The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Meat Rain, Medicinal Sword Swallowing, a Nuclear Kodak Moment

Episode Date: November 11, 2020

The weirdest things we learned this week range from meat raining down from the heavens to swallowing swords to help doctors look down esophaguses.  Whose story will be voted "The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week"? The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us in our Facebook group or tweet at us! Click here to learn more about all of our stories!  Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Claire Maldarelli: www.twitter.com/camaldarelli Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Edited by Jessica Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy Theme music by Billy Cadden: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LqT4DCuAXlBzX8XlNy4Wq?si=5VF2r2XiQoGepRsMTBsDAQ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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And while most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles, we also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not share those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors of Popular Science. I'm Rachel Fultman. I'm Stan Horacek. And I'm Claire Maldarelli. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about

some kind of fact or story we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, trying to escape from the world around us. And we decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first. Then once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. Stan, it has been a while since you joined us, so welcome back. Thank you. Would you like to start with your teas?

Sure. So I want to give mine the broadest possible appeal. And it's about how cows eating different grass over the course of a century led to us figuring out about the very first nuclear tests, nuclear bomb tests in the United States. Whoa. I love cows. Holy cow. Oh, God. Sorry.

All right. My tease is that I am here today to talk to you about the Great Kentucky Meat Shower. That's it. Whole T's. I'm trying to picture meat and shower together, and I can't. Well, soon all will be made clear, or at least. slightly more clear. And Claire, what's your tease? Yes, I would like to discuss the connection between professional sword swallowing and modern-day gastroenterology. Oh, my gosh. We have three real

winners today. I am at a loss. I really want to hear about cows, just saying. Yeah, let's start with cows. Yeah, good. I know my sales pitch was so eloquently delivered. and my research here is going to be equally as scattered because I'm really excited about this. This is a chance for me to talk about film photography, which is something I'm extremely nerdy about. So what I'd like to do is sort of we have to sort of start with a very small, very easy chemistry lesson about how black and white film actually works. When you have a black and white negative, you're actually essentially making a tiny little silver sculpture of a scene in front of you. in rendered cow bones. Now that sounds pretty wild, right? But what film manufacturers do when they make film is that they take silver halide crystals and they emulsify it into gelatin, sort of the

same base that you'd have for like jello or any other gross gelatin-based foods that you might want to eat. And then they take that and then they layer it on top of thin strips of acetate or polyester, whatever you want to do. That silver halide is like, sensitive. So when light hits it, it creates a latent image and then you develop it. And that silver, which is metallic silver at that point, actually stays in the film. So that's like a really romantic way to think about film photography is that you're sort of creating this little sculpture. Nobody buys it when I talk about it. Everyone's like, we know, shut up, nerd. But that process sort of worked the same way in 1880 when George Eastman, who would go on to start the Kodak

photographic company, was making what they call dry plates. And it was, essentially the same process except it used glass plates instead of plastic film because plastic film wasn't really available yet so in 2017 i actually got to go to rochester where the kodak plant is and see how they make film and while i was there there's this guy named uh jeff hanson who was one of the technology supervisors of the of the factory it was like going to this place for me was like willie wanka right like i went i like roused my old grandpa out of bed and dragged him over to the Kodak factory and got to see how everything was made. And one of the rooms we walked into had just rows, like racks and racks and bags full of these little nubs, full of unrendered

gelatin. And at that point, Jeff started telling me a story about how around the turn of the 20th century, something weird started happening with the Kodak film. And customers were complaining that they couldn't make images. The, the emulsion wasn't working right. And so George Eastman being, you know, this, you know, very scientific mind that he was, they took a very scientific approach to researching it. And eventually they were able to find out that Kodak had started getting their gelatin from a different place where the cows were eating a different food. And the cows diet changing that much had enough of an effect on their body makeup

that it changed the chemical properties of the gelatin and the way it reacted with the emulsion. and it actually screwed up how the film worked. Wow. So these, yeah, these cows eating different grass was enough to ruin Kodak's day. And this was such a profound thing that happened, at least according to the Kodak people I've talked to, that it actually spurred George Eastman to start the entire research and development like wing of Kodak in 1912.

