Stuff You Should Know - Can it rain frogs?

Episode Date: May 31, 2012

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. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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They just have way better names for what they call, like what we would call a jackmove or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready, are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with me as always is Charles W. Chuck Bryant and this Friends is Stuff You Should Know.

Drain and frogs, hallelujah. Yeah, I got a lot of those during the search for this. Oh really? Yeah, during research for this. You got it draining men references? Yeah, kept coming up and I didn't see any. Predictive search and really? Yeah, and then there's a lot of raining different things, mouse pads out there available. Oh really? Yeah, e-retailers like Etsy and Zazzle and stuff like that. Basically, if you type something in, Zazzle will be like, well, you know, we'll put that on a mouse pad for you. Oh sure. You know? Yeah. And there's an adorable umbrella out there, a see-through umbrella with frogs all over it. That's cute. Yeah. Are they splattered?

No, they're not. They're actually, oh, it didn't show up there in this article. There's triplets holding them. Wow. Yeah, three times the adorable. So, Chuck. Yes. I ran into a lot of descriptions of crazy stuff happening over the course of history. Yes. Here on planet Earth. As far back as I could see, there was a guy named Athenaeus. 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, it frequently rained fish and frogs frequently. Okay. And not only did it frequently do it once, it rained frogs for three days there, he said. Wow. Yeah. And so much so that the villagers had to leave because they were just inundated with frogs. They poisoned the water whenever

they tried to cook. There was like frogs and there were frogs everywhere and it was raining frogs. Sounds like the ramblings of a fourth century BC Greek madman, right? Sure. Okay. We'll say that. But what about Bergen, Norway in 1578 and 1579 when it rained supposedly yellow mice and lemmings? It rained lemmings. Supposedly. Now, that's been widely discredited. Okay. But what about Memphis, Tennessee, January 1877. It rained live snakes, some as big as 18 inches long. And this one was reported in Scientific American. Yeah. Pliny the Elder, which is the name of a beer as well. I found out. An IPA even. Nice. First century AD reported rains of flesh, blood and wool. Yeah, wool. 1873, Kansas City, Missouri, raining frogs. Australia, raining fish.

Yeah. Acapulco, 1968, raining maggots. Ew. Yeah, tadpoles, jellyfish and Tasmania. Jellyfish? Yeah. That's scary. Yeah, pretty scary. The one of squid, that's BS. It was some guy who found a single squid. Really? Yeah. So what we're talking about, all of these are documented cases of it raining crazy, crazy stuff. It's rained blood before supposedly. Really, it was in algae. But it did in India and Russia. Right. And the people in Russia found that they had the biggest crop yield ever, thanks to the blood rain. They're weird. Wow. Yeah. 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 is just a lie. Other ones, like there was a report of rain,

I believe, in London, somewhere in Great Britain. So it's London or the rest of Great Britain. Yeah. Like that. Where some guy, some doctor, came out into his garden and there was 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 rained frogs in Great Britain that year. There's a lot of stories like that. Yeah. People are just stupid. Right? I didn't notice that that a lot of the stories where people didn't actually witness it, but they just assumed there's tadpoles all over my car. So it must have rained them. Exactly. You know, that's not the most illogical conclusion. Even one of my personal heroes, Charles Fort, threw his goofy hat in the ring. Yeah. 40 in

times is the greatest magazine ever created. Charles Fort said that 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 either until today, too. Yeah. Boy, the snakes one. That was in Scientific American, man. Live snakes, foot and a half long, raining. I caught a snake the other day in my yard from the sky. No, no, no. I was just doing the weeds and I saw and he was a copperhead. He was. Oh, wow. Those are deadly. But I picked him up like

