Flying Fish Need Not Apply: The Chicago Fish Fall

Chicago - Workers at "Collision World," a small auto body shop outside Chicago, were distracted from their jobs on August 10, 1999 by a repeated banging noise on the tin roof of their old building. When John Posne (24), stepped outside, he noticed something was very, very wrong.

"It was raining pretty hard that day, but there were fish all over, like someone had just spread them everywhere," said Posne.

Like "frog falls," "fish falls" are a fairly well documented phenomena, though they remain unexplained. Unlike frog falls, the fish that generally are found to fall from the sky are normal sized (weighing up to three pounds). Explanations range from slightly implausible (they are falling from some kind of aircraft) to unlikely (they are swept up by gale-force winds and blown hundreds of miles to a rainstorm) to the absurd (they are pulled out of the water by some alien force).

In the case of the Chicago Auto Body Shop, nobody inside the shop personally saw the fish fall. They believed to have heard them hit their roof (and indeed there were fish on the roof), but all evidence was circumstantial.

"Okay, let's say this is fake. Who would do this? Why?" asked painting technician Mike Sion. "This has to be real, otherwise it's the most expensive waste of time I ever heard of." sources

"The Chicago Fish Fall," Esoterica magazine, September 1999, Volume 15 issue 145.

Photo Courtesy of Esoterica Magazine