Now, I think would you like to respond? Would you like to be in awe of the cows? Yes. I would, I am amazed by this, and I would just like to say that they say diet is medicine. Apparently, it's also true for photography. Diet is everything. I eat a lot of grass, and I wonder what it's doing to my bones. And whatever product people are going to make out of my bones after I die, I hope I'm ruining it for them.

Yeah, this reminds me of, like, people who eat too many carrots, and then they turn, like, the color of carrot, but in film forms. Well, as an aside, this is not part of it. But if you look up, if you search for a guy, there's a guy who used to take collodial silver as like a supplement. Oh, yeah. I don't know. Or like grayish, blueish. It turned him blue. Essentially what happened is he developed himself like a photograph.

Oh, my gosh. Wow. Because it work, Collodial silver and silver halide is what makes film work. So this in 1912, George Eastman starts this research company. And they hire all. of these scientists. And I think like because Kodak has sort of fallen so far, we sort of underestimate how much power Kodak had. In 1990, Kodak was selling $19 billion worth of film a year. And at one point they had nearly 150,000 employees, many of whom were literally scientists.

Their headquarters had its own train system for bringing in chemicals. It had its own coal-driven power plant, which recently converted to natural gas. It has its it still to this day has its own fire station that's fully staffed with firemen inside the park. So in 1945, one of the Kodak's on-staff physicists made a pretty crazy discovery. So it actually goes back to X-ray film, which works in a similar way, but it's a lot more sensitive, right? So Kodak actually had to pick very specifically the production plants that it used in order to make the packaging, because a lot of cardboard plants back then used post-war recycled material where they also made from places where they also made radium-based instruments

because radium was good for things like glowing dials and airplanes. And even tiny amounts of radium that could sort of get mixed up in this recycled material could ruin x-ray plates because they're so sensitive. So in 1945, a Kodak physicist named Julian Webb began investigating a batch of x-ray film that was generating a lot of customer complaints. They were saying that there were like little dots showing up on the film even before they were exposed. So he assumed it came from the packaging, which is made of strawboard. But when he tested it, he found that there was no evidence of alpha wave radiation,

which is, you know, what comes from the typical radium and stuff that they expected to find. He did, however, find beta radiation, which was unexplainable to him. So according to a popular mechanic investigation, he discovered the effect was caused by, quote, a new type of radioactive containment not hitherto encountered, which is like ghosts. Yeah, it's like wonderfully poetic in a very scary sort of way. Right. He narrowed it down eventually and tracked it down to plates that came from two different plants, one in Indiana and the other from Iowa.

He eventually identified the contaminant as Syrium 141, a byproduct of a nuclear fission explosion. He would eventually report that it specifically came from the Trinity nuclear bomb test in New Mexico. Now, he was a physicist, and he actually worked on the Manhattan Project in the early days, trying to isolate isotopes using electromagnets. But he wasn't part of the Manhattan product, but he was looking at this and, you know, saying, like, this has to come from a nuclear bomb test. And what had happened is the radioactive particles had traveled in the atmosphere, on the air currents, all the way, you know, across the country.

And in Iowa and Indiana and other places, they eventually fell out of the sky through precipitation, literally nuclear fallout. They ended up in the river and then the mills used that water with the nuclear isotopes in it to make the paper and it ruined their film. Wow. So, yeah, Webb published this work in 1949 because he knew how sensitive it was. There's like a big gap between when he sort of figures this out and when he publishes it. But it keeps happening and Kodak keeps losing money. So in 1951, Kodak threatened to sue the U.S. government because the secret tests kept ruining its film. And as a result, the government said, well, like, okay, yeah, you're right.

We are kind of ruining your film. So they entered into an agreement with all the companies, not just Kodak, in the photographic industry, where they said, we'll tell you where and when these tests are going to happen so we can stop ruining your film. They didn't, however, tell people like dairy farmers and literally everyone else. who now has little bits of radiation inside of them. But eventually it came out, but not until decades later. But Kodak knew about it first. And because they have so many scientists and so much R&D,

like they were the ones who knew that, you know, we were nuking ourselves just a little bit way before everyone else. Yeah. That's crazy. And they didn't think to like, I don't know, leak it out to the media. I don't know. I mean. Well, that's one of the things that, you know, when even now, like even a colleague has long, like a little bit of maybe not even a decade ago, when some of these documents became public and some of the people started finding them.

