The fact that some of them appeared to be of fiery comets, stars and spiders spinning webs only increased his eagerness to publish his findings. By the time he discovered that he had been hoaxed, it was too late – and he spent the rest of his life (and fortune) buying up the volumes in which he had printed his revolutionary conclusions.
A few months ago I received a letter and photograph from Mr William W. Jenna of Bel Air, Maryland, containing information about an item which one might suspect of having a similar origin. Note that it was found on the high plateau near Nazca – where, as we have seen, some surprisingly ingenious technology once flourished!
About ten years ago, my wife and I purchased a piece of pre-Columbian pottery from a collector who had unearthed it in a dig in Peru in the late 1950s. The piece was a product of the Vicus culture, which flourished in Peru between the first and fifth century A.D. Because of the location in which the piece was found, the high plateau near Nazca, it was dated by museum experts at around A.D. 200; at least 1,500 years before the dawn of the industrial revolution. Yet it would appear to be an exact representation of a modern steamroller, complete with a front ‘smoke-stack’ and, even more startling, a cab with a driver inside, tire-treads, and wheel spokes. All this from a culture which, as far as we know, did not even make use of the wheel. Everything was carried or dragged from place to place, and it was not until the Spanish explorers conquered the area that wheeled vehicles (carts, etc.) were introduced.
Up to this point, only a handful of people have seen the piece, primarily museum curators, who, like ourselves, were both puzzled and fascinated by the piece. The thing is in mint condition, having fortunately been perfectly preserved by the extremely arid conditions of the high plateau; all the museum people agreed that it was a superb example of the Vicus double-vessel work, and all placed the date between A.D. 100 and 300.
The resemblance to a modern (well, 1930-ish) steamroller is certainly striking. But need it be more than coincidence? I’m prepared to admit that the makers of the Nazca lines had hot-air balloons, as has been ingeniously argued. But not steam engines.
The origin – and method of manufacture – of the stone ‘Giant Balls’ of Costa Rica (see Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World, Chapter 3) is still an archaeological enigma. Surprisingly, it turns out that nature can make almost perfect spheres of stone. Hundreds of specimens of up to 11 ft (3 m) in diameter have been found in Mexico. They appear to be of volcanic origin, and were formed some forty million years ago when a torrent of incandescent ash cooled and crystallized. Although many of these natural spheres are almost geometrically perfect, they lack the finish of the man-made ones – though James Randi has suggested that they may have inspired their production. And, one might add, greatly assisted it: any sensible sculptor starts with a piece of rock as near as possible to the shape he’s aiming at.
I am indebted to my old friend Colin Ross for information about much smaller spheres (the ‘Moeraki Boulders’) which occur in New Zealand. These are concretions, i.e. masses that have ‘grown’ from the surrounding rock by chemical precipitation over immense periods of time. Some are up to 6 ft (2 m) in diameter, and range from perfect spheres to ‘highly irregular and fantastic shapes’.
Natural spheres can also be produced when rocks are trapped in holes on the beds of rivers, and strong currents continually turn them over and over. I am grateful to Hubert Siemerling for this information; he tells me that farmers in the Alps used this method to make stone cannon-balls, so the process must be fairly swift.
Never underrate Mother Nature. In this case, she has come up with several solutions to a problem which at first sight seems insoluble.
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3 – Out of the Blue
Frogs that Fly and Fish that Rain
In Marksville, Louisiana, they still remember the day J. Numa Damiens burst into the offices of the local paper brandishing a fish. The date was 23 October 1947. J. Numa had telephoned the office a few minutes before, and was incensed at the scepticism shown by the hard-bitten smalltown journalists on the Weekly News to his extraordinary tale.
The fish, he claimed, had fallen from the sky. It was just one of hundreds which had rained down from out of the blue. They were all over Main Street, in the yard of the director of the Marksville Bank, in Mrs J.W. Joffrion’s property next door, on rooftops everywhere. Three of the town’s most eminent citizens had even been struck by cascading fish as they walked to work. The morning rush-hour had been thrown into chaos: cars and trucks were skidding on a carpet of slithery scales.
The journalists heard their visitor out as he waved the fish in front of their faces, crying, ‘Here’s one of ’em; take a look and then see if you think I’m talking through my hat.’ It certainly sounded very strange, but surely fish couldn’t really have rained from the sky. Not on peaceful little Marksville, Louisiana. With their deadline upon them, and no time to check the story, the journalists wrote a rather flippant account of J. Numa Damiens’ visit for that week’s edition, and concluded it with this folksy appeal to their readers: ‘Please, Sister and Brother, won’t you come to our rescue and tell us what’s ailing folks who say fish are raining from heaven on a clear sunshiny day!’
It turned out that the paper had been wrong to scoff. By the time it hit the news-stands, eyewitnesses to the fish-fall had come forward with their own amazing tales to tell. Thirty years later, many of them could vividly recall what happened.
Said Anthony Roy Jnr: ‘As I left the house to go to school that morning, I went through the back of the house, and as I got near the garage I heard something fall on the tin roof of the garage and simultaneously something hit me on my head and on my shoulders, and when I looked down I saw they were fish.’
Mrs Eddie Gremillion was ill at the time: ‘I was in bed, not feeling good, and I didn’t get up early. But my maid came early and she was out in the yard. She ran in excited like anything, and she’s a black maid but that day she was white with excitement, and she came and she told me, “Miss Lola, Miss Lola,” she said, “it’s raining fishes. It’s raining fishes.”‘
Mrs Elmire Roy’s maid also panicked: ‘When the fish fell on the tin roof, my maid, whose name was Viola, ran outside with me, and she was so upset, and she kept saying, “Lord, Lord, it must be the end of the world.”‘
Sheriff ‘Potch’ Didier was another witness. He was driving through Marksville at the time. ‘I saw the fish fall out of the sky,’ he said. ‘I kept driving. I was very amazed.’ At one house, the yard was ‘just absolutely covered with fish. And just about that time some other people started getting here and everybody was just amazed at the whole thing, and we just couldn’t believe it, believe that the fish had just dropped out of the sky.’
Yet the Marksville fish-fall, astonishing as it was to the citizens of the town, is not unique. All kinds of weird showers have been reported over the centuries, notably of fish, blocks of ice, and frogs. We marvelled at many such mysteries in Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World, but could offer little in the way of satisfactory explanation. However, recent work by researchers studying fresh cases and re-evaluating many from the past has provided a new understanding of how it is that fish and frogs can rain from the sky.
In the past, many experts flatly rejected the claims of eyewitnesses. For example, in 1859 a sawyer called John Lewis from the Aberdare Valley in Wales told this story to the local vicar, the Reverend John Griffith:
On Wednesday, February 9, I was getting out a piece of timber, for the purpose of setting it for the saw, when I was startled by something falling all over me – down my neck, on my head, and on my back. On putting my hand down my neck I was surprised to find they were little fish. By this time I saw the whole ground covered with them. I took off my hat, the brim of which was full of them. They were jumping all about.
Lewis added that the fish had arrived in two showers, about ten minutes apart. He and his workmates gathered some of them up and sent a few to London Zoo, where they were put on display. Although they proved a popular attraction, not everyone was impressed. J.E. Gray of the British Museum told the Zoological Magazine: ‘On reading the evidence it appears to me most probably to be only a practical joke of the mates of John Lewis, who seem to have thrown a pailful of water with the fish in it over him.’ Edward Newman agreed: ‘Dr Gray is without doubt correct in attributing the whole affair to some practical joker.’