Wheat from the Sky? Gibb’s Curious Reports

Transcript

In his historical book Odd Showers, Sir George Duncan Gibb records two unusual reports: a shower of wheat in Wiltshire, and a shower of millet seed in Silesia, cited in the Ephemerides Germanicae. The surprising detail is not a storm or a witness’s reaction, but the reported seeds themselves falling as a shower. Gibb thought both cases were most probably caused by a hurricane, which could carry material through the air and bring it down elsewhere. But he was careful: he had not seen the original accounts, so he could not state the cause with certainty. These are reports Gibb passed on, not proof of how the seeds arrived.