mysteries | DAILY STRANGE endless 2/4

From the Founding of the City: :A fall of stones

Stanislav Farada
May 14, 2021
1 min read

A fall of stones in a military context occurs in the middle of the sixth century, when the Abyssinian Army, laying siege to Mecca, was put to flight by a fall of stones, supposedly dropped by birds. However, at least one famous stone-fall in ancient times occurred in the aftermath of a military action. The story is told in Chapter 31 of the first book of Livy s history of Rome, From the Founding of the City:

After the defeat of the Sabines, when King Tullus [672-640 b.c.] and the entire Roman state were at a high pitch of glory and prosperity, it was reported to the king and senators that there had been a rain of stones on the Alban Mount [Mount Albanus]. As this could scarce be credited, envoys were dispatched to examine the prodigy, and in their sight there fell from the sky, like hailstones which the wind piles in drifts upon the ground, a shower of pebbles.

The envoys also thought they heard “a mighty voice issuing from the grove on the mountaintop,” commanding the Albans to resume the ritual sacrifices they had neglected since the Roman victory. The Romans themselves took this order to hear, according to Livy, because thereafter “it remained a regular custom that whenever the same prodigy was reported there should be a nine days’ observance.” (Whether “the same prodigy” refers to all subsequent falls of stones or only to repeated falls on Mount Albanus is unclear.)

#astronomicalmiracle #atmosphericaloddities #unquietsky #phenomena #skyfalls #abyssinianarmy #theabyssinianarmy

The Era of the Atmospheric Anomalies Vol 1: Heavens Above

Daily Strange
May 12, 2021
13 min read

Donato Creti (1671-1749) was an Italian painter

The heavens have always been a screen on which people projected their deepest beliefs and hopes in the order of the cosmos. Weather might be unpredictable, but the regular cycle of the seasons stood behind every thunderbolt and hurricane. Meteors and comets flared above, but the ''fixed stars'' wheeled beyond them every night.

The heavens were, until recent times, seen as a unified system; the atmospheric events we call ''weather'' were not clearly separated from celestial events, and events that regularly occurred together were seen to have cause-and-effect relationships. The ''dog days'' of summer can be traced back to the Egyptian observation that the rising of Sirius, the Dog Star, meant a period of hot, still weather. In all parts of the world the orientation of the crescent moon has been interpreted as signifying rain or drought. Not all such beliefs should be dismissed as superstition: the links between sunspots and climate and between the moons position and storms are being intensively studied today; both are thought to work through interactions in the thin upper atmosphere and through subtle ''air tides'' similar to the tides of the sea.

Large-scale weather could not be understood until good maps and communications were available to trace the movements of the air. Today the international network of weather stations and satellites gives reliable long-range forecasts of large weather patterns, but, in a seeming paradox, forecasters cannot tell us whether a given cloud will rain on us, on the next county, or not at all. The general laws and statistics that apply to large-scale weather are of little help on a small scale. The continent-sized loops of moving air that shape whole seasons are generally stable from year to year. The smaller loops that can tighten into hurricanes tend to follow repetitive tracks but can swerve with little warning. Tornadoes are dangerously capricious; and whirlwinds and dust devils are totally unpredictable.

So it is the local, unpredictable, sometimes bizarre and incomprehensible atmospheric events that are recorded here: waterspouts, abnormal fogs, inexplicable mirages, thunder and other noises that seem to come from nowhere, ball lightning, strange aurora effects, and more. Some of these events are now well documented and classified. Others are so rare that they must be considered inexplicable until chance brings together the right observers, instruments, and circumstances.

Samuel Palmer - A Shepherd and his Flock under the Moon and Stars

I - On June 18, 1178, a group of men saw the upper cusp of the new moon“split in two.”According to the chronicler Gervase of Canterbury:

From the midpoint of this division a flaming torch sprang up, spewing out, over a considerable distance, fire, hot coals, and sparks. Meanwhile, the body of the moon which was below writhed, as it were, in anxiety.... This phenomenon was repeated a dozen times or more, the flame assuming various twisting shapes at random and then returning to normal.

Then after these transformations the moon from horn to horn... took on a blackish appearance. The present writer was given this report by men who saw it with their own eyes. . . .