Steve Irwin and Emily was very impressed. Not bad. Then I like 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. A poisonous snake. Popped his head clean off. No, he was fine. Field dressed him and ate him on the spot. He wasn't that big. You're going to get some mail for letting a poisonous snake go in a neighborhood. It was already in the neighborhood. I just moved him to a to a empty wooded open wooded land. But you didn't exercise extreme prejudice and was supposed 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

kooks and dummies out there who say that oh, it's rained. Oh, it's rained frogs. It's rained squid. That squid one just irks me. Yeah. It's rained a bunch of crazy stuff. People not named PT Anderson. Yes. Which, by the way, I finally saw there will be blood yesterday, day before yesterday. You had never seen that? No. What'd you think? There's a lot. Okay. Josh's one word of view. A lot. Two words. It could be two. Yeah. It depends. The crazy thing is, we're finally going to get to the point here. It actually has rained things like frogs before. That's right. 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 people who've

reported frogs specifically falling from the sky in the middle of a storm. And it's true. It happened as recently as 2005. Yeah. And was that the Serbia? Uh-huh. Yeah. Where people, there was a big old storm and people saw and heard frogs raining down from the sky, hitting their roofs. And basically apparently what, like you were saying, PT Anderson in Magnolia, what he depicted, is probably a lot what something like that would look like. I would imagine so. There's an explanation for this. Oh. It's not the end of the world. We're going to go into that. It's not one of the plagues, biblical plagues, although we'll get into that. First explained by French physicist André-Marie Empere in the early 19th century.

He said, you know what this is? This is a 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, like three feet? Three feet. For a big one. Yeah. And picks these things up because they're obviously lighter than, you know, they might not be picking up like a great white shark, but it'll pick up a little fish or a little frog or a tadpole. And then as it dies out, it spits them back out when it gets overland because it decreases in what pressure? Yes. For filler, since you just explained the whole podcast, let's talk about how a water spout forms. Okay. Okay. So you got two kinds of water spouts. You've got a tornado,

which is just like a tornado. Yeah. And it starts with a vertical clockwise turning column of air that eventually goes down so it's cloud to surface. Yeah. Right. Those are really scary ones. Sure. And they're associated with storms. 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. Yeah. Which is formed by low rising air. And as it goes up, remember cold air comes in to fill the void. That's right. And those two things interplaying the low pressure warm air rising and the cold air dropping, high pressure dropping form of vortex, which creates suction in the middle

and low pressure area, the difference in pressure. And that's how you can suck something up up to three feet beneath the surface. Right. Or if you're a tornado, you might suck up a dog or a cat or a cow. Yeah. Or a car. Are we talking about this? We didn't do how tornadoes worked. We just did what's it like in the eye of a tornado. Yeah. Which is pretty awesome. It was good. Yeah. The war on drugs impacts everyone, whether or not you take drugs. America's public enemy number one is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute 2,200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah. And they can do that without any drugs on the table. Without any drugs. Of course, yes,

they can do that. And I'm the prime example of that. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. The cops. Are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. My name is Adelita Paz, or as some like to call me, the modern day Selena. Sonoro and my culture represent Adelita changing the key.

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So are we done? I don't think so. Sometimes it's 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. Yeah. And all that is the water spout got high enough into the atmosphere that it reached an area that was beneath zero. Sometimes it's not just animals. Sometimes it's tomatoes. Or coal. Or coal. There's a guy in Manassas, Virginia who got a frozen 10,000-Deutschmark note. Really? Yeah. Wow. Yeah, frozen. Was this after they converted to the Euro? I don't know. You can still trade those in, I bet. Oh, I'll bet. I'm sure. Are they completely out of circulation, I wonder? I hope not for this guy's sake.

