This was his error

On July 8, 1886, according to Science Gossip, 1886-238, a land species of small snails fell during a heavy thunderstorm near Redruth, Cornwall. The number of them was so great that they were gathered up by the hatful, a species unknown in that district. A correspondent writing in the same issue said they must have been on the ground in the first place, and that “astonished rustics had jumped to the conclusion that they had fallen.” He met one person who said he had seen the snails fall, but “this was his error,” the investigator said.

–Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned, p. 92 (The Complete Books of Charles Fort, Dover, c1974).

The Super-Sargasso Sea and its Arctic region

Fort writes of an item in the Monthly Weather Review for October 1886, quoted from the Charlotte Chronicle. “For three weeks there had been a fall of water from the sky, in Charlotte, N.C., localized in one particular spot, every afternoon, about three o’clock; that, whether the sky was cloudy or cloudless, the water or rain fell upon a small patch of land between two trees and nowhere else.”

Fort goes on to note that a Signal Service observer visited the place, near two trees at the corner of 9th and D streets. The observer “saw precipitation in the form of rain drops at 4:47 and 4:55 p.m., while the sun was shining brightly. On the 22nd, I again visited the place, and from 4:05 to 4:25 p.m., a light shower of rain fell from a cloudless sky…Sometimes the precipitation falls over an area of half an acre, but always appears to center at these two trees, and when lightest occurs there only.”

–Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned, pp191-192 (The Complete Books of Charles Fort, Dover, c1974).