Perennial "Mystery"

Last week Dayton had a shower of green rain. It stained a few citizens' clothes and left a greenish tint on some white-painted houses. The press reported that local scientists were mystified.

There is not really much mystery about green, red or other-colored rain. A quick-acting biologist could probably have proved with a few squints through a microscope that Dayton's rain got its color from algae (microscopic plants) sucked up by a tornado. Full-sized tornadoes can lift heavy objects (such as signboards) high into the clouds. Even little whirlwinds can vacuum-clean the surface of a pond and deposit its green scum many miles away as discolored rain. Sometimes small fish or frogs are sucked up (and later dropped) with the water.

People who regard science with suspicion have always celebrated such familiar, explainable events as "mysteries" or "miracles." Charles Fort, who died in 1932, made a career of it. For 26 years Fort puttered in the British Museum and the New York Public Library, collecting phenomena which "science cannot explain" (he had a special fondness for unusual objects falling from the sky). He insisted that the earth was surrounded by a gelatinous shell, in which the stars were holes. Rains of fish, frogs and "blood" (water containing reddish dust particles) were brought down to earth from the shell by "teleportation," a force that worked something like gravity, only faster. He was not interested in such real mysteries as why the earth has a magnetic field.

Fort's books (Lo!, Wild Talents) were enthusiastically hailed by a group of U.S. literary exhibitionists including Alexander Woollcott and Tiffany Thayer. In 1931 they formed the Fortean Society, dedicated to "the frustration of science." The society, which has no real magnetic field, just a gelatinous shell, petered out, leaving science no more frustrated than usual. But the tradition goes on. Next time the rain washes dust or pollen or algae out of the air, some newspaper will probably report that "scientists were mystified." They often are, but not by green rain.

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