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 violent wind speeds. Right? Yeah. 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 species? I knew you were going to say that. Well, then answer. Well, I don't have an answer. Because I wondered the same thing. There is a professor at Washington University that says, you know, it just makes sense because they're of similar size and weight. They might be all hanging out together at the one point where this thing goes down. Yeah. That still didn't

explain it to me, though. I mean, if a waterspout goes down over water, it's going to be spitting out fish and frogs and whatever else. And it's almost always reported to be one thing. Yeah. It's like it's raining frogs or it's raining fish. And fish supposedly are the most common animals to be rained. Rain fish in Australia, like every day. Yeah. It's like, they're like, yeah, of course. But yeah, why they're not mixed together or why they're not reported to be mixed together is the weirdest thing. It is weird. There's another professor from Southern Illinois that theorizes that it's not just waterspouts. He said it can be any kind of unusual updraft. Yeah. Anything like at a speed of 60 miles an hour plus can pick up light objects and deposit

them elsewhere. So not necessarily just a waterspout. Although it has been observed by like, you know, bona fide people. Okay. Like this one professor on Louisiana in 1947. And he worked with the Department of Wildlife. He was eating breakfast and he saw like an average of one fish per square yard raining down. So that's a significant amount of fish depending on the size of the fish. Like people say fish. Are they talking about guppies? Are they talking about crap? Are they talking about crap? Is it crappy? Crappy. They're talking about, you know, swordfish. Those are really dangerous. Yeah, when they rain. Yeah. No, I mean, I think they're light because that's the whole point. Even an updraft from a waterspout of 200 miles an hour isn't

going to be picking up, you know, great white sharks. Right. That's a movie for you. Raining sharks. Yeah. What about piranha? Piranha two, they flew and made it on the land, right? And then piranha two. Oh, the original piranha two? Yeah. Yes. So not the new piranha three double D. Is that what it's called? Yeah. I know. So I guess Occam's razor teaches us that in this case, the simplest explanation is that this is Satan's work. Okay. What a waterspout forming supposedly and just picking up things and then dropping them over land. Right. Okay. Right. And raining frogs is explaining it, I guess, is part of this larger trend that's gripped the scientific community lately, which is explaining biblical phenomenon. Yeah. Phenomena. Yes.

I thought that's pretty interesting. You dug up this article on the biblical plagues. Yeah, the 10 plagues of Egypt. One of which was frogs. Yes, but it didn't rain frogs. A lot of people think that it supposedly rain frogs. Now, what supposedly happened was apparently it's like where, you know, Dinar in Turkey is now they were just overrun by frogs. Yeah. And I guess I can imagine there was another horror movie from the 80s 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. Yeah, judging you. Yeah. And they'll kind of get all over everything and they'll get under foot 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 these these researchers figured out or they suggest that all of these things were linked. It was a series of events of amazing events that became what we know as the 10 plagues of Egypt that eventually caused Pharaoh to say, Hey, Moses, you guys can go back your stuff and leave. Yeah. Yes, you dug this up from the telegraph. One of my favorite publications. And Richard Gray, the correspondent of the telegraph, you can tell he's the science correspondent. Yeah. 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. There was a city called Pi Ramesses on the Nile Delta. Right. It was abandoned about 3000 years ago, which they think this explanation works in concert with that abandonment of the city. And they said that there was a dramatic shift in climate toward the end of the second reign of Ramesses Ramesses Ramesses Ramesses Ramesses. And we had a goat named Ramesses. You can't just say things like that. Sure, I can. So they found that the end of the rain coincided with a warm, wet climate and then switched over to a really dry period. Yeah. And that was not good news for the Nile. No, it kicked off the first plague, which was the

