Red rains are more common and easy to attribute to red desert sands being carried aloft then coming down with rain miles away from the desert. However, what could cause blue jelly like spheres? Florist supplies? Toys? Recently it was shown that hailstones form around airborne bacteria. Could these be masses of bacteria? Like many mysterious falls, this may remain a mystery.
The blue spheres are jelly-like but have no smell and are not sticky. Image BBC
Steve Hornsby and one of the spheres that fell in his yard during a storm. Image Inquisitr.
Florists use water-absorbent balls in their displays. Image BBC
The manufacturer of the toy gun range said the balls were not its products. Image BBC
Blue balls theories rage after Dorset storm mystery
30 January 2012 | bbc.uk
A number of theories have been put forward to explain the presence of blue jelly spheres found in a Dorset garden.
Steve Hornsby from Bournemouth reported the 3cm diameter balls came raining down last Thursday during a hailstorm.
Theories include the balls being crystals used in floral displays or ammunition for a toy gun.
But Mr Hornsby remains unconvinced and believes they were formed in the atmosphere. Bournemouth University is to analyse the balls.
He found about 20 balls made of a jelly-like substance which the Met Office has said was “not meteorological”.
A number of people who contacted the BBC after the story was published on Friday believed the balls were sodium polyacrylate crystals.
‘Mightily convincing’
They can absorb hundreds of times their mass in water and are used in floral displays.
Mel Smith, from Ena’s Florists in Bournemouth, said the balls look extremely similar to the type she uses and have the consistence of firm jelly when broken into.
As the amount of space junk in orbit increases, falls of metal like this seem less mysterious. However, the FAA has determined the metal did NOT come a spacecraft. So what is it and where did it come from?
It seems that even though the FAA gets involved in “metal hunk fall from the sky stories” not often do their determination of the origin get much publicity. Please see the FALLS category for more stories about things that fell.
Click an image to enlarge.
Image www.wickedlocal.com
Image www.wickedlocal.com
Broken ceiling tiles on the floor of the warehouse. The FAA confiscated the piece of debris before workers could take a picture of it, one employee said. Image Michaels Wholesale Furniture Distributors
The falling debris drove a hole into the warehouse roof and knocked out ceiling tiles below. Image Michaels Wholesale Furniture Distributors
UPDATE: Mysterious metal cylinder crashes through Plymouth warehouse roof
By Rich Harbert | Wicked Local Plymouth | Dec 02, 2011
PLYMOUTH —Employees of a local furniture business scrambled to make roof repairs and buy lottery tickets Thursday after a chuck of metal harmlessly crashed through the roof of their offices.
The cylindrically shaped piece of solid steel tore a hole through both the roof and ceiling panels of Michael’s Wholesale Furniture Distributors in Camelot Industrial Park sometime Wednesday or Thursday.
A company employee found the three- to five-pound chunk of metal lying amid broken ceiling tiles on the floor of a storage room early Thursday afternoon.
“He just happened to go in and all the ceiling tiles were blown out. It came right through the ceiling and was lying right on the floor,” Michael Facchini, owner of the import furniture business on Mary B Way, said. “We’re lucky no one got clunked on the head. It would have hurt…I’ll have to play the lottery tonight.”
“It’s pretty bizarre. I guess ferris wheels are stronger than they look.”
Plane crashes into NSW ferris wheel
www.abc.net.au/news | October 03, 2011
The pilot of a light plane that crashed into a ferris wheel at a fair on the New South Wales mid-north coast says he simply did not see it.
Four people, including two children, had to be rescued after the plane crashed into the wheel at the Old Bar Festival about 10:00am (AEST) on Saturday.
All four walked away unscathed.
Local pilot Paul Cox was flying with his son-in-law when he failed his first landing attempt on the airstrip next to the festival.
When he turned the plane around, he crashed into the ferris wheel.
Two children had to be rescued from a basket at the top of the ferris wheel and Mr Cox and his son-in-law were rescued after dangling from the top of the wheel inside their plane for more than an hour.
NASA: Huge Defunct Satellite Will Fall to Earth This Week
by Tariq Malik, SPACE.com Managing Editor | 19 September 2011
A dead climate satellite that has been circling Earth for 20 years will make a fiery death plunge this week, with some pieces of the 6 1/2 ton spacecraft expected to reach the surface of the planet, NASA officials say.
The bus-size Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite, or UARS, will likely plummet down to Earth sometime around Friday (Sept. 23), according to NASA’s latest projections. There is a 1-in-3,200 chance that UARS debris could hit a person, though NASA considers that scenario extremely remote.
