoric origin virtually certain. On a picture taken seventeen minutes later by the US metsat NOAA-7, they discovered a dark line running across the clouds towards the impact point! They believe it was the track made by the meteor (original mass probably about a ton) as it entered the atmosphere.

Artificial satellites may also have contributed another clue to this continuing story. Astrophysicist Louis Frank of the University of Iowa has discovered that ultra-violet images of the upper atmosphere made by Dynamics Explorer 1 show numerous black spots, lasting a few minutes which he believes are produced by water vapour from incoming 'ice comets'. If this is confirmed it may throw new light on both planetary and biological evolution. The ice comets - if that's what they are - arrive at a rate of over 1,000 an hour, and average 100 tons each. If this has been going on for the whole of geological time, it's enough to account for all the oceans of the earth! This will upset a lot of theories; no wonder that a good deal of arm-waving is going on among Dr Frank's sceptical colleagues.

Perhaps they feel that all this is uncomfortably reminiscent of the 'cosmic ice' theories put forward early in this century by eccentric Germans like Fauth and Hoerbiger, who believed that most of the universe was made of ice and that, for example, lunar formations were carved by glaciers. (Though I wouldn't swear to it, I seem to recall that one genius constructed a cosmology in which even the sun was made of ice!) Such pseudo-science flourished - briefly -under the Nazis; how ironic if it turns out, after all, to contain an element of truth.

Further Thoughts on Tunguska

The weight of scientific opinion now favours the idea that it was a comet which exploded above Siberia in 1908, laying waste to around 800 square miles of forest. Indeed, in the summer of 1986 the American Geophysical Union held a special session in Baltimore, Maryland, designed to alert the world, in that year of Halley's return, to the catastrophic implications of another comet arriving and colliding with the earth.

The geophysicists have a special nightmare. Rocks and boulders - the debris of space - are swirling round the earth all the time, running into our atmosphere and disintegrating. On average, a 1,000-ton boulder bumps into us each month. Frequently, especially in June, there are spectacular displays of shooting stars at night as fragments burn up in the upper atmosphere. But what the geophysicists fear is the arrival of a really large body weighing perhaps 100,000 tons or more. They envisage its sudden appearance, unanticipated, in the upper atmosphere.

There would be a tremendous fireball, brighter than the sun; then a cataclysmic explosion. If this took place over a populated area, the destruction and loss of life would be enormous. Worse, it might well be assumed that the explosion was a thermonuclear weapon, with the consequent horror of retaliation and holocaust. Hopefully the sensor systems of the superpowers are, or soon will be, discriminating enough to tell the difference.

However, in September 1986 another natural disaster occurred which, some scientists felt, might shed light on the mystery of Tunguska. In Yaounde, capital of the West African state of Cameroon, the authorities started to receive reports that in an area around Lake Nios in the interior, hundreds of people had just fallen down dead. Officials who quickly arrived on the scene were confronted with an apocalyptic vision.

The rolling green countryside was strewn with the carcasses of cattle, pigs and wild animals. Along the roads and tracks leading to the lake lay the corpses of people who had apparently been struck down as they walked or bicycled along. In the villages themselves around the lake, people had died by the hundred in their houses and gardens. In total, more than 1,700 people died, as well as herds of animals. It was soon apparent that a great cloud of poisonous gas was responsible. It had rolled down from the crater lake, fatally enveloping everything in its path.

In 1984 a geologist, A.R. Crawford of the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, suggested that a great gas cloud from within the earth might have been the cause of the Tunguska explosion. Tunguska, he wrote, 'might be a wholly terrestrial phenomenon ... Rather than being the only well-argued-for cometary impact on Earth, it may be the only modern example of a sudden very voluminous hot gaseous effusion.' Crawford noted that such gases were associated with diamond-bearing kimberlite pipes, a belt of which lie across Siberia.

Crawford belongs to a school of geologists which believes that the earth may be expanding, even pulsating like a heart, and that this may account for some of the fractures associated with plate tectonics. From these fractures in the earth's crust may emerge gouts of lethal and explosive gases.

Sixty years of research on the Tunguska site have still failed to come up with any convincing residue of extraterrestrial material, though there are plenty of exotic minerals in the little glass globules found in the Tunguska soil. It is a frightening but plausible concept that the big bang, which could have laid waste a city the size of Paris, might simply have been the biggest gas explosion the modern world has ever seen.

Arthur C. Clarke comments:

The Tunguska event will soon be eighty years in the past. Imagine our surprise, therefore, at receiving this report in 1985 from Mr Samuel Sunter of Victoria, Canada. Mr Sunter was a boy of nine, living in Northumberland, England, when the explosion took place. This is what he told us:

I saw, looking north east, on June 30th 1908, a large red ball of fire, about three times the size of a full moon. It looked just like a hole in the sky. On the other side of the hole, it looked like flames, just like looking into the fire box of a locomotive. But what made me afraid was a solid beam of light which reached right down to where I was standing. This made me afraid and I ran into the house, so I do not know how long it lasted after I first saw it. Even today I have a very vivid memory of it.

Could Mr Sunter have indeed seen the Tunguska explosion from 4,000 miles away across the roof of the world? It seems improbable; but if his memory of the date is correct, he almost certainly witnessed some of its effects.

The whole subject of meteor - or cometary - impact has now become of great scientific and, surprisingly, political importance. On the scientific side, it is now widely believed that the extinction of the dinosaurs (as well as a vast range of other creatures) some sixty-five million years ago was due to the impact of an asteroid or comet about 5 miles in diameter. Quite apart from the colossal immediate danger, the resulting smoke and airborne debris darkened the earth for months, killing off much of the planet's vegetation and the chains of life that were based upon it.

Nobel Prize winning physicist Luis Alvarez, who with his son Walter is chiefly responsible for this explanation of the 'Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction', has no doubts about its truth. Twenty-five years ago I dedicated my only non-science-fiction novel, Glide-Path, to Luis and his wartime radiation lab colleagues, with whom I worked in 1942. When I recently updated the Preface, I mentioned that the debate over his theory 'now rages furiously'. He corrected me at once:

Had you written that sentence a few years ago, I couldn't disagree. But now, the ball game is over, and everyone who has taken the trouble to examine the evidence is convinced that we were right ... Our theory - more accurately our discovery - that the K-T extinction was caused by the impact of a 10-kilometre diameter object is no longer controversial, in the scientific sense of that word.

Certainly controversial, however, is the theory that even a small-scale exchange of nuclear weapons could cause similar ecological effects, so that the whole world, and not merely the target areas, would be devastated by the effects of a 'nuclear winter'. If this is true, the entire human race is held hostage by the stockpiles of a few nations.

Perhaps evolution is about to repeat itself. It may well be that we mammals would still be scurrying nervously in the undergrowth if a multi-megaton explosion sixty-five million years ago had not eliminated the giant beasts who were then the masters of the earth. Are we about to repeat the scenario - and make way for our successors - the cockroaches?

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