EVERYDAY STRANGE - Rain of Snakes

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If you read through the Rain of Rice edition of Everyday Strange then you may remember the lengthy (and incomplete) list of organic and inorganic objects that have been observed or reported to have fallen from the skies over the past 300 or so years, one of them being snakes. You may also remember my solution for the Rain of Rice mystery having to do with waterspouts and atmospheric convection. Well, how would that explain a rain of snakes?

THE STORY GOES LIKE THIS

Memphis, TN - At 10:35 in the morning of January 15, 1877 a sudden 15-minute torrential downpour of rain abruptly stopped. After the deluge, people reported seeing masses of snakes lining the streets, in yards and even on the sidewalk. It wasn't just a couple of them that were spotted, or even a few hundred of them, it was thousands of dark brown, almost black snakes splayed about in a two block radius surrounding Vance Street, between Lauderdale and Goslee (Vance and Goslee appear to have been renamed or redeveloped in the ensuing 138 years).

One important feature of the event is that there were no eyewitnesses to the snakes actually falling with the rain. They were there alright, at ground level, but none were found on rooftops, in cisterns or any other elevated areas. And in the Monthly Weather Report it is stated that "Vance Street is comparatively new, has no pavements, gutters merely trenches"

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The snakes were between 12 and 18 inches long. Some of them were all tangled together, while others, according to witness Sgt. McElroy of the U.S. Signal Corps, exhibited bizarre behavior, stating that they didn't move like snakes. They would thrust their heads forward, then draw their rear up in a horseshoe shape, rather than slither and they would raise their bodies up as though seeking support. One witness put a couple of the snakes in a jar and brought them to the Memphis Weekly Public Ledger newspaper and they ran the story about the incident.

THE INVESTIGATION
After the Ledger published their account, the story hit the newswire where it was picked up by the New York Times (see picture above) and the Scientific American Supplement. Scientific American considered a hurricane as a possible explanation for the snakes, but remained puzzled as to where such a large collection of snakes could have been taken from.

Charles Fort rightly points out that a hurricane of such magnitude as capable of scooping up thousands of snakes would likely have deposited other debris such as twigs and leaves. Also, snakes are dormant in January, like other reptiles, their cold-blooded nature leaves them with no source of warmth during the winter months so they usually gather in a burrow or hibernacula until the weather turns again. A typical hibernaculum will have as many as a hundred snakes in it, but to find one with thousands in it is extremely rare.

It should also be noted that Memphis has never experienced a hurricane because it is too far away from sea. A severe derecho with hurricane force winds blasted through Memphis in 2003 and was known by locals as "Hurricane Elvis". Hurricane Elvis left hundreds of thousands of homes without power and killed seven people, dwarfing the 15-minute downpour preposterously. In other words: it wasn't a hurricane.

Well what was it then? Charles Fort believed that the snakes had traveled to earth on warm air currents from outer space. But we can assume that the snakes didn't actually fall from the sky because there were no witnesses to that and the snakes were mostly, if not all alive and uninjured on the ground. So if they didn't come from the sky, can we assume they came up from under the ground?

It's an elegant solution to the problem but snakes don't behave that way. They stay in their hibernaculum until it's time for their snake orgies and summer barbecues. So, what kind of creature does come up from the ground after a hard and heavy rain? (Even a bird would know the answer to this one ...)

CONCLUSIONS

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In the 1980's a local psychologist named Gregory Little took the story to Memphis State University biologists who concluded that it was most likely misidentified horsehair worms behind the mystery, not snakes at all.

It seems that the larvae of horsehair worms are parasitic. They live off of arthropods such as large insects and shellfish. They are free moving in their mature form. When exposed to water mature worms will exit the host and apparently, in this instance, had nowhere else to go but up.

And that's that!

Right?

Not quite. As is often the case when confronted with the mysterious, the university scientist(s) seem to have rushed to an easy conclusion. How can two whole city blocks worth of people misidentify horsehair thin parasitic worms for snakes? It's possible, but you'd figure someone would be able to spot the difference. What's more, horsehair worms don't behave in the ways described by witnesses, if they're to be believed.

So if it wasn't snakes and it wasn't worms, then what was it? Little believed it was leeches taken by a waterspout from a lake of the Mississippi River. It's the same opinion that was taken by the editor of the original Public Ledger article way back in 1877.

SOURCES
Monthly weather report to House of Representatives for 2nd session of the 45th congress, 1877-78
or this alternate link
Unnatural Phenomena: A Guide to the Bizarre Wonders of North America
On This Day in Memphis History
The Complete Books of Charles Fort pgs. 93-4

*Note: Even though two different versions are available online I couldn't find the original Scientific American article from February 10, 1877 in the table of contents or perusing the actual content which led me to believe that either the event was simply mentioned in an article about some other thing or that the version I read through is incomplete. Here it is.

