Great balls of ice falling from the sky!

December 11, 2003 10:38 AM

Great balls of ice falling from the sky! Not a B-movie but a reality. Scientists are baffled by the 25-400lb ice balls falling from clear blue skies.
posted by humbe (25 comments total)

Sounds kind of fortean to me.
posted by drezdn at 10:41 AM on December 11, 2003

Cool!
posted by Eekacat at 10:43 AM on December 11, 2003

uh-oh
posted by evening at 10:58 AM on December 11, 2003

Holy-huge-chunks-of-ice-falling-from-the-sky, Batman... Can you imagine the updraft required to keep a 440 lb. chunk of ice aloft?
posted by Nauip at 11:07 AM on December 11, 2003

The Military's Pandora's Box
Bombs away...kablam: then all evidence is melted: whom could have done that?
posted by thomcatspike at 11:12 AM on December 11, 2003

Wanted to add Tesla could change the weather; felt it could give an opponent in war the battle front edge. His "death machine" was thought to "end all wars" that was the one invention he truly sought.
posted by thomcatspike at 11:20 AM on December 11, 2003

not to be confused with falling blue ice.
posted by pejamo at 11:42 AM on December 11, 2003

It's pretty clear that the Earth is pissed off. It's now resorted to fighting back by flinging huge iceballs at us in an attempt to cool the place down and kill enough people to get us to stop warming the place up.

I for one welcome our new iceball overlords.
posted by togdon at 11:47 AM on December 11, 2003

thomcatspike - damn, you beat me to it.

Meanwhile - I think life is like a B-movie most of the time. Then, occasionally, it drops to the "Killer Tomato" level except that there is real blood squirting from the humans without any cheesy theme music to accompany the carnage.

On the ice balls - are they chocolaty and salty?

If they are not, we're screwed.
posted by troutfishing at 12:05 PM on December 11, 2003

The term megacryometeors is coined from ''mega,'' which means ''big,'' ''cryo'' for ''ice'' and ''meteor.''

Well I'm glad you pointed that out, as I was so unsure
posted by ajbattrick at 12:11 PM on December 11, 2003

Shades of Joe Dirt! Doesn't anyone know a "Boeing Bomb" when it hits em on the head?
posted by DBAPaul at 12:59 PM on December 11, 2003

Ice balls?!? I didn't even know they had sex!

Seriously, though -- they'll need a better name for them than "megacryometeors" if its ever going to catch on with the public. MCM sounds like something Godzilla had to battle back when:

"LOOK OUT!! MEGACRYOMETEORS!!"

I expect James Bond to be on the case anytime now.
posted by Ogre Lawless at 1:58 PM on December 11, 2003

So global warming causes ice? Am I the only one who doesn't understand that?
posted by Bonzai at 2:26 PM on December 11, 2003

Global warming means a general upwards trend of temperatures. It is also associated, as I understand it, with wilder fluctuations in temperatures and weather systems. This includes extreme cold or even generally cooler temps for some areas.
posted by kahboom at 2:40 PM on December 11, 2003

The generally accepted scientific nomenclature is "Global Climate Change". This is because while the overall temperature of the globe will increase the changes from region to region or system to system may vary wildly. Some places may be cooler, others warmer, some may have more precipitation others less.
posted by aaronscool at 2:50 PM on December 11, 2003

thomcatspike - damn, you beat me to it.
might not always be thinking together, yet a like ;P
posted by thomcatspike at 2:54 PM on December 11, 2003

thomcatspike - What I was actually going to say was : I bet those boys up on the HAARP project in Alaska are laughing ther asses off....

"...You can make giant ice cubes with this thing? No shit! No SHIT! Ummmm....OK, ok.....alright.....no I'm not going to make any giant ice cubes rain down on the Spanish, sir, or on the French....maybe just a little on the French?....Yes sir, I was joking. I'm very sober. I'm taking this very seriously sir. Yes sir, I understand that this equipment is very expensive government property. No sir, I will NOT be conducting any unauthorized ice-making experiments, I will conduct HAARP experiments by the book without taking any joyrides. Yes sir, you have my word on that..."
posted by troutfishing at 3:41 PM on December 11, 2003

Speaking of HAARP, is anyone else keeping at least a rough log of things like mood swings or the like and cross-referencing it with the HAARP magnetometer logs?

I've noticed that I go through... "bad hair days" on the days that HAARP goes into high-power testing, especially since it went online nearly full time a few months ago.