Almost 800 years later, space scientist Jack Hartung put the medieval account together with modern calculations and realized that Gervase may well have recorded the lunar impact that created the 12-mile-wide crater Giordano Bruno.

Source: (Meteoritics, 11:187-94, September 30, 1976)

Joseph Mallord William Turner, Fishermen at Sea, 1796, Tate London

II - "A luminous cloud was seen, driven with some violence from E. to W., where it disappeared below the horizon” on the same day an earthquake occurred at Florence, Italy, on December 9, 1731. Like many accounts of earthquake lights, this one is tantalizing because it lacks detail that would identify it either as escaping gas or as some auroral display stimulated by magnetic effects of the earthquake.

Source: (Report of the Twenty-second Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 22:129,1852)

III - Before dawn on October 23, 1740, James Short, an expert optician and a Fellow of the Royal Society, was watching the sky:

Directing a reflecting telescope of 16.5 inches focus… .towards Venus, I perceived a small star pretty nigh her; upon which I took another telescope of the same focal distance, which magnified about fifty or sixty times.... Finding Venus very distinct, and consequently the air very clear, I put on a magnifying power of 240 times, and to my great surprise found this star put on the same phases with Venus [that is, it showed the same phase or pattern of sunlight and shadow, indicating that it was near Venus rather than a distant star].... Its diameter seemed about a third, or somewhat less, of the diameter of Venus; its light was not so bright or vivid, but exceeding sharp and well-defined.... I saw it for the space of an hour several times that morning; but the light of the sun increasing, I lost it altogether about a quarter of an hour after eight. I have looked for it every clear morning since, but never had the good fortune to see it again.

Short was a premier telescope maker and would have hardly been deceived by a “ghost Venus”—an internal reflection within the eyepiece—as some have suggested. Others who saw an apparent satellite of Venus included Gian Domenico Cassini, the discoverer of four of Saturn’s moons,in1672 and 1686; Andreas Meier in 1759; T. W. Webb in 1823; and M. Stuyvanert in1884. Today there is no trace of any satellite of Venus.

Source: (Nature, 14:193-94, June 29, 1876)

IV - Phantom soldiers appeared on and above a mountain in Scotland on June 23, 1744. Twenty-seven witnesses, some of whom gave sworn testimony to a local magistrate, watched the aerial maneuvers for up to two hours before darkness ended the display. Sir David Brewster, in his Letters on Natural Magic, suggested that it must have been a mirage of troops on the far side of the mountain and linked the hypothetical troops to the Scottish rebellion of the following year.

Source: (Notes and Queries,1:7:304, March 26,1853)

V - There were earthquakes at many points in England and throughout Europe in 1750. Several days before the March 2 tremor in London, “there were reddish bows in the air, which took the same direction as the shock.” At the moment of the April 2 quake in Warrington, England, the Reverend Sedden saw “an infinite number of rays of light, proceeding, from all parts of the sky, to one point near the zenith.'' An aurora accompanied the August 23 quake at Spalding, England, and Northampton felt the earth shudder on September 30. Dr. Doddridge reported a fireball that morning, a red sky the following night, and the night after that ''the finest aurora he ever saw.''

Source: ((Magazine of Natural History, 7:300-01, July 1834)

VI - An extraordinary fog astonished the colonists in Connecticut one morning in 1758. One of them wrote:

... about sun-rise, at this place was a fog of so strange and extraordinary appearance, that it filled us all with amazement. It came in great bodies, like thick clouds, down to the earth, and in its way, striking against the houses, would break and fall down the sides in great bodies, rolling over and over.

A book published in 1874, included this 1780 engraving entitled “Wonderful Dark Day,” which shows daytime farmworkers carrying lanterns.

Mariner 10 photographed Venus from 450,000 miles away on February 6, 1974. No recent observations of Venus have detected any satellites of the planet.

It resembled the thick steam rising from boiling wort [a plant used in making soap], and was attended with such he at that we could hardly breathe.

The Dark Day, May 19, 1780 BY GORDON HARRIS

Chapter title page from “Our first century: being a popular descriptive portraiture of the one hundred great and memorable events of perpetual interest in the history of our country.” by R. M. Devins

When first I saw it I really thought my house had been on fire, and ran out to see if it was so; but many people thought the world was on fire, and the last day come. One of our neighbors was then at Sutton, 100 miles to the eastward, and reports it was much the same there.

