Chronicles of the Strange and Mysterious
Page 7
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 p
icture 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.