EVERYDAY STRANGE - Rain of Rice in Burma

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THE STORY GOES LIKE THIS
In the January 10, 1952 edition of the London Daily Telegraph it was reported that a rain of rice fell on Mandalay, Burma. People reportedly gathered handfuls in the streets. Tracking down information on this event has led to a brick wall, and what you see above is all I have regarding this event. The Daily Telegraph website does not have that particular edition of their newspaper archived on the web, and that's where the trail goes cold for an armchair detective.

THE INVESTIGATION
Anomalous precipitation is nothing new. Indeed when taken in total, the sheer number of reports of strange rains and bizarre or unexpected objects falling from the sky, both organic and inorganic, shows that the phenomenon may be strange, but is not all that unusual. Stones, balls, seeds, nuts, wheat, fish, frogs, insects, red rain, curiously large ice blocks, even a red hot chain have all been reported to fall from the sky, sometimes on numerous occasions. Charles Fort reported the phenomenon seemingly endlessly and reports go back at least three hundred years and continue in a pretty much unbroken chain up to the present day. There isn't a whole blog post worth of information and occurrences, there is a whole blog's worth, updated regularly.

Some of the strange falls are well-documented and have been at least hypothetically explained. The explanations begin with waterspouts. In the not-entirely-accurate-but-simplest-possible definition a waterspout is like a mini-water tornado, though much weaker. A waterspout is a columnar vortex which more or less connects a body of water to the cloud above it.

Waterspout [image source]

Knowing this, it's easy to understand that a waterspout might have generated over a rice paddy and sucked up some rice, then rained it back down over the city. Again, the above information doesn't give much of a clue as to whereabouts the rice actually fell, it just gives the name of the city, Mandalay. Mandalay is no small place, in 1952 it wasn't the bustling metropolis it is today, but the population exceeded 150,000 and it covers an area of 63 square miles (163 km sq), putting Vancouver (44 sq mi.) to shame. For the sake of argument, let's put the rice fall square into the middle of the city.

According to the FAO, Mandalay is the second largest city and eighth largest producer of rice in Myanmar (formerly Burma). No special thing perhaps, but we see that rice is produced in the area, therefore it doesn't take a huge leap to see that a columnar vortex or water could have sucked rice out of a paddy onto any part of the metropolitan area surrounding it.

But, if we're willing to accept a waterspout as a point of origin, what happened to the rice in mid-air? Did it simply arc like some kind of vacuum rainbow, rise an fall without any resistance whatsoever? Every time I read about a strange fall I've got to ask myself: how can something heavier than air, that doesn't collect naturally in clouds, fall from the sky? How does the heavier than air object hang in the air without falling immediately?

CONLUSIONS

Large hailstones [image source]

The answer is almost certainly convection layers. Basically, the heavier than air object rides the wind. Again, if we accept waterspouts as our means of conveyance for the rice, then it's easy to figure out what happened next. The rice began acting like hail. Indeed, each grain of rice would have been lighter than a hailstone, the phenomenon of "golfball-sized" hailstones is widely known and discussed. When hail forms it wants to fail as it grows heavier, when it doesn't, particles of super-cooled air collect on the hail until the become the size of golfballs or larger when the 110mph winds of the storm can no longer keep them aloft. The reason the winds don't blow the whole accumulation away is where the layering comes into effect as whatever object, be it hail or rice grain is 'squished' back down by warmer winds from above.

As the cloud lumbers on its journey through the sky, the process continues until it can no longer be sustained and a thing like a rain of rice becomes possible.

But, there is no way of knowing if this is even a likely explanation because the details are nonexistent.

What's frustrated about having so little information is that the truth, like the devil, is often in the details. Two simple questions are left unanswered: were the grains of rice still in their husks? and were they coated in ice? These may be the most essential missing details as to figuring out what exactly happened. If they were still in their husks, then it becomes easier to accept a waterspout explanation and if they were coated in ice, then they were mostly likely trapped in a convection layer until they fell.

If the grains were already de-husked, then it's possible that somebody's open store of rice somehow ended up in the sky and that's a whole other bizarre mystery to think on.

Ultimately, a waterspout explanation may not satisfy, even though it's a good, and frankly easy one, because waterspouts usually occur over larger bodies of deep water, not rice paddies. The explanation  can be said to be nearly as extraordinary as the event itself, although waterspouts have been witnessed over ponds and other small bodies of water.

Strange falls happen all the time. You may be witness to one some strange day, but your chances aren't likely. You'd be lucky to witness such an event, and even luckier to be able to explain it satisfactorily.

SOURCES:
The Rough Guide to Unexplained Phenomena [2nd Edition], pg. 60
FAO Corporate Document Repository (see table Producing Zones and Cropping Seasons)

And if you'd like to learn more about waterspouts and atmospheric convection, wikipedia is a good place to start for general knowledge. They usually have loads of relevant links to dig further.
Waterspouts
Atmospheric Convection