Source: [Annual Register, 1: 90 - 91, 1758]

VII - A large number of luminous globes filled the air on the day of an earthquake at Boulogne, France, in 1779.

Source: (Felix Sestier, De La Foudre, Vol. 1, p.169)

VIII - A “bright ball of fire and light” accompanied a hurricane that struck England on September 2,1786. If it was ball lightning, it was unusually persistent, lasting a full 40 minutes.

Source: (Charles Fort, The Complete Books of Charles Fort, p.100)

IX - After Sir William Herschel's observations of“volcanoes” on the moon in 1783 and 1787, a German astronomer named Johann Hieronymus Schroter saw something even stranger. In 1788 he noted, to the east of the lunar Alps and in their shadow, “a bright point, as brilliant as a fifth-magnitude star, which disappeared after he had watched it for fifteen minutes.” After the moon had turned enough to bring the site into full sunlight, Schroter saw a round shadow, varying from gray to black, where it had been.

Johannes Hevelius's Selenographia (1647) contained this early detailed map of the lunar surface. Some of his names for lunar features, including the Alps, are still in use.

It has been proposed that Schroter saw first a mountain peak projecting above the shadow cast by the adjacent lunar Alps and then a shadow cast by the mountain itself, but as a selenographer esteemed enough to have another crater named for him in later years, would Schroter have failed to make that identification himself?And how could a steep mountain cast around shadow under light from any direction?

Source: (The Popular Science Monthly, 34: 158 - 61, December 1888)

X - A mirage of a walled town was seen at Youghal, Ireland, in October 1796, again the following March, and in June 1801 there appeared a mirage of an unknown city—mansions surrounded by shrubbery with a forest behind them.

Source: (Charles Fort, The Complete Books of Charles Fort, p.391)

XI - A weird marine noise was heard by naturalist Alexander von Humboldt and other members of his expedition to South America:

On the 20th of February, 1803, toward seven in the evening, the whole crew were astounded by an extraordinary noise, which resembled that of drums beating in the air. It was at first attributed to the breakers. Speedily it was heard in the vessel, and especially toward the poop. It was like a boiling, the noise of the air which escapes from fluid in a state of ebullition. They then began to fear that there was some leak in the vessel. It was heard unceasingly in all parts of the vessel, and finally, about nine o’clock, it ceased altogether.

Humboldt's French contemporary Baron Cuvier confidently ascribed the sound to fish of the group called the sciaenoids, but this was later studied and found to be unlikely.

Source: (Nature, 2: 46, May 19, 1870)

XII - Lewis and Clark, on their 1804-06 expedition to the far west of the United States, heard booming noises like cannon at a site near what is now Great Falls, Montana. A party outfitted by John Jacob Astor heard similar noises in the Black Hills of South Dakota and Wyoming a few years later.

Source: (Nature, 53: 487, March 26, 1896)

XIII - The light that filled the London sky for a few seconds one December night in 1814 was attributed to a meteor by the editors o (Annals of Philosophy. Their informant, John Wallis, described it:

... at about 20 minutes before 11, I was walking in an open part of the village of Peckham. . .. The night was cloudy and dark, the lower part of the atmosphere clear and calm.... Suddenly I was surrounded by a great light. I remember that at the instant I shrunk downward and stooped forward; as I was apprehensive of some danger behind me, I instantly ran a few paces. I turned about in a few seconds... . But I saw nothing to cause this light. It did not give me the idea of the force and intensity of lightning; its brilliancy was not so instantaneous and fierce; but it was a softer and paler kind of light, and lasted perhaps three seconds. I could discover no noise,though immediatelyI expected an explosion. The strength of the light was nearly equal to that of common day-light; all near objects were distinctly visible.... None of the persons I met that night thought it to be lightning, though none of them saw anything but the light.

Source: [Annals of Philosophy, 5: 235 - 36, March 1815]

XIV - At Comrie, Scotland, mysterious booming noises have been reported since 1597. In 1816 a resident observed “a large luminous body, bent like a crescent, which stretched itself over the heavens.”