That's the question a lot of people have been asking is like, why, why didn't, you know, we know about this? Yeah. Yeah. It's crazy. Yeah. So all those cows that were ruining film, they kickstarted, the R&D department. that would eventually make a pretty wild discovery. So I thought that was pretty excited about it when he told me about it.

I asked if I could have one of the little nubs of gelatin, and they said no. So I didn't have one. But yeah. So if you're going to, if you're planning on being near a nuclear explosion, don't bring your film with you. So that's the kind of really practical, useful everyday information I bring to this podcast. I will never think about cows the same. I love cows.

My freshman year dorm room, like I went to like an ag school, agricultural school, and it was right across the street from the cow facility. Oh. It smelled really bad, but they're cute. Yeah, they smell bad, but they're adorable. Yeah. And they're useful and moderately depending on your thoughts on it, delicious, which also is a funny way to say that film is not vegan. So if you're a vegan, shooting photographic film, not something you can do. All right. We're going to take a quick break, but then we'll be back with more facts.

Okay, we're back. And Claire, you have something about sword swallowing and also health and medicine. So please, I can't wait any longer. Yes, I do. That is very accurate, Rachel. All right. So for anyone who's ever had gastrointestinal issues, you might have had an endoscopy, which if you don't know, your stomach has never hurt you. ever before. And endoscopy is when a doctor passes this flexible tube down your throat and into your stomach and small intestine where they can see the inner lining of those organs and see if there's inflammation or ulcers caused by various diseases. Super fun. Now, I've definitely had a few of these endoscopies in my life and I've always wondered how they invented this bizarre, though very useful device. So I was always like sitting there in like the holding room

I was like, who would ever invent something that you'd have to shove down your throat? Like, who would just sit there and be like, this is something to invent? So, luckily for you all this week, I had a lot of insomnia for whatever reason, nothing going on in America. I had the time, or the time was placed upon me. And it turned out that it happens to be an amazing weirdest thing, fact. So you are welcome. So the endoscope takes us all the way back to the 1800s and this German physician named Adolf Kozmal. And he was a very, very prominent and well-known physician of his time.

And he seemed to be extremely interested in research and the advancement of medicine and didn't really limit himself to one area of the body. So for us, it would be like we were like general news reporters. We like it all. For example, he was the first to describe dyslexia. which he called word blindness. And he also studied heart rate and blood pressure and how that shifts as we move and sleep and exercise. And he was also fascinated.

These are like all the problems I have with me. Yes, the same. That's exactly what I was thinking. I was like, wow, this guy could solve all of my problems, perhaps. Yeah, wow. Yeah, yes, I love that. So he also had this fascination with visualizing the inside of the body. Now, maybe, I don't know if I have that fascination,

but anyway, he constructed the first, Now I'm going to mess this up, but ophthalmoscope. It's like that device that eye doctors use to look at the inside of the eye, but he really struggled with this device. So he struggled with finding the proper amount of targeted light. The device didn't work properly. He noted that when he reflected on the device years later, he said it was the best optimal scope at the time.

Its only drawback was that it didn't work. Now, I don't know what the FDA would say to that today, but they would probably say no. So despite this failure, he was inspired then to look at other areas of the body. He was like, all right, well, if the eye didn't work, what else do we got? And he knew a lot of research had been done a few years prior to that on the first endoscopic device that looked at urethral and bladder diseases, and that seemed to sort of inspire him. So he knew, though, that traversing the esophagus, would be a lot harder than investigating and navigating the urethra.

So he thought, well, who is really good at getting stuff down their throats without dying? Professional sword swallowers. That's who. So that's exactly what he did. He hired this really prominent and famous professional sword swallower. Now, I couldn't get the name of him, but I'm assuming it's a guy. Maybe it was a woman. I don't know.

but there are multiple accounts of this in various medical journals, but no one actually named the professional sword swallower. So that is indeed a shame. If you're going to use professional sword swallowers to figure out the endoscopy device, like I really don't want to know who they hired to figure out the urethra camera solution. I'm not sure what kind of professional you figure out for that. That's an excellent point, Stan. So, yeah, so he hires the this professional sword swallower and he studies his technique. He's like, swallow some swords for me, let me observe. And he learned many things. Specifically, he noted that this sword swallower was able to relax the crecoferengias and straighten their esophagus. So the cricoferengias,

which I'm not going to say anymore, because it's also known as the upper esophageal sphincter, and it's this semicircular muscle that's located in the neck, and its main job is to prevent food and liquid from coming back up. So if you've ever had acid reflux, yours just doesn't work as great as the general population. Dang. Yeah, exactly. Rude. So it relaxes when it shouldn't, and stuff comes back up, very uncomfortable.

