'Fish drops from sky' and hits car in Tampines
It has been raining cats and dogs in Singapore lately, but according to one motorist, it rained fish as well.
A fish apparently fell from above and hit a vehicle before bouncing onto the road in Tampines on Oct 3.
Sharing a video of the incident, Stomp user Eddie said: "A fish dropped from the sky and hit the deck of the car in front of me at the junction of Tampines Avenue 4 and Tampines Avenue 7."
If you watch the dash cam clip carefully a few times, something can be seen bouncing off the top of the minivan and landing on the road. It looks like it could be a fish.
Unfortunately, Eddie did not take a picture of the fish on the road.
"There’s a red light camera so I could not anyhow stop there to take photo of the fish at the road junction," he said.
If it really was a fish, where could it have come from? Could it have fallen from another vehicle?
The video does not show a vehicle nearby where the fish could have come from and there is no flyover above that Tampines junction for the fish to have fallen from.
The closest building is the Tampines North Community Club, which does not seem tall or close enough for someone to throw the fish from.
You may be surprised to learn that this is not the first recorded incident of fish mysteriously dropping from the sky in Singapore.
You may be even more surprised to learn that the first such recorded incident was way back in 1861.
This was 42 years after Sir Stamford Raffles founded modern Singapore in 1819.
According to the US magazine Natural History, French naturalist Francis Castelnau recounted that after an earthquake followed by heavy rain in February 1861, the Malays and Chinese in Singapore were filling their baskets with fish found in the pools formed by the rain.
They told him that the fish had "fallen from heaven".
He wondered: "Is it permissible to suppose that a waterspout, in passing over some large river of Sumatra, had drawn up the fish and carried them over? It is not without diffidence that I venture this hypothesis."
However, no waterspout that could possibly be a kind of 'fishnado' was reported anywhere near Tampines on Oct 3, 2022.
There is another theory.
After it rained fish one day in Texarkana, Texas, in the US last year, researchers proposed that the fish had been dropped or possibly regurgitated by passing birds.
Do you have a theory?
Get The New Paper on your phone with the free TNP app. Download from the Apple App Store or Google Play Store now
