Tuesday, May 17, 2005

May is a month in which falls of various strange kinds have occurred throughout history, according to the esteemed Charles Fort. Here is a list of them, taken from The Book of the Damned in The Complete Books of Charles Fort, Dover, 1974.


  • May 1652 - fall of viscous mass with a luminous meteorite between Siena and Rome
  • May 1830 - fall of red ("vegetable") matter in rain, Siena, Italy
  • May 1858 - fall of great numbers of beetle larvae, "inanimate as if with cold," Mortagne, France
  • April 30, May 1 & May 2, [1856?] - fall of reddish to yellowish substance, carbonized, "spread the odor of charred animal matter", France and Spain
  • May 1, 1863 - fall of red meal mixed with fine sand, Perpignan
  • May 3, 1877 - fall of masses of ice "large as a man's hand, killing thousands of sheep," Texas
  • May 3, 1884 - black rain at Crowle, England, near Worcester, accompanied by earthquakes
  • May 8, 1802 - fall, during a storm, of a "mass of ice 3' long, 3' wide, and more than 2' thick", Hungary
  • May 11, 1894 - fall of a small piece of alabaster, Vicksburg, Miss.; 8 miles away in Bovina, Miss., fall of a gopher turtle, both in a hailstorm
  • May 12, 1811 - fall of lumps of ice, a foot in circumference, Derbyshire, England
  • May 14, 1849 - ink-colored rain, fetid odor and "very disagreeable taste", Ireland
  • May 14, 1864 - fall of "twenty masses, some of them as large as a human head, of a substance that 'resembled a dull-colored earthy lignite'", Montauban, France
  • May 16, 1833 - fall of dead and dry fish, Futtepoor, India
  • May 16 or 17, 1834 - fall of dead, dry fish (or fish-shaped objects), Allahabad, India
  • May 18, 1883 - fall of 'a number of stones of peculiar formation and shapes, unknown in this neighborhood' in a tornado, Hillsboro, Ill.
  • May 22, 1884 - fall of flinty stones, Bismarck, [North] Dakota
  • May 27, 1884 - peculiar stone "'very like the fourth part of a large Stilton cheese'" found near a fall of a meteorite

I think that pretty well covers the subject for the month of May.

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