FAFROTSKI ….. Ivan Sanderson’s word for Things Which Fall From The Skies.
Most of you have seen the recent report by a biology teacher in Norway who was on a skiing trip with friends near Bergen. The group came across large numbers of worms {as pictured above} lying moribund but alive on the surface of the snow, which was in many places up to a meter deep. There was no sign of any penetration of the snow [i.e. tunneling upwards], and such behavior makes no survival sense at all anyway. The worms were just lying there as if dropped down in large numbers from above.
While no one in the teacher’s party saw these worms in the act of falling, there was no explanation, given the quantities scattered about, of anything else which would explain their presence.
I’ve collected a thick notebook full of such strange {apparent} falls over the years, and Ivan collected hundreds of the incidents. Wormfalls are not as common as many other categories, but they are not absent in the literature either — “famous” ones occurred in 1927 in Sydney NSW and in Sweden in 1924 and 1945 — the latter one is pretty spectacular, being seen falling over an ellipse 100×300 meters in size, and some sploshing down into a family’s cream cake. The worms were described as “deep frozen, transparent, and reddish in color.” Neither the local crows nor chickens would eat them. {My guess here is that, being frozen, the worms didn’t have the requisite odor that signaled dinner}.
The evidence therefore would point towards the fact that worms [and other things] DO fall from the sky. What continues to stun me however is the talk which tends to follow in the media when such things are acknowledged. There is always some denial skepticism, which usually makes no sense given the quality of the observations, and then some expert comes in and is quoted about “whirlwinds and waterspouts” picking up objects in one place and dumping them in another — as if that could end the story. But it doesn’t even come close.
Let us give the mini-tornado theory a temporary OK. Alright then, what are the “experts” saying? IF THEY FOLLOWED THEIR OWN LINE OF REASONING, then they must believe that these winds have the ability to pick up JUST ONE KIND OF OBJECT, leaving everything else on the ground [or in the water]. Boy, are those whirlwinds smart.
If they don’t think that whirlwinds are that smart, they they must engage in further theoretical dances : Oh, only those particular things were at the site of the pick-up; nothing else at all, and large quantities of the things picked up. Hmmmm…. I find that idea EXTREMELY unreasonable. Oh well then, how about this?: The whirlwinds picked up all different sorts of stuff, but in transit dropped out everything but just this one kind of thing — sort of like a fabulously efficient air centrifuge. So everything heavier was dumped AND everything lighter. And this despite that all manner of other things are JUST the density of the worms, or extremely near to it. And I find THAT just as unreasonable.
The mystery of the phenomenon of the Fafrotski is not that things fall, but that things are SORTED out during whatever the process is. Either something has sorted them while still “on the ground”, or they have been somehow sorted in the air.
What about Norway’s worms? I can’t buy the air centrifuge theory [is there even one stated in the literature?]. It is a bit like the solid waste “air classification” blower system for separating mixed recyclables, but impossibly better refined. So how else might the Norwegian worms have been separated? Worms might “gather” I suppose, but how good are the chances with a natural process that nothing else of similar size [and lift-ability] was in the same place as the pickup?
But the great SORTER-OUTERS of the universe are intelligences. Whoops! Probably shouldn’t go there. And maybe that’s why the experts don’t continue their line-of-reasoning either.
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That’s my BS for the day folks. I’ll get back here with another Down-in-the-Cryptodumps entry [about ABSMs] soon, Peace
