It’s raining toads

A good classic anomaly, how it warms the heart. On July 5th, Associated Press reported a rain of toads in the Mexican town of Villa Angel Flores, in the Pacific Coast state of Sinaloa.


Apparently a ‘mini tornado’ picked them up from a pond and dumped them on the town, although the report doesn’t state how this can happen, or more importantly why it was *only* toads that the the tornado allegedly picked up. classicThis phenomenon has been reported in some shape or form for hundreds of years, and there’s still precious little information as to why these rains are so selective. Sometimes it’s berries, sometimes it’s fish, and sometimes of course, the classic frog falls. Charles Fort’s books record many of these reports up to the 1930’s.
The indices of ‘Book of the Damned‘ (1919), ‘New Lands’ (1923), and ‘Lo!’ list dozens of examples of weird rain, all over the world, (yes including showers of berries and black rain in Ireland!) including alabaster, ants, ashes, beef, beetle larvae, bitumen, blood, butter, charcoal, china fragments, cinders, coal, cobwebs, coins, crabs, crayfish, eels, fish, flesh, frogs, gelatinous matter, grain, ham sandwiches, hay, iron balls, jelly fish, limestone, lizards, mud, mussels, oyster shells, periwinkles, quartz, resin, salt, sand, sandalwood, seeds, silk, snails, snakes, spawn, spiders, carved and shaped stones, turtles, and of course, toads.

No Stopping Jack

Since his recent assisted suicide court case, which was declared a mistrial, it looks like Dr. Jack Kervorkian *may* have been involved in another three deaths. It seems that one of them took place on the very day that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that United States citizens do not have a constitutional right to assisted suicide. Kevorkian was unavailable for any comments, but his lawyer, Geoffrey Fieger has been quite outspoken on the issue.
Ned McGrath, speaking for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Detroit, condemned the deaths as a ‘maniacal publicity stunt staged by Fieger and Kevorkian to advance their cause.’ Fieger made no bones either, saying on MSNBC, ‘They can control their own flock, they just can’t control the rest of us. They have no business in medical affairs, and they should get their religious nose out of medical business.’ You tell’em, boy.

The Very Latest on Bantry UFOs

(See also here)
The Examiner (Cork) on June 28th reported local Bantry sheep farmers as dismissing all the recent UFO sightings as the work of fox hunters and their powerful lamps. This in turn, was dismissed by Alan Sewell of the Irish Centre for UFO Studies, who maintains that people had witnessed ‘craft, balls of light or unexplained solid lights, huge in size’. He added that the craft were orbiting the earth for ‘surveillance reasons’. If this is true, one would be inclined to think he talking about spy satellites. . .
On the other hand, could the poor lads on Mir have seen anything? West Cork News, on Friday, July 4th, described the goings on in Bantry on the previous weekend. Two hundred people attended a talk and film showing where Eamonn Ansbro ‘astronomer and UFO expert’ explained his astronautical theory developed with Roy Dutton, an aerospace engineer, and Patrice Birot, formerly of the European Space Agency. This ‘theory’ apparently enables them to:
a) Predict encounters at specific locations
b) Initiate contact – through meditation
Anyway. . . three hundred people showed up to look for UFOs, the ‘windows’ for ‘contact’ being 11.45 p.m. – 2.00 a.m. on Friday, and 2.45 – 4.00 a.m. on Saturday night. It seems that the flashing UFOs mentioned in last week’s Blather were sighted at 2.45 a.m. and 3.30 a.m. respectively.
The first was described as a disc ‘half the moon’s breadth’ and the second a cigar shaped object, of the same colouration (red, green and white), and 200 metres long, apparently hovering over Bantry. The newspaper reports claims that Cork airport confirmed that there were no aircraft in vicinity at the time and that a film crew (who Blather suspects were from RTE, tried to film it, but their equipment ceased to function. ‘This was brand new equipment, and we’ve had this sort of trouble before’, was the word from Eamonn Ansbro.
To be blatantly honest, it all looks not a little suspicious to the highly critical Blather Eye.
Blather spoke to Alan Sewell yesterday, and he has promised to let us know of further goings on. He didn’t mention extraterrestrials, which won him points, but did say that a lady was on the phone to him on Tuesday while a coin sized disc was hovering ten miles over Bantry Bay.
A big thanks to Martin Wheatley for his Haughey Hypothesis:
‘It’s obviously gnomes carrying money to Charlie Haughey’s bank accounts!’ Stay tuned. . .
Dave (daev) Walsh
10 July 1997

daev
Chief Bottle Washer at Blather
Writer, photographer, environmental campaigner and "known troublemaker" Dave Walsh is the founder of Blather.net, described both as "possibly the most arrogant and depraved website to be found either side of the majestic Shannon River", and "the nicest website circulating in Ireland". Half Irishman, half-bicycle. He lives in southern Irish city of Barcelona.