“Re-entry is expected Sept. 23, plus or minus a day,” NASA officials wrote in an update posted Sunday (Sept. 18). That means that by Saturday (Sept. 24), the UARS satellite should slam into Earth’s atmosphere and break apart. The space agency’s space debris experts predict that at least 26 large pieces of the satellite will survive the scorching temperatures of atmospheric re-entry. But exactly where the UARS satellite debris will fall is uncertain.
NASA officials have said that the drop zone for UARS satellite debris could be anywhere between the latitudes of northern Canada and southern South America, an area that includes much of the planet.
The satellite should re-enter over a 500-mile (804-kilometer) track, according to NASA officials. Since 75 percent of Earth is covered with ocean, there is a high likelihood that the satellite will re-enter over the sea or a remote, uninhabited stretch of land, Victoria Samson, the Washington Office Director of the Secure World Foundation, an organization dedicated to the peaceful use of outer space, told SPACE.com last week.
Rains of frogs and fishes are much more common than worms. Oh those mysterious winds that lift and carry the oddest things into the air.
Never mind cats and dogs – school hit by worm rain
By Angus Howarth | news.scotsman.com | 02 April 2011
A PE class had to run for cover as it started raining worms.
Teacher David Crichton was leading a group of pupils playing football at Galashiels Academy when dozens of the invertebrates began plummeting from the sky. The 22 second-year boys had to abandon their lesson
Mr Crichton said the children had just completed their warm-up when they began to hear “soft thudding” on the ground.
The class then looked to the cloudless sky – and saw worms falling on to them.
Mr Chrichton, 26, said he was baffled by the incident, with teachers later finding more worms spread across a tennis court almost 100 yards away.
Crocodile on plane kills 19 passengers
www.news.com.au | by Staff Writers | news.com.au | October 22, 2010
• Crocodile escapes from carrier bag
• Creature causes on board stampede
• Plane tips, then crashed into house
• All the latest travel news
A STOWAWAY crocodile on a flight escaped from its carrier bag and sparked an onboard stampede that caused the flight to crash, killing 19 passengers and crew.
The croc had been hidden in a passenger’s sports bag – allegedly with plans to sell it – but it tore loose and ran amok, sparking panic.
A stampede of terrified passengers caused the small aircraft to lose balance and tip over in mid-air during an internal flight in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The unbalanced load caused the aircraft, on a routine flight from the capital, Kinshasa, to the regional airport at Bandundu, to go into a spin and crash into a house.
17 year old Juliane Koepcke was in an airplane that exploded over the Amazon. Juliane Koepcke plunged to earth, landed in the jungle and survived 9 days of trekking thru tough conditions to find civilization. Juliane Koepcke survived the ordeal and thrived to be a successful adult. Her story was featured in 2 films.
Here’s some info about her from wikipedia not included in the following story.
Her experience is the subject of two films, the first being the 1974 Giuseppe Maria Scotese film Miracoli accadono ancora, I (Miracles Still Happen), and the most recent being the 2000 Werner Herzog film Wings of Hope. Herzog was inspired to make the film as he narrowly avoided taking the very same flight while he was location scouting for Aguirre, Wrath of God. His reservation was canceled due to a last minute change in itinerary.[3]
Köpcke returned to Germany, where she fully recovered from her injuries and continued her studies, eventually earning a PhD degree in zoology, like her parents, in 1987. Now known as Dr. Juliane Diller, she specializes in mammalogy, studying bats in Munich, Germany,[4] and working at the Munich Zoological Center, where she is a librarian.[2]
For more stories of children who were the sole survivors of plane crashes click here.
The young Miss Koepcke
As an adult she returned to survey the wreckage for a 2000 documentary.
On Christmas Eve 1971, in the skies above the desolate, remote jungles of Peru, LANSA Flight 508 got its ass rocked like a hurricane by a ginormous bolt of lightning that blew the entire fuselage apart like a humongoid human-filled flying pipe bomb with wings. Juliane Koepcke, a quiet seventeen year-old high school senior on her way to visit her father, fell two miles out of the sky, without a parachute, crunching into the dirt floor of the Amazon Rain Forest with enough velocity to fracture the skull of Bahamut the World Fish. When she somehow miraculously awoke and came to her senses (a feat which few of her fellow passengers managed to accomplish), she was still strapped in to her seat. She had a broken collarbone, a severe concussion, deep cuts in her arms and legs, and one of her eyes had been swollen shut like Stallone the end of Rocky II. You know, the sort of injuries you’d expect from someone who just plummeted through a few thousand feet of freefall and splashed down in a goddamned rainforest.
This is a chilling story of what may have been “the perfect crime” gone wrong.
Map view of Black Horse PIke near the Atlantic City Expressway, where authorities searched for a missing skydiver after witnesses reported seeing someone fall from a plane without a parachute.
NJ residents say man fell from sky…but where is he?
