World of the Paranormal

Its name alone gives the impression that this is one cryptid not to be taken seriously. Also known by the diminutive Altie, the creature’s name is derived from the river system in which it supposedly resides, the Altamaha River in the US state of Georgia. The extra ha at the end supposedly has something to do with a Native American language. Still, it makes you wonder if someone isn’t letting us know that our legs are being pulled.

An aquatic creature resembling a smaller version of Nessie, Altie is described as being around 20 feet long and snake-like with a circumference of 5-7 feet. It is also claimed to have a crocodile-like snout, bony ridges on the back, and large, protruding eyes. Most of the time it is described as a peaceful animal, except on occasions when it climbs out of the river and kills everyone in sight.Most reports, however, are of someone claiming to have simply bumped into it while swimming. A minority claims that it has behaved in a threatening manner and once even attacked a boat, but such instances seem to be very rare.

Though there have been at least a couple of hundred reported sightings and the creature can be traced back to Native American mythology, no evidence of this pigmy cousin of the Loch Ness Monster has ever been presented. For now, the Altamaha-ha is best filed under “Wait and see.”

Cases in which various types of animals come down with the rain are fairly rare, but they do go back for many centuries. The animals are almost always small ones such as frogs and the smaller breeds of fish, and it is this lack of large animals such as tunas falling out of the sky that gives the phenomenon its credibility. The explanation most often put forward is that the animals are somehow swept out of bodies of water by a storm, updraft or tornado which carries them for miles before dumping them at the feet of shocked witnesses. Some times the animals are still alive, in most cases they are dead. In a minority of cases the animals are frozen solid, in some cases actually encased in blocks of ice. This is not hard to believe as a the higher you go the colder it gets, so it’s just a matter of the tornado or storm carrying the animals to a high enough altitude.

Though such occurrences are described as far back as ancient Egypt and may even be the basis of biblical tales about plagues, there is no shortage of events in modern times. In 1947, an American biologist was having breakfast in a Louisiana restaurant when the waitress informed him that those in the kitchen weren’t the only fish in the vicinity ; fish were pouring down from the sky. According to the man, when he went outside he found fish scattered all over the street and across the roofs of houses. Some of these fish he gathered up and preserved in jars of formaldehyde.

In 2008, villagers in the Indian town of Kandanassery witnessed a rain of small fishes late at night. As they were returning home, they felt something solid landing on their bodies. When they checked, they found small fishes. Some of the fishes were kept alive to be shown to the other villagers in the morning. In 2009, citizens across Japan’s Ishikawa Prefecture were pelted by hundreds of dead tadpoles from the heavens. Unusually, this was not one isolated incident but several incidents happening at different times over a period of a few weeks. In one case, a man in Nanao heard a strange noise coming from a nearby parking lot. When he went out to see what could be causing such an unusual sound, he found over a hundred dead tadpoles scattered across the ground and the windshields of cars.

This phenomenon has been going on for so long that t is almost certain that such rains are bound to happen again. So remember, the next time it rains don’t just take an umbrella, take a fishing net as well