Our friend Jeffery Hodges cracks open the door for a little peek.

The phenomena in question included UFO sightings (many from before the invention of powered flight), poltergeists, sudden or unexplained disappearances, spontaneous combustion, teleportation, bizarre artifacts, and much more. One area to which he gave much attention was the falling of things from the sky: strange organic materials, flat sheets of ice, and animals such as fishes and frogs, often of unknown species, and often, for no apparent reason whatsoever, only a single species.

Mr. Fort would, I think, have been keenly interested to learn of recent events in Arkansas, where something very strange is afoot. It seems that thousands of red-winged blackbirds (and as far as I can tell, only red-winged blackbirds) fell dead from the sky on New Year’s Eve in the area around the town of Beebe: victims, apparently, of some “massive trauma”. The cause is as yet unspecified; those who abhor such explanatory vacua, and must fill them, have suggested that “a loud noise” might have been to blame.

A loud noise? It’s a dandy explanation, of course, and ought to settle the question — but as I head for the door I find myself turning back again, troubled, Columbo-style, by a nagging little detail. You see, the thing is that I have been around a lot of very loud noises in my day, and have even caused quite a few myself — and it strikes me that on no occasion did any of them, not even the very loudest, cause thousands of birds, of a single species, to drop lifeless from the firmament. So I wonder.

But wait: there’s more. It appears that fish are dying too, in the Arkansas River, where 100,000 or so of them have inexplicably gone to their reward, such as it may be, en masse. Once again the slaughter appears to be confined to a single species: in this case Aplodinotus grunniens, the freshwater drum. Does this seem odd to you, particularly in light of recent actuarial data for Agelaius phoeniceus? Well, it does to me too.

I seem to recall that there was yet another curious manifestation down there in the “Natural State” the other day, perhaps involving earthworms — but not having the tenacity of a Charles Fort, I’ll leave it to readers to dig that one up on their own. Worms or no worms, though, it’s a queer business, and wants looking into.

“Please disregard any further instructions.”