6abc.com | 2010.09.15
If a man falls from the sky, but nobody can find a trace of him, did it really happen?
Some employees of Shore Veterinarians on the Blackhorse Pike in Egg Harbor Township think so.
Kelly Hale is one of those employees.
“There is no doubt it was a person; we are 100% sure,” Hale said.
Hale was one of three employees who looked out a window Tuesday afternoon to see a horrifying site in the sky.
“I’d seen the guy falling on an angle, straight down, no parachute, no paraglider. You could see the arms and legs flailing and his clothes were blue, a dark blue like a navy, black and gray,” Hale said.
Off in the distance, one of the women saw what they say was a tan single engine plane that soon disappeared.
“We don’t know if he came out of that plane, we don’t know if he fell out a wheel well, we don’t know,” Hale said.
After seeing the incredible sight, the vet employees rushed to call 911, triggering a multi-agency search effort focused on the wooded area between Route 40 and Tilton Road.
I wonder if the local weatherman warned people of the falling drunken parrots?
Red-collared lorikeets range from The Kimberly coast to the western margins of the Gulf of Carpentaria (Credit: Mitch Reardon)
Drunken parrots falling from sky
By: John Pickrell/Melissa Leong with AAP | June-4-2010 | www.australiangeographic.com.au
Parrots intoxicated by a mystery substance are dropping out of the sky near Darwin.
SEEMINGLY DRUNKEN AND HUNGOVER parrots are dropping out of the sky in the Northern Territory and experts are at a loss to explain why.
The red-collared lorikeets lose coordination and pass out after eating a mystery food, Lisa Hansen, of the Ark Animal Hospital at Palmerston, near Darwin said on Thursday. Red-collared lorikeets are an NT subspecies of the rainbow lorikeet (Trichoglossus rubritorquis).
“It happens every year around this season, they lose all balance and we find them fallen out of trees and the sky,” she says. “Unless someone intervenes, they can’t fly and will get picked up by predators.”
I wonder if any one is keeping statistics about the number of unsuspecting ear-bud or headphone wearers who get struck by stuff and die? Are people who fly in a airplane they make themselves in their garage asking for trouble?
I am sorely disappointed to not have found a local source for this piece.
Edward Smith, foreground, pilot of a small plane that crashed Monday evening on Hilton Head Island, SC, walks from his crashed airplane Tuesday, March 16, 2010 on Hilton Head Island, S.C. Smith was piloting the plane Monday evening when it crashed on the beach, killing a man who was jogging near the water. ((AP Photo/Russ Bynum))
Edward Smith, pilot of a small plane that crashed Monday evening on Hilton Head Island, SC, inspects his aircraft Tuesday, March 16, 2010 as it is hoisted onto a trailer for removal from the beach. Smith and his passenger survived the crash, but a man who was jogging on the beach was killed when the the plane struck him. (AP Photo/Russ Bynum)
Beach jogger killed by plane likely never heard it
By RUSS BYNUM and DORIE TURNER – Associated Press Writers | Wednesday, Mar. 17, 2010 | www.thesunnews.com
HILTON HEAD ISLAND, S.C. — The kit-built single-engine plane was gliding quietly as it came down for an emergency landing on a beach. Pharmaceutical salesman Robert Gary Jones, listening to his iPod while jogging, likely never saw or heard it before the aircraft hit him from behind Monday evening and killed him.
“There’s no noise,” said aviation expert Mary Schiavo, a former inspector general for the National Transportation Safety Board. “So the jogger, with his ear buds in, and the plane without an engine, you’re basically a stealth aircraft. Who would expect to look up?”
The 38-year-old Jones, whose mother said he was serious about nutrition and exercise, especially jogging, was on a business trip to Hilton Head for GlaxoSmithKline. He was looking forward to getting home to the northern Atlanta suburb of Woodstock, Ga., for his daughter’s third birthday Wednesday, Pauline Jones said.
With over 11,000 jumps under his belt Gerencser could not have had more experience in the sport. He died doing what he loved, I guess. Condolences to the Mr. Gerencser’s friends and family. The condo was vacant and probably part of the glut of overbuilt real estate along our beaches. If that condo had never been built perhaps….
The late Peter Gerencser, skydive enthusiast.
Skydiver Killed After Parachute Fails During Landing Segment Of Flight
By Daniel Guevarra | avstop.com
March 26, 2010 – On Thursday at 11:10 AM, the Port Aransas Police Department received a call reference a skydiver that had landed on and through a condominium roof located at 604 Beach Access Road 1-A in Port Aransas, TX.
Port Aransas Police, Port Aransas EMS, and Port Aransas Fire Department personnel responded to that location and upon arrival observed the victim still alive in the attic suffering from massive injuries sustained during the impact.