Nile turning to blood. So how did that happen? Well, the Nile supposedly dried up and became kind of this muddy, mucky, slow moving mess. Sure. No longer vital. And prime for this type of algae that we know was around back then that's still around today called burgundy blood algae. That's right. And basically it sucks the life out of a mucky area, which would have caused the second plague, frogs. Right. Well, did you say the name of the first plague? The river turns to blood? Yeah. Okay. And so frogs suddenly infesting where the people were living. Because there's no place to be in the river. Yeah. Right. It's suddenly turned lifeless, right? Right. And so now the frogs are everywhere, 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. Yeah. Which were flies and lice. Yes. All of a sudden the frogs aren't around to eat these things. So you're going to have a lot more lice and flies. Yeah. Okay. So far so good. Yeah. Now what? Well, after that, while everybody's itching and like swatting and like trying not to slip on all the dead frogs that they've stepped on, the following plagues were disease livestock and boils. Which you're going to have if you've got lots of flies and lice and mosquitoes. Spreading disease. Spreading disease. Okay. So that's, that's okay. That was, I mean, it makes sense, but that's not like that. Oh, yeah, of course. Right. 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 Thera on the islands of Santorini, which happened 3,500 years ago, and which they found evidence of in Egypt. Right. Excavating some, some locations in ancient Egypt, they found pumice volcanic stone from the Thera volcano. Yeah, because they're like there are no volcanoes in Egypt. Yeah. How could there be pumice? Exactly. Well, they looked and they said, Oh, it's from Santorini. Wow, that's kind of big. So you have the this volcanic eruption, huge, huge volcanic eruption. The ash mixing with the clouds over Egypt would have caused hail worth writing down in the Bible. Boom. And then it would have also created locusts because it 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. I did too. But then the darkness. Volcanic ash blotting out the sun. Yeah. Which we've heard could happen. Ever heard of a nuclear winter? That's right. Same thing. And so there you have it. All the plagues explained sort of except for the last one, Josh. This one didn't seem to be connected to anything. It was kind of freestanding, if you ask me. But the tenth plague was the death of the firstborn. Yeah. The firstborn sons, I should say. Yes. In Egypt, we're suddenly dying mysteriously as a plague. And I think that possibly there was some sort of grain fungus that killed the firstborns who would have had first dibs on food. Yeah.

So they would have been the first to die. I thought that was a little hinky. A couple of these were a little hinky, but little. I thought it was interesting to read for sure. But I mean, yeah, they weren't going to be like, hey, right, we're going to get front page exposure in the telegraph by saying we've explained eight of the 10 plagues of Egypt. You have to go for 10. Yeah, sure. And you got to fudge apparently if you are a researcher looking to get media coverage. Oh, we don't know if they fudged. Still. That was it. That was not the greatest flink. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that will piss you off. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It

starts as guilty. Cops. Are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil answer for. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. My name is Adelita Paz or as some like to call me the modern day Selena. My culture, I present Adelita changing the key podcast series about the crossover dream of a Tejano superstar starring Diane Guerrero and Anna Ortiz. And there comes a time when you must decide whose dreams you will fulfill. What would you do for the world of pop music to know your

name? Would you just risk it all or play it safe? Do you have any idea how many artists have attempted to do just that? Adelita changing the key is the story of Adelita Paz and the compromises she must make to get to where she wants. Listen to Adelita changing the key as part of the Micultura podcast network available on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Well that's it. That was a weird weird episode all over the place. We talked about raining frogs 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 it. Me too. In the meantime, I'll just watch Magnolia very frequently. If you want to learn more about frogs

and rain, you can type those things into the search bar at HowStuffWorks.com and it's time, man this is weird, for listener mail. That's right. Josh, I'm going to call this, it's a family here. It's a slight in the family stone. That's right. Hey guys, I'm a 24 year old stay-at-home mother of two wonderful children. My husband is a marine who has been deployed to the Middle East for just over a year. You may be interested and 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. Bed rest, no good. Stuck with us. Yeah, I quickly

became addicted to the fun tidbits of knowledge that you two threw out. 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 though we probably have had like a real hand in their daughter's development from the womb. 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, and percentages work. He's extremely proud and excited to be doing so much good and even asked if he could use his birthday money to lend on Kiva. Aww. What a sweet kid. I was so touched

by this, I even shed a little tear. That's her talking about me. I might have got weepy though. I'm sure. Our son is extremely intelligent for his age 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 requests that you include more insects and animals in your lineup. Okay. 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. Did he get a new one? I hope so. He had me immediately send him my iPod so that he could survive. We often email back and forth as we don't have many opportunities to

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