Source: (The Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal, 31: 117, April - October 1841)

Howling Wolf MtG Art from Conspiracy Set by Nils Hamm

XV - ''Strange, howling noises” in the air and large spots obscuring the sun were reported along with an earthquake at Palermo, Italy, in April 1817.

Source: (Report of the Twenty-fourth Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 24: 111, 1854)

XVI - What seemed to be an unknown planet was seen crossing the sun's disk by the German astronomer Stark in Augsburg on October 9, 1819. He observed the same thing again on February 12, 1820. The second appearance was described as “a singular and well-defined circular spot with indications of an atmosphere, which was not visible in the evening of the same day”— as any planet with an orbit inside the earth's should have been.

Source: (Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 20:98-101, January 13, 1860)

John Constable - Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows exhibited 1831

XVII - One of the most widespread “dark days” of history came to eastern Canada and New England on November 10, 1819. There had been a heavy, soaplike rain on November 8, which left behind a sooty residue. Then, in Montreal:

On the morning of Tuesday, the 10th, heavy clouds again covered the sky, and changed rapidly from a deep green to a pitchy black, and the sun, when occasionally seen through them, was sometimes of a dark brown or an unearthly yellow color, and again bright orange, and even blood red ... the day became almost as dark as night, the gloom increasing and diminishing most fitfully At noon lights had to be burned in the courthouse, the banks, and public offices of the city. Everybody was more or less alarmed....

About the middle of the afternoon a great body of clouds seemed to rush suddenly over the city, and the darkness became that of night. A pause and hush for a moment or two succeeded, and then one of the most glaring flashes of lightning ever beheld flamed over the country, accompanied by a clap of thunder which seemed to shake the city to its foundations ...

And then came a light shower of rain of the same soapy and sooty nature as that of two days before.... Another rush ofclouds came, and another vivid flash of lightning, which was seen to strike the spire of the old French parish church and to play curiously about the large iron cross at its summit before descending to the ground. A moment later came the climax of the day. Every bell in the city suddenly rang out the alarm of fire, and the affrighted citizens rushed out from their houses into the streets.... Directly the great iron cross, together with the ball at its foot, fell to the ground with a crash, and was shivered to pieces... the real night came on, and when next morning dawned everything was bright and clear, and the world was as natural as before.

The rains strange texture suggests a distant volcanic eruption or forest fire—the usual explanation for dark days. But the accompanying electrical storm hints at something more than just smoke. Meteorologists do not yet know much about the effects of such rarely occurring clouds of smoke and ash upon the weather.

Source: (Scientific American, 44: 329, May 21, 1881)

Sounds.Vol.54 Contemporary Original Abstract Oil Painting Heavy Texture Impasto Dark Blue, Deep Black, White and Beige Painting by Olga Hotujac

XVIII - At the village of Babino Polje in the center of a valley in Mljet Island in the Adriatic Sea remarkable sounds were heard. They started on March 20, 1822:

They resembled the reports of cannon, and were loud enough to produce a shaking in the doors and windows of the village. They were at first attributed to the guns of some ships of war, at a distance, in the open sea, and then to the exercise of Turkish artillery, on the Ottoman frontiers. These discharges were repeated four, ten, and even a hundred times in a day, at all hours and in all weathers, and continued to prevail until the month of February, 1824, from which time there was an intermission of seven months. In September of the same year, the detonations recommenced, and continued, but more feeble and rare, to the middle of March,1825, when they again ceased.

Source: [The American Journal of Science and Arts, 1:10:377, February 1826]

XIX - In 1829, on an expedition into what became New South Wales, Australia, Captain Sturt's expedition heard cannonlike noises on a clear, calm day in flat, wooded country along the Darling River. “To this day the singularity of such a sound, in such a situation, is a matter of mystery to me,” Sturt wrote.

Capt. Charles Sturt and his party were pictured in a small sailboat and a difficult situation in Romance of Australia. Sturt led three expeditions into the Australian interior.

Source: (Nature, 81:127, July 29, 1909)

XX - The mysterious cannonlike sounds at Comrie, Scotland, began a two-year “barrage” in October 1839. Almost 250 blasts, many accompanied by earth tremors, were heard between then and October 1841.