But he noticed that this guy or woman, I don't know, was able to relax that muscle and get the sword down and then straighten their esophagus at a certain angle such that the sword doesn't perforate the very delicate inner lining of the esophagus, because if that does happen, you bleed out and risk death. Not fun. So with the inspiration from this sword swallower, he created a about foot and a half-and-a-half-long and half-an-inch-wide rigid. I emphasize, device with an external gasoline lamp light source. Can't see how that would pass any inspections these days. And using his sword swallor as his test subject,

he was able to visualize the esophagus and fun disk, which is the upper part of the stomach. And he was so pleased with himself that this device worked, it didn't go the way of the eye scope, that he went on to demonstrate his new device with his sword-swallowing coworker at the Society of Naturalists in Freiburg, and the Swarthaler was successfully able to introduce the device

while sitting upright in front of an audience of scientists, and everyone was very amazed. However, according to a research paper, the device was limited because the light source, the gasoline lamp light source, which also used reflected mirrors to visualize the stomach and the esophagus, was really, really inadequate. And according to this research paper,

he noted that there were quote unquote copious secretions, which I believe is just food and liquid sitting in the stomach. And nowadays they tell you to not eat for, I believe it's like eight hours or 12 or 24 or something like that. I haven't had an endoscopy in a little bit, actually. So as such, all of these issues with the light and the secretions, he ended up actually never publishing a case report and just kind of dropped the idea altogether. and then a couple of years later, a bunch of other researchers kind of picked up on his idea and created what is now the modern gastroscope. But their biggest shift was taking it away from being rigid and making it be flexible, which I think was a very key aspect because you no longer need this sword swallower to study his technique and tell you how to get a rigid device down your throat without perforating. dying. It's better, but it's also a little disappointing. Like, imagine if you were getting ready

for the, like, procedure and the doctor's like, nurse, the sword, and then he could, like, brandish it, like a magician before he shoves it down your mouth. Yeah, yeah, totally. I am with you. And then, Orrith, they had to, like, watch a video. Now you'll watch this instructional video on how to swallow a sword before we... Yeah. Yeah. So, I don't know, he was still pretty visionary for his time, I will give him credit. And he also described a method of what's called balloon dilation for like opening up strictures and obstructions in the gastrointestinal tract. And that at the time, I found this very interesting. He thought it could be a really great way to fix these obstructions and fix these strictures. However, he was afraid of how it would be viewed. So he wrote quote unquote,

whether perhaps bolder species of a distant future will attempt, in such cases through gastrotomy, creation of gastric fistula and dilation of the stricture with a knife or probe to achieve radical success. Who dares today to decide this question? One must fear being softly or loudly ridiculed for just posing it. But nowadays, it's the standard go-to treatment as a way to avoid surgery for people who have these really bad strictures either from really bad acid reflux disease or inflammatory bowel diseases as well. So in my head, he's a visionary, but, you know, there weren't that many people studying how to look at your intestines these days. So it's not like he had competition. I'm looking forward to the next Apple Watch having a version of this.

When my stomach's upset, see what's going on down there. Yeah, I love that. Oh, my goodness. Let's pitch this to Apple and make it happen. My endoscopy was one of my very first serious medical procedures. And the very last thing I remember was the doctor going, give him however many CCs of whatever medicine is that makes you go unconscious. And the nurse going really that much and then everything going black. Oh my goodness.

Yeah, me as well. I just remember trying to like, I was like everyone else falls asleep from Anast. anesthesia, but I'm going to be the one to fight it and stay awake. And then I fell asleep. All right. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with one more fact. Okay, we're back. And I am here to talk about the Kentucky meat shower. So gather around y'all. So according to several news reports, including one in the New York Times, at around 11 a.m. on March 3rd, 18, 76. One, Mrs. Crouch, we don't know her first name because she was a woman, so we just know she was married to Alan Crouch, but I'm sure she was a lovely woman. She was sitting on her porch on the family farm in Bath County, Kentucky, just minding her own business, apparently making some soap. And then meat started to rain down from the heavens. Meat, M-E-A-T, animal flesh from the sky. So yeah, we're going to talk about that. That's crazy. I'm scared to know.

