Between July 25 and September 23, 2001, residents of Kerala, India’s southernmost state, were treated to an unusual sight: blood-coloured rain. Although most accounts described the rain as being a bright red that looked like blood, several individuals also reported seeing green, black, and even yellow rain. Witnesses reportedly described tremendous thunderclaps and flashes of lightning following the early occurrences of colourful rain. Following the arrival of the strange rain, several trees lost their leaves, which became grey and seemed to be burnt.
Whether any of these stories were true or not, the colourful rain was a scientific wonder, and scientists, as is their habit, set out to investigate it. It was discovered early on that each millilitre of rain included about 9 million crimson particles. While the majority of the particles were red, some were coloured green, blue-grey, and yellow, which may corroborate the accounts of others who experienced other coloured showers. The Centre for Earth Science Studies in Kerala discovered that the rain contained significant quantities of nickel, manganese, titanium, chromium, and copper, as well as a neutral ph. The red particles themselves were found to be mostly made up of carbon and oxygen, with minor quantities of iron and silicon.
This led the Centre to believe that an exploding meteor was the probable source of the colourful rain; nevertheless, an additional investigation revealed that the particles carried spores. While there was a lot of buzz about some researchers speculating that the spores could have come from another planet, given initial reports of no DNA found and some researchers still sticking to the “exploding meteor” theory, the Tropical Botanical Garden and Research Institute eventually discovered that the particles were spores of “a lichen-forming alga belonging to the genus Trentepohlia” that had been accidentally released.
They theorised that torrential rains in the days leading up to the events caused extensive lichen development, increasing the number of spores in the air. While this was their best estimate, they believed it was improbable that the lichens would release enough spores at the same time to account for the colourful rain. They were also perplexed as to how the spores could have ascended so high in the sky when no nearby recent weather event appeared to have produced such a surge.
Some of the riddles may have been answered around a decade and a half after the incident. In 2013, scientists who were still investigating the incident discovered not only the missing DNA but also that the algae species was Trentepohlia annulata, which was not native to India, explaining why no local weather phenomenon at the time could explain how the spores got so high in the atmosphere. The researchers concluded that the spores arrived in the United States through Austrian clouds. Strange showers are, of course, unheard of throughout history. As we’ve previously mentioned, in 1876, Kentucky saw a Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs-style downpour, with pieces of meat raining from the sky.
A weird, milky rain occurred over portions of Idaho, Oregon, and Washington in early 2015. It was later discovered that it was caused by a dust storm in southern Oregon, where the dust had a “large quantity of saline, comparable to the makeup of milk.” “The homes and the roads have been full of them,” Greek philosopher Heraclides Lembus (2nd century BCE) wrote of a downpour that featured so many frogs dropping from the sky that “the houses and the roads have been full of them.” While you may believe this couldn’t have occurred, a tiny village in Serbia saw a shower of non-native frogs in 2005, with some of them surviving.
The most common explanation for why frogs (or fish, snakes, stones, meat, or maggots) fall from the sky is that they are sucked up by waterspouts or tornadoes and then dropped someplace else. While the theory of tiny animal rain has yet to be proved, it is very uncommon for small-animal sized items to be scooped up by tornadoes and then travel up to 200 miles before being dumped back onto solid ground. It’s also worth noting that extremely light objects, such as large dust particles, have been documented travelling thousands of miles and falling in rain, including yellow dust from the Gobi Desert falling on Washington state in 1998 (5600 miles or 9000 km) and Saharan dust crossing the Atlantic Ocean.
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