Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

On this blog, I’ve covered what many Fortean experts like to call “Anomalous Falls From the Sky,” but this is a new one for me.  Lousy actors and criminals in the stocks used to get pelted with tomatoes, but it’s a bit unusual for modern-day suburbanites to get such treatment.  The following is from a syndicated 1998 Dave Barry column which summarizes the incident.  Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find the original story, which appeared in the “Calvert County Recorder” on August 27, 1997.

This article states that on Aug. 25, Gloria Daniels, 68, of Lusby, Md., was working in her garden with a young neighbor boy when she was hit by a falling tomato. Then the boy was hit by a tomato. Then tomatoes--more than 30 of them--began raining down all over her yard.

Friends, neighbors and the media were called in to investigate, but nobody could figure out where the tomatoes--which appeared to be falling straight down out of the sky--were coming from. Rob Terry, the reporter who wrote the story for The Recorder, states that, while on the scene, he personally was struck by a tomato, and although he quickly investigated, he could find no evidence that it was hurled by pranksters. 

I called Gloria Daniels recently and asked her if anybody had come up with an explanation for the falling tomatoes, and she said nobody had. 

"It's a mystery," she said. 

I asked her if she had been in touch with anybody at "The X-Files," and she said she'd never heard of it.