Source: (The Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal, 32:106 - 09, October 1841 - April 1842)

XXI - At Forest Hill, Arkansas, the sky was clear on December 8, 1847. Then, in midafternoon, turbulent clouds formed suddenly, appearing “like a solid black fleece lighted from above by a red glare as of many torches.” A loud explosion shook houses and rang the bell of the church, and a barrel-sized flaming body crashed into the earth just outside the town,making a hole eight feet deep and more than two feet in diameter. The rock that was found at the bottom of the hole smelled of sulfur and was hot enough to boil away water thrown on it. Inside of 20 minutes the sky cleared and the sun shone again.

Fulgurites are formed when lightning strikes sand or rock and vitrifies it. Sand fulgurites characteristically have branched, tubular forms, as shown above.

Was the phenomenon at Forest Hill a meteorite impact? If so, there is no plausible explanation for the clouds before hand; a meteorite passes through the entire atmosphere within a few seconds and cannot affect the air over its impact zone while still scores or hundreds of miles away. Is it possible that lightning fused the soil into a solid mass at the bottom of the hole? Such a stone, known as fulgurite, is not uncommon, but barrel-sized chunks are unheard of.

Source: (The American Journal of Science and Arts, 2:5: 293 - 94, May 1848)

XXII - A phantom battle was reported at the village of Buderich in Westphalia, on January 22, 1854:

Shortly before sunset, an army, of boundless extent, and consisting of infantry, cavalry, and an enormous number of waggons ,was observed to proceed across

the country in marching order. So distinctly seen were all these appearances, that even the flashing of the firelocks,and the colour of the cavalry uniform, which was white, could be distinguished. This whole array advanced in the direction of the wood of Schafhauser, and as the infantry entered the thicket, and the cavalry drew near, they were hid all at once, with the trees, in a thick smoke. Two houses, also, in flames, were seen with the same distinctness. At sunset the whole phenomenon vanished. As respects the fact, government has taken the evidence of fifty eye-witnesses, who have deposed to a universal agreemen trespecting this most remarkable appearance.

Local citizens considered it a supernatural “replay” of a battle that had taken place nearby some years earlier. There were no battles anywhere in Germany inJanuary 1854, so the suggestion that it was a mirage of a faraway scene is scarcely more credible.

Source: (Notes and Queries, 1:9: 267, March1854)

Atmospheric and Astronomical Oddities: The Moodus Noises (Barisal Guns, Mistpouffers and Airquakes)

Agnieszka Walach
May 9, 2021
5 min read

The Bizarre World of Noisecraft (Photo from www.this-is-cool.co.uk)

Mysterious detonations—booming noises apparently unrelated to thunder or earthquakes—are among the most widespread and puzzling phenomena of nature. Long before the days of dynamite or sonic booms, fishermen in the North Sea were familiar with mistpouffers, their name for the distant rumblings they heard on calm, foggy days. In India’s Ganges Delta, the Barisal guns have long been familiar. G.B.Scott’s 1896 account in Nature expresses well his puzzlement when

he tried to trace them:

The villages are few and far between and very small, firearms were scarce, and certainly there were no cannon in the neighborhood, and fireworks were not known to the people. I think I am right in saying I heard the reports every night while south of Dhubri, and often during the day ... more distinctly on clear days and nights.

I specially remember spending a quiet Sunday, in the month of May, with a friend at Chilmari, near the river-bank. We had both remarked the reports the night before and when near the hills previously. About 10 a.m. in the day, weather clear and calm, we were walking quietly up and down near the river-bank, discussing the sounds, when we heard the booming distinctly, about as loud as heavy cannon would sound on a quiet day about ten miles off, down the river. Shortly after we heard a heavy boom very much nearer, still south. Suddenly we heard two

quick successive reports, more like horse pistol or musket (not rifle) shots close by. I thought they sounded in the air about 150 yards due west of us over the water. My friend thought they sounded north of us. We ran to the bank, and asked our boatmen, moored below, if they heard them, and if so in what direction. They pointed south!

Albert G. Ingalls, who discussed these mysterious sounds in Science magazine in 1934, grew up with the sound of the “guns of Seneca Lake” in upstate New York but had no better luck as an investigator: “Their direction is vague, and like the foot of a rainbow, they are always somewhere else ''when the observer moves to the locality from which they first seemed to come.”