I'm just scared. So she claimed it had the look of fresh and grisly beef with pieces from two by two inches that she described as being snowflake-like, with pieces as large as four-by-four inches. So that's, you know, like slab territory that's, I guess, steak. And they were just falling from the sky. And according to the New York Times, several extremely trustworthy sources confirmed that meat particles were scattered around the four. farm the next day and tasted them. And I would just like to stop here and say, please do not ever eat mysterious sky meat. Wait, like these were cooked pieces of meat that they were just like, oh yeah, free steak. I believe they were raw. Oh, goodness. That's not, I, yeah, no, I'm pretty

positive they were raw. But yeah, they just ate them because they were they were real men. They were not afraid. And they decided it was either lamb, venison, or. or bear. And there's actually, fun fact, an alleged sample of said Sky Meat at the Arthur Bird Cabinet of Curiosity at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky. And in 2007, an art history professor named Kurt Goad actually had it analyzed four flavor compounds and then had custom jelly beans made to mimic its taste so that he could give them to people and get their gut reaction on what they thought it tasted like.

From what I can tell, the general consensus was just that it tasted real bad, which is perhaps not surprising for a mysterious meat sample that had been in a jar since 1876. That's like a nightmarish version of Bertie Bot's Every Flavored Beans, where the vomit is actually real vomit, dehydrated. Oh, God. But yeah, art is wonderful. I love the idea of this project, but it did not really tell us anything except that that very old meat was very nasty.

So, okay, there are two separate questions to address here. Did meat really fall from the sky in Bath County on that day? And, you know, where did it come from? If so. And the second question is, why do random foreign bodies sometimes rain down from the heavens? Because they certainly do. Frogs, fish, golf balls. Seriously, all of these have happened multiple times.

So we'll start with the first question. what happened in Bath, Kentucky in 1876, with the meat shower. So a couple of contemporary scientists did examine samples from the Kentucky meat shower. And one analysis suggested that the substance was Nostok, which is actually a sort of cyanobacteria, so not meat. And this theory was basically that like this cyanobacteria can appear to rain from the sky because it kind of sprigestion. up into a jelly-like substance when rain falls on it. And the scientist behind this theory was just really adamant that if you ate it, not knowing what it was, you might think it was meat, but others were kind of skeptical of that.

The other analysis, which was confirmed by a Dr. JWS Arnold and a Dr. A. Mead Edwards, suggested that the sample might be lung tissue from either a horse or a huge. human baby. Because apparently they could not tell the difference between the two. That was just the state of science at that time. Old time of science, everybody. Yeah. And also like no one followed up on the disturbing implications of it being from a human baby.

So that's... How long tissue does a human baby have? Well, you know, more than rained down on Kentucky that day. So we're talking multiple babies in this scenario. No. Call it. Yeah, and the cyanobacteria theory really didn't hold up because apparently it was not raining water the day that it rained meat. So you wouldn't have had that reaction where the water splashes and these random clumps of jelly seem to appear.

And further samples of the meat allegedly said they took on decidedly meaty forms like cartilage, fat, muscle. there was a whole assortment of viscera in there. You know, of course, we did not have DNA analysis in 1876, so no one was able to definitively say, oh, this is from a cow, this is from a horse. But they were like, these are body parts. So we did know that much. So the best theory at the time, and arguably still the best theory, is that some vultures actually overhead just vomited en masse,

like a bunch of vultures upchucked on Mrs. Crouch. So we know that vultures are known to vomit when they need to like jettison some weight to fly away quickly. I couldn't find anything about vultures vomiting while they're already in the air, which seems like what would have had to happen. but it is at least plausible that we know vultures vomit in theory, and they are birds that carry a lot of meat with them in the sky. Some people also suspected that it may have been vultures who ate meat that had been poisoned

with strickenine, which some farmers were doing at the time to deter coyotes. So it could be that a bunch of vultures took off and then all got food poisoning, basically, and ejected their meals again on Mrs. Crouch. And then... You know there was somebody there with her who was like, oh, the vultures vomited on you. That's good luck. Also, those guys who wanted to taste the meat ate vulture vomit, probably.

