CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 2 Chapter One IT’S RAINING FROGS AND FISH 3 Chapter Two BIG BANG IN SIBERIA 9 Chapter Three WALKING ON FIRE 15 Chapter Four THE MYSTERIOUS TREASURE OF OAK ISLAND 21 Chapter Five GHOST SHIP 29 Chapter Six THE CRYSTAL SKULL 35 Chapter Seven STRANGE BOOMS 41 Chapter Eight PHOTOGRAPHING THE INVISIBLE 46 Chapter Nine LIGHTS IN THE NIGHT 52
INTRODUCTION Everybody enjoys a mystery The stranger the mystery the more we enjoy it And our enjoyment is even greater when we know that the mystery really happened This book is about strange mysteries that are true days that frogs and fish rained down from the skies a buried treasure whose location is known but that has never been recovered the strange disappearance of an entire ship’s crew what seems to be an atomic explosion that occurred forty years before the invention of the atom bomb and others We know that these things happened but we still don’t know the reason why But there are many strange things that occur in the world around us Some of the mysteries in this book are so strange as to baffle the imagination Some of them may never be solved 2
CHAPTER ONE IT’S RAINING FROGS AND FISH When it’s raining heavily some people say that it’s pouring cats and dogs Of course that’s only an expression Cats and dogs really don’t rain down from the sky Although there may be poodles in the street But don’t be too sure that it never rains animals Here is a quote from the July 12 1873 issue of the magazine Scientific American A shower of frogs which darkened the air and covered the ground for a long distance is the reported result of a recent rainstorm at Kansas City Mo And this is by no means the only reported observation of animal showers Here is a report from an 1841 issue of an English magazine called The Athenaeum During a heavy thunderstorm the rain poured down in torrents mixed with half-melted ice and incredible as it may appear hundreds of small fishes and frogs in great abundance descended with the torrents of rain The fish 3
were from half an inch to two inches one to five centimeters long Many were picked up alive The frogs jumped away as fast as they could but the bulk of them were killed by the fall on the hard pavement The idea of living things raining down from the sky is difficult to believe But from ancient times up to the present there have been reports of showers of one kind or another of animals or plants In olden times these living showers were thought to be supernatural People believed in magic and witches They believed in good and evil omens People must have been frightened or pleased depending upon what rained down But whatever animal or plant rained down it certainly seemed to be a miracle There are still many stories of strange animal showers The reports are often printed in magazines or newspapers of the time Let’s look at some of these reports and then see if they can be explained in any scientific way Here is a report from Scientific American February 21 1891 In some parts of Randolph County Virginia this winter the crust of the snow has been covered two or three times with worms A square foot thirty by thirty centimeters of snow can scarcely be found some days without a dozen of these worms on it Another report from Scientific American in 1877 tells about a rain of snakes in Memphis Tennessee Thousands of little reptiles ranging from a foot to eighteen inches thirty to forty 4 STRANGE MYSTERIES FROM AROUND THE WORLD
