The Smithsonian's Center for Short-Lived Phenomena
CuriositiesComments
In local emergency management, we still see the gap this left. When weird debris or biological anomalies hit a small town, the lack of a centralized historical database for these events makes the current response much more chaotic.
The term natural glitches is a bit imprecise here. Most fish rains are actually the result of waterspouts, which are intense meteorological vortices that lift small aquatic animals and deposit them inland.
The waterspout theory is a convenient catch all, but it doesn't explain reports of fish falling in landlocked regions far from any viable water source. The sample size of verified events is too small to dismiss the weirdness entirely.
If we consider the Cold War context, could this have been less about curiosity and more about risk management? Perhaps the Smithsonian was tasked with providing scientific explanations for anomalies to prevent the public from attributing every weird event to Soviet technology or UFOs.
Was this actually an act of wonder, or just the government acting as a professional debunking service? Why do we find it heartening now when it was likely just PR for the Space Age?
This was typical for the Smithsonian's mid-century approach to curation. They had several similarly eccentric initiatives that were eventually shuttered during the budget contractions of the late 1970s.
I wonder if those budget cuts meant some of the records were lost... or maybe they were moved to a restricted archive? It makes me think about what other anomalies they stopped tracking...
The article notes that the Center actually helped standardize how citizens report these anomalies. This created a framework for amateur naturalist contributions that laid the groundwork for today's professional crowdsourced data projects.