But strychnine in it with poison. Actually poison in it. That's not even the worst part. I guess it depends on who you ask, what the worst part of eating vulture vomit that has stricinine in. nine in it is maybe depends on how much striccanine is in it. But really just in general, like not an activity I would recommend. So again, if mysterious meat falls from the sky, do not partake, friends. Yeah, I mean, they always say don't eat food that's fallen to the

floor, but it also pertains to coming from the sky. Okay. So of course, an even simpler explanation for this is that it was all a hoax. America loves its hoaxes. And just because some people got the New York Times to write about it doesn't mean it really happened. Just because there were meat samples doesn't mean that meat really fell from the sky. But that doesn't mean we've never seen bizarre objects or even animals, sometimes living ones, rain from the sky. So I'm going to talk a little bit about that. So just to just to review there is no general consensus that vultures is only a theory. The vultures is only a theory. We will never know. I mean, I there is just truly not enough documentation one way or the other, you know, unless someone uncovers a letter one day that

Mrs. Crouch wrote about this fantastic hoax she was going to pull on the coastal elites at the New York times. We will never know. As far as I'm going to tell this story to people from now on, it was a vulture vomit party because that's really the vulture sounds really plausible. Yeah. Yeah. It's all like it totally could have happened. And then you also have to think about the fact that like, you know, there is a, when it comes to news stories being reported from, you know, hundreds of miles away in the 1800s, there's a real spectrum of truth. like maybe it was really truly just like one vulture vomited meat and by the time the story got

to the New York Times it was like there was meat all over their farm no one saw a single speck of anything in the sky that these could have come from you know so everyone tried it yeah yeah my favorite is there's definitely um I I saw one person quoting the guy who had tried it and said it was bear meat and I couldn't find a source for it. So I'm not positive that this is real. But he was just like, I know from bears. And let me tell you, this for sure is bear meat or I'm not Jenkins McJenkinson or whatever his day was. Like I said, it's also possible that the actual details of this story were a lot less fantastic or that it didn't happen at all.

but the vulture theory is at least like fairly plausible. But yeah, there are a lot of reasons why stuff can fall from the sky that is not rain or snow or hail. And I'm going to talk about a few examples of that. So one really funny one is that in 1969, according to the St. Petersburg Times, dozens of golf balls fell from the sky in Putagorda, which I think is really funny because we talk about golf ball-sized hail a lot. but in Florida there were actual golf balls. And this was probably due to a water spout, which is a column of rotating cloud-filled wind. So a water spout descends from a cumulus cloud to a body of water like an ocean or a lake.

And they're basically just like small, weak tornadoes of water. And so if one happened on like a golf course pond where a lot of people had, you know, hit balls and not retrieved them, It could conceivably, along with the water, pick up some golf balls into the clouds. And so no scientist has ever directly observed this process I'm about to explain, but it is like pretty generally accepted as being plausible and being the mechanism behind some of these weird events with things falling from the sky. But it's basically like if an object is small enough to get picked up by a water spout, then it can spend some time like with.

around up in the clouds. And once the wind speed decreases enough that there isn't enough force keeping them aloft, they'll just fall back down wherever they happen to be. And people will be like, what the fuck balls? And that's actually, that can explain why it's pretty common for water dwelling critters, like small fish and frogs, to rain from the sky. because they are picked up as there's a water spout over their house, which is pretty rude, and then they just get dropped somewhere over land.

And that can also explain possibly why so many instances of this are like limited to one kind of animal. Like you'll see news reports of, you know, golf balls falling from the sky or frogs falling from the sky. But it's much less common to be like random marine creatures of sorts and various kinds falling from the sky. And that actually kind of makes sense. I saw one researcher pointing out that, you know, you would expect objects of similar size and weight to be deposited together because the winds losing its energy, so heavier stuff would fall first and that smaller objects would stay aloft for longer. In 2006, the British Weather Service actually claimed that spots on England's coast might be like the most likely places to see this phenomenon because of the cold