Similar noises are called either marina or brontidi in Italy; to Haitians they are the gouffre. Early settlers in the Connecticut River valley (where the towns of Moodus and East Haddam now stand) were told by the Indians that the sounds represented the Indian god’s anger at the English god. Unlike many other such noises, those heard in Connecticut often involved earth tremors as well:

The effects they produce, are various as the intermediate degrees between the roar of a cannon and the noise of a pistol. The concussions of the earth, made at the same time, are as much diversified as the sounds in the air. The shock they give to a dwelling house is the same as the falling of logs on the floor. The smaller shocks produced no emotions of terror or fear in the minds of the inhabitants. They are spoken of as usual occurrences, and are called Moodus noises. But when they are so violent as to be heard in the adjacent towns, they are called earthquakes.

None of the usual signs of earthquakes accompanied the Moodus noises, however, so it maybe questioned whether“ the concussions of the earth” were a cause or and effect of the atmospheric phenomena.

Scientific attempts to explain such sounds began in earnest in the 1890s, when a Belgian, Ernest Van den Broeck, collected hundreds of pages of testimony about mist-poeffers from Iceland to the Bay of Biscay. He also drew the attention of Sir George Darwin, Charles Darwin's son and an expert on the tides, to the problem. That led to publication of many more reports in physical and meteorological journals throughout the English-speaking world.

Soon there were almost as many explanations as there were names for the mysterious noises. Van den Broeck himself believed that the most likely causes were ''some peculiar kind of discharge or atmospheric electricity'' (in other words, thunder - but from clear skies?), while one of his colleagues, M. Rutot, thought the origin to be internal to the earth, comparing the noise to“the shock which the internal fluid mass might give to the earth’s crust.” The latter theory was barely plausible even at the time. Although the molten interior zones of the earth certainly transmit earthquake waves, the liquid rock, or magma, cannot possibly slosh around as Van den Broeck's colleague seems to have imagined.

Others suggested that because many of the noises were associated with coastal regions and river deltas, perhaps they came from occasional settling of the earth beneath the steadily accumulating weight of sediment washed to sea. Such settling, though, should have produced large and noticeable waves and probably tidal waves, or tsunamis, as well.

Rock bursts—the fracturing of boulders or subterranean strata as ancient stresses are relieved—were advanced as a possible cause, but rock bursts produce a higher-pitched noise than that of most of the reported cases—a crack rather than a boom. In any event, most of the areas where rock bursts are common are mountainous regions, where sharp temperature changes can add their effects, rather than lowlands such as the Ganges Delta.

Another theory was offered by Father Saderra Maso, who had studied earthquakes in the Philippines for years before turning his attention to the distant noises that his native parishioners attributed to waves:

It is a common opinion among the Filipinos that the noises are the effect of waves breaking on the beach or into caverns, and that they are intimately connected with changes in the weather, generally with impending typhoons. Father Saderra Maso is inclined to agree with this view in certain cases. The typhoons in the Philippines sometimes cause very heavy swells, which are propagated more than a thousand kilometers [away], and hence arrive days before the wind acquires any appreciable force. He suggests that special atmospheric conditions may be responsible for the great distances to which the sounds are heard, and that their apparent inland origin may be due to reflection, possibly from the cumulus clouds which crown the neighboring mountains, while the direct sound-waves are shut off by walls of vegetation or inequalities in the ground.

Father Saderra Maso may have been correct, but a theory that depends on distant typhoons, breaking ocean swells, special (unspecified) atmospheric conditions, reflection of sounds by clouds, and strategically placed hills could explain virtually anything.

Similarly, when residents of the northeastern coast of the United States heard booming noises from the Atlantic in the winter of 1977, they were told that a few cases could be traced to sonic booms from Concorde airliners and that the rest were probably more distant sonic booms carried hundreds of miles by special atmospheric conditions. Air layers of a certain temperature and density can unquestionably conduct sounds much farther than usual, just as they can produce mirages of scenes beyond the horizon. However, they are unlikely to last until a scientific investigation can be made, which makes them conveniently untestable as explanations.

#skyquake #mistpouffers #mistpoeffers #barisalgun #barisalguns #brontidi #airquake #airquakes #earthquakes #mysteriesnoises

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