Back in the day (by which we mean 2013), we talked about all the randomness that has fallen from the sky like God's hastily improvised wrath. Turns out that mankind and Mother Nature haven't gotten any more careful in the intervening years, and a lot more weird stuff has been plummeting down and changing people's lives in the most confusing ways. For example ...
Everything's more hardcore in Alaska. Instead of bears, they have grizzly bears and polar bears. Instead of long winter nights, they have one long winter night, period. And instead of raining cats and dogs, it rains ancient abominations from the depths of the ocean. And that's not a saying.
Alaska Department of Fish and GameSay what now?
Back in June 2015, Fairbanks thrift store manager Sue Valdrow had a day she won't forget anytime soon. In what had to be the most exciting morning in the history of secondhand retail, "Two gentleman [sic] came in and asked if we have a bucket with water because there's an eel in [the] parking lot," Valdrow recalled. But instead of finding an eel, employees caught a live lamprey, a jawless vampire fish that hasn't changed much since the prehistoric age.
Alaska Department of Fish and GameWell this sucks.
And because one fish out of water isn't crazy enough, officials said they'd received three more reports of lampreys falling from the sky around Fairbanks, one of which landed in a guy's yard. According to ADFG sport fish information officer Nancy Sisinyak, the likely culprits leaving these things around town are gulls, which hunt the toothy horrors in the Chena River and likely dropped their catches on the way back to their nests. Because in Alaska, even the gulls are more hardcore.
When you hear a loud boom in the middle of the night, it could mean a lot of things: a thunderclap, a gas explosion, old man Stevenson having another musket-related incident. Where your mind probably doesn't go is to a giant brick of drugs crashing through your roof.
Yet this happened to Bill and Maya Donnelly of Nogales, Arizona. In September 2015, the couple was awakened by a loud crash. Figuring it must be a thunderstorm, they went back to sleep. They only realized they had been wrong the next morning, when they found a massive hole in the roof of their carport -- oh, and 26 pounds of marijuana underneath it.
Turns out they had gotten a visit by Sativa Claus, who'd left $10,000 worth of grade-A kush. While weed packages randomly descending from the heavens and landing in your house might not sound so bad, its landing caused "chronic" damage not only to their carport roof, but also to their beloved doghouse. All in all, the unexpected dope delivery cost them about $500 in repairs, not counting their dog's rehab costs.
Nogales Police DepartmentThe dog is fine; he's at White Castle.
Police quickly figured that the bundle probably fell from a smuggler's airplane on its way to the U.S. from Mexico. It's not atypical for drug drops to happen in border towns like Nogales, though they usually land in the outskirts near the desert instead of mortar-bombing a pooch palace. Obviously, someone up high was getting even higher on their own supply.
In May 2015, Philadelphia girl Jacinda Cambray and her family were celebrating her 16th birthday with grilling, swimming, horseshoes, and other good clean backyard fun. But before they were done soaking up that famous late-spring Philly sunshine, an uninvited guest decided to crash the party and rain on her parade with a shower of actual human feces.
Right after the birthday cake had been passed around, the guests noticed that something foul was being bombed into the backyard. It didn't take them long to realize it was shit, raining from the sky like a very immature god's idea of a plague. The next minutes passed by pretty much as you'd imagine. There were tears and cursing, followed by water hoses, followed by the devastating realization that someone else has shit your pants.
"It was brown. It was everywhere," said Jacinda's stepfather. "It got on everything." The victims of this smelly Dresden were several of the party guest and one rental canopy, though you don't rent out tarps for a living and not expect to be washing bodily fluids out of them on occasion.
Lacking any better explanation for the shitstorm, guests looked up flight paths and determined there were several planes in the air at the time of the bombing run, and any one of them could have been the literal party pooper. While airplanes are legally required to dispose of waste only while in airports, it sure looks like one didn't give a crap about that particular regulation. Regardless of the hows and whys, remember that your next backyard barbecue is one rogue plane away from being a turdfest.
The village of Keresley is famous for being the birthplace of actor Clive Owen and ... not much else. But on December 12, 2011, a reason to finally get a second paragraph on their Wikipedia page came down from the sky: mystery apples.
It was right after "rush hour" -- or whatever you call the drive home when you work in a village of fewer than 1,000 people -- that something happened which shook the Keresleyians to their core. Without warning, hundreds of apples suddenly fell from the sky, pelting people, cars, yards, and pavement over a 20-yard area. And while one apple a day might keep the doctor away, it turns out that a few hundred plummeting to Earth cause damage to cars and make a rather unappealing mess.
radulep/Adobe Stock"I haven't seen a Granny Smith fall that hard since Nana broke her hip!"
Witnesses said that some of the apples were "large, like cooking apples," and were "crushed, as though they'd fallen from a great height." However, nobody could explain how or why Keresley was unexpectedly shelled by apples. Of course, that hasn't stopped some fairly epic speculation on the part of its residents. There have been sensible theories, like the popular fell-out-of-a-plane one, or meteorologists figuring a small but powerful tornado could have been behind the blitz.
But then there was another citizen who suggested there may have been sinister forces at work, saying, "Strange things do happen in this part of the world ... We're in an area with a spooky history, where there have been witches for centuries, after all." So these were some kind of unholy apples? Ghost apples, even? In short, in Keresley, opinions are like apples -- nonsensical and flying all over the place.
If there's one thing you'd expect to fall from the sky, it's water. And whether it takes the form of rain, snow, or mist, all falling water can really do is ruin your hair or give you a cold. But if that's what you think, you're a damn fool who's going to get themselves impaled by a vicious ice spear.
In February 2018, a street cleaner working near London's Kew Gardens was quietly doing his job when a block of ice dropped out of the clear blue sky and missed him by only a couple feet. In March 2016, a football-sized chunk of ice crash-landed at a car dealership, shattering the windshield of a parked Kia Soul. And in November 2017, a slab of ice tore through the roof of a Chino, California home and landed in an upstairs bathtub. There are more examples, but you get the picture: The sky is falling.
While nobody's really positive where all these ice missiles are coming from, the general consensus is that they must be falling off airplanes. It's not uncommon for planes at a high enough altitude to build up small pockets of ice, which are almost as dangerous for the plane itself as it is for the poor suckers on the ground who have to dodge the glacial missiles. Fortunately, the odds are excellent that you'll never be hit -- or even nearly hit -- by an ice spike falling from the sky. Then again, they're the same odds those poor bastards had.
But if there's a frozen torpedo with your name on it, you'll probably hear it before it hits you. A witness said the one in Kew Gardens "made such a loud noise -- like a meteorite crashing down," and while we've never heard a meteorite, we'll go ahead and take his word for it. Employees at the car dealership said their chunk "made that noise you hear from the fireworks that spin," while the poor woman in Chino whose bathtub got bombed said she thought there was "an explosion." So like an actual bomb dropped from an airplane. Remind us again how United Airlines isn't violating the Geneva Convention with these things?
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For more proof nowhere is safe from life's random, check out 4 Insane Things People Just Found Underground and The 7 Most Horrifying Things Ever Discovered In A Human Body.
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What's that in the sky? It's a bird! It's a plane! It's our Facebook profile!
Kelly Stone
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