I've talked to a few others about this, and I started taking note of their mood swings before discussing HAARP with them. There were enough correlations for it to be unnerving.

(I've also noticed that I might be more sensitive than average to EM radiation, but I'm more sensitive about most things in most senses. I can "feel" strong magnetic fields. CRTs bug me, as do television sets. Large energized coils and the like.)

Blah, blah, blah. /dons tinfoil hat. Feel free to be skeptical. I don't have anything resembling proof other than the usual unprovable subjective experiential garbage.

Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

/me walks off to the city of gold and lead.
posted by loquacious at 4:23 PM on December 11, 2003

I'm not skeptical, especially given that I occasionally hear/perceive extremely high pitched noises which seem to move into - or slowly through - a room I'm in and then gradually out again. They are unpleasant. I just figured that there is so much random EMF in industrialized life that I'd never figure it out. I don't have a lick of "proof" - only anecdotal experience. HAARP and mood swings.....interesting. I get mood swings from changes in barometric pressure - I know that.
posted by troutfishing at 5:40 PM on December 11, 2003

I can hear the high-pitched whine that a television or CRT emits, even if I am in another room. It's not EMF, it's just the frequency of the vibrating air inside the tube every time the electron gun goes to a new line (about 16KHz). As I got older, my high-frequency hearing got worse, and now I can still hear it but it bothers me a lot less.

Of course, that's just me, maybe they really are controlling your mind and sending giant balls of ice from the sky to try and kill you.
posted by fuzz at 6:06 PM on December 11, 2003

If they were merely trying to drop balls of ice on my poor noggin I could live with that, but the implications of real-world tinfoil hat type RF/EM mind/mood control is disturbing and insidious to the extreme.

Especially considering how funny people who wear tinfoil hats are, how quickly people dismiss them out of hand, that there is already a history of such devices, and even most importantly that the US already has a history of not-so-benign testing on civilians. (MKULTRA anyone?)

And I'm not just talking about me. Being as objective as a subject being can be, I notice that people are often in 'bad moods' or 'irritable' or just plain bitchy on the same days. One day I'll go out into a vast city and everything is roses, people are smiling and practically giddy to the point of delightful surreality, the next day everyone I encounter wants to stab out my eyes with a picklefork.

The CRT whine isn't what I'm talking about either, though, that is indeed annoying. You can also - obviously - feel that static discharge at the front of a TV or CRT, which is also not what I'm asking about. You can feel the dust particles bombarding your eyes if you're not a wearer of glasses.

I'm simply trying to convey that I'm very aware of these things and their causes to delineate them from the unknown of which I speak.

I'm not even demanding that it is an intentional effect of ELF RF projects like HAARP. It could be entirely accidental, even unverifiable. But, like open air nuclear testing, like the MKULTRA project, like so many other things there has been a precedent of collateral damage. Can we start putting Pandora back in the box yet? Can't we at least play with Pandora in a nicely isolated sandbox before we start blowing holes in the only thing that keeps the sun from irradiating our chromasomes to crispy bacon?

Maybe Huxley, Orwell, and Zamaitin were completely wrong. It wasn't a boot stamping, or a drug taken, or a glass house forever. Maybe it'll be electromagnetic bombardment of our minds above and beyond any message at all. The medium is the massage? mmMeh. :\
posted by loquacious at 4:45 AM on December 12, 2003

And let's not forget the theory that posits that global warming may actually trigger another ice age event (sorry, no reference, just Google it). Short version: more warming means more water in the ocean, more water means more evaporation, more evaporation means more precipitation which means both more rain in summer and more snow in winter. At some point the snow fall is so extenisvie that it doesn't melt completely. Ice age cycle continues.

And according to some climatologists, we are not really out of the last ice age. We are lucky to be living in a brief lull between more or less continuous cold climate periods.
posted by mooncrow at 8:22 AM on December 12, 2003

mooncrow - that's not actually how the mechanism is proposed to work - here's a book about it from the US Academy of Science's National Academy Press : Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises (2002)
posted by troutfishing at 8:45 AM on December 12, 2003

Thanks troutfishing & loquacious I'll start taking a keener eye to my environment, had not realized "all" the ramifications this experiment is creating on one self. {runs to nearest hat store, asks the clerk: 1 tinfoil hat w/ ear flaps.
posted by thomcatspike at 10:14 AM on December 12, 2003

thomcatspike - you might want to provide a few of those hats to those US Congress-people and Senators who actually read those reports that the US Academy of Science prepares.
posted by troutfishing at 7:54 PM on December 12, 2003