North Sea air colliding with the warmer landmass and encouraging lots of storms and tornadoes. And I didn't really see anyone else confirming that. We don't really know enough about this phenomenon to make a claim like that. But they did point out that in theory, climate change should increase these strange occurrences because they're increasing the kind of atmospheric disturbances that lead to tornadoes and waterspouts. So that's just a fun. apocalypse thing for us. So yes, we've seen... Golf balls are expensive. So really, this seems like a win

if you live in the right spot. They're very spicy. Yeah, you don't have to go like dredging them up out of the water traps or whatever. It does make sense, though, because like the dimples on a golf ball are literally designed to help it get up in the air, like in large parts. So like it kind of makes sense that if there was something that's easy to get up in the air that doesn't seem like it should be there, a golf ball is probably it. Yeah, that's a great point. And so yeah, when you look at look at the, there's actually like an animal rain list on Wikipedia because there are so many claims of things like this happening. And you see frogs, worms, random assortments of marine animals, spiders, though that's actually due to a different effect. Spiders do this thing called

ballooning where it's really cute. They actually just kind of like put out a little bit of web and like catch the wind and fly off to seek their fortune. And every once in a while, a bunch of spiders will do this at once. It's happening all the time. I actually just ran into a couple dozen of them and had to flick a bunch of tiny spiders out of my face the other day. They don't look. They're like really tiny when they do this. They're like little white little fluff balls. But so it's not as horrifying as like, you know, a giant, giant. No, it's horrifying. It's horrifying. But every once in a while, it will just happen that like millions of spiders are doing this at once. And that's when you'll see news stories like spiders raiding down across Australia.

So spiders do not get caught in water spouts because they would just like die. And you probably wouldn't notice that there were spiders raiding from the sky. They probably wouldn't have held up very well structurally. But yeah, in 2015, a bunch of lampraise, which are really scary looking boneless fish with tons of menacing little teeth, They definitely looked the most like a horror movie creature of any fish, in my opinion. They started falling from the sky in Alaska, and some of them were alive. And the same thing had happened previously in Ireland. And in that case, the most likely explanation is actually that gulls are picking up the lampraise

and then just dropping them when they get too wiggly. And I found one report of a woman who was supposedly hit in the face by a catfish that fall from the sky in Philadelphia. And that was also probably a bird. Water spouts will drop like a mass of small animals that will probably be dead by that time. If you're getting like one off still living creatures or large fish, it was probably a bird that just wanted to piss you off. The catfish is the new version of the Philadelphia snowball, which used to be a snowball with a

D battery inside of it, but now it's just a catfish flying through the air. Just a whole catfish. Also, like, as somebody from very close to Philadelphia, I like, I wouldn't assume that that wasn't somebody just like throwing a catfish up into the air so that it would hit somebody in the face. I don't know. We have fun there. But yeah, fish are by far the most common thing that rains out of the sky.

You see reports on this pretty much every year. And in fact, and this is the end of my tale, in the small Hondurian town of Euros, fish rain is allegedly such a reliable occurrence that they have a festival for it every year, though the date varies. But they celebrate every year when the first fish rain of the season occurs. So, yeah, that's all I have to say about animals falling from this guy. Got to put that festival on the old post-COVID travel calendar. Yeah, those fish are often dead.

I read one theory that they might actually. be like subterranean fish that wiggle up. But there hasn't been a lot of like hard research. We just know that in this town, they are adamant that it rains fish at least once every year. Honestly, this is making me feel like I need to look up more when I walk. Yeah. No, the catfish story in Philadelphia, like catfish are big. And getting hit in the face with a catfish that a seagull rejected sounds really gross and painful. So yeah, I would also recommend keeping an eye out for things falling down from this guy. All right, guys, what was the weirdest thing we learned this week? I'm going to have to go with stands.

It was a fantastic week, but that one just had so much like government intrigue. Same. I 100% agree. I was enthralled. I'll take the win, but I still, I think I vote for meat, rain just to show how gross it is. Thank you. The dudes eating it. Deserve the respect of the win?

The late 1800s was a wacky time, as we so often say, on the weirdest thing I learn this week. The weirdest thing I learned this week is a popular science podcast. We're available on all major podcast platforms. So subscribe wherever you're listening now. And if you like what you hear, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. It helps other weirdos find the show. For more information on the stories you heard in this episode, come find us at popsye.com slash weird. You can buy our merch, including Weirdest Thing t-shirts, tote bags, and mugs at

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