Fish fell from the sky in Texas

East Texas closed out 2021 with fish falling from the sky

Image by Jan Helebrant from Pixabay

Suddenly Sharknado doesn’t seem so implausible.

It may sound like something out of the end of days from the bible, but animal rain is an actual meteorological event. It’s even described in an article by the Library of Congress.

It happened most recently in Texarkana, Texas when fish were caught up in a waterspout and rained back down onto the ground.

According to a Facebook post on December 29, 2021, from the City of Texarkana,

“2021 is pulling out all the tricks… including raining fish in Texarkana today. And no, this isn’t a joke.
“Animal rain is a phenomenon that occurs when small water animals like frogs, crabs, and small fish are swept up in waterspouts or drafts that occur on the surface of the earth. They are then rained down at the same time as the rain.
“While it’s uncommon, it happens, as evidenced in several places in Texarkana today. So, show us your fishy pics! And please, for the sake of everyone, let’s tiptoe into 2022 as quietly as possible.”

Many residents chimed in, posting in the comments their own images of the fish they found hitting the ground.

It was fish in Texarkana, but any small flightless creature can get caught up in a waterspout and deposited elsewhere with the raindrops, much to the surprise of innocent bystanders. According to an article from the National Geographic, reports of the skies raining “bats, fish, snakes, birds, frogs, and jellies stretch back for centuries.

The Library of Congress detailed an event when it rained frogs in Kansas in 1873, which Scientific American determined must have come from a tornado.

An even weirder event occurred in Iowa in 1882 when frogs were swept up by the wind, frozen into hail in the sky, and then rained back down to earth.

It’s not only America that has found its skies filled with small animals. The Library of Congress noted that in a small Serbian town in 2005, reportedly thousands of frogs fell from the sky one day.

And in Australia in 2010, hundreds of spangled perch rained down in a small town. Local Christine Balmer reported, “These fish fell in their hundreds and hundreds all over the place. The locals were running around everywhere to pick them up.”

So if one day you look up to the sky to find fish or frozen frog hail pelting down at you from above, don’t think the seven seals have opened to end the world just yet. You are most likely witnessing a rare, but true, weather phenomenon.

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