In 1947, fish rained from the US skies, leaving the public stunned in disbelief; it almost felt unreal and many rechecked to actually believe what was going on.While this may seem like another excerpt from a sci-fi novel, it is actually real. Weather forecasts often show us how the day would be: sunny, cloudy, or maybe a little rain. But nobody ever expects dinner to fall out of the sky.
The morning it rained fish in Marksville
On the morning of October 23, 1947, a quiet breakfast in Marksville, Louisiana, turned into one of the strangest moments in the town’s history. According to Guinness World Records, biologist Alexander Bajkov and his wife Virginia were eating at a diner when their waitress told them it was raining fish outside. Bajkov wrote about it in the journal Science two years later, recalling that the waitress said “fish were falling from the sky.”Bajkov rushed out to see for himself. He estimated about one fish of upto 9 inches fell per square yard across an area roughly 1,000 feet long and 80 feet wide. All of those belonged to the freshwater species native to the local rivers and bayous, mostly largemouth bass, goggle-eye, sunfish, minnows, and hickory shad.He further described that hundreds of them fell everywhere from the streets to the sidewalks and lawns, and also quoted that the director of the Marksville Bank had also found out that it had rained fish in his yard while cashier J.E. Gremillion was hit on the head by a hickory shad.The fish were “absolutely fresh and fit for human consumption,” and the largest in Bajkov’s collection was a bass about 9¼ inches long, which is close to 24 cm.
So, how did this bizarre phenomenon actually happen
Bajkov believed a waterspout was responsible, which, according to his account, had sucked small fish from the warm, shallow lakes nearby and launched them hundreds of metres into the air. They then came down far enough away that nobody saw the spout itself. The New Orleans weather department had no reports. James Nelson Gowanloch, the chief biologist for the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, had noticed several small tornadoes, or ‘devil dusters,’ the day before it rained fish in Marksville.
Why can’t fish be lifted with water and carried by the whirlwind?
In his 1949 report, as quoted by Guinness, Bajkov defended the idea with a simple question: “Why can’t fish be lifted with water and carried by the whirlwind?”The weather that day makes the story even odder. The Weather Network describes the morning as foggy and calm, without the violent thunderstorms you might expect.Fish rains aren’t unique to Marksville. According to Guinness, ichthyologist E. W. Gudger counted 78 well-documented fish rains in his 1946 review. More recently, officials in Texarkana, Texas, reported fish falling at the end of 2021.His theory might offer a plausible explanation, but the exact reason behind the phenomenon has not been completely proven
