By James Donahue

It doesn’t take a lot of searching to find them . . . those news clippings about strange and unexplained phenomena that defy all of the rules that we think are in place for the normal operation of our world.

Here are a few of the latest anomalies plucked from news reports within recent months:

The unexplained 400-pound boulder high in the fork of a chestnut oak tree in Yellowwood State Forest, near Unionville, Indiana, is no more. Either the mere weight of the rock, a wind storm, or just old age caused the tree to fall bringing the rock it held crashing with it to the ground.

For many years Gobbler’s Rock, so-called because a turkey hunter found it, was a popular tourist attraction. People had to hike a ways through the woods to see it, but there it was, a large four-foot-wide rock wedged about 30 feet up in the tree. The mystery, of course, was whether it was hoisted there by pranksters using a crane, or if the tree grew up under it? Whatever happened, its existence defied logic and drew curio-seekers.

Then there was a mysterious tree fell in the Patagonian Forest in Argentina. All of the trees in a space measuring about the size of an average city block in the forest near Ushuaia were found uprooted and lying in a north to south direction. The site brings to mind the Tunguska event of 1908 in remote northern regions of Siberia, except on a much smaller scale. Residents of the area even talk of having seen fireballs plunging from the sky days before the toppled trees were noticed.

Part of the Patagonian mystery lies in the fact that none of the trees appear burned. Also at the northern part of the site, the tree trunks were severed about six or seven meters from the ground, suggesting that something very large struck the trees with a force strong enough to snap the trunks and knock them all flat. But what was it? There is no sign of wreckage of an aircraft, and no debris from a falling meteor. Just a section of trees lying flattened, and all lying in the same direction. Suggestions of a strange wind, or tornado have been mostly ruled out because of the way the trees fell.

While on the subject of odd things falling out of the sky, we will examine the giant ice ball, the size of a microwave, that recently fell from a clear sky into a parking lot in Douglasdale, South Africa. It was witnessed by Sizwe Sofika and S’Wester Mova, two security guards employed at the Fontana de la Vita complex who said the giant ice block hit the paved parking area with enough force to leave a small crater. They said the ice shattered on impact and melted away quickly.

Research by a NASA-affiliated scientist has suggested that the object may have been the first “megacrvometeors” to be recorded in Africa. And Madrid Professor Jesus Martinex-Frias, head of the Planetary Geology Laboratory at Centro de Astrobiologia, and an authority on the megacrvometeor phenomenon, suggests that the fall in that part of the world may be a portent of serious environmental problems.

Frias, who has written papers on the subject, said that “megacrvometeors are not the classical big hailstones, ice from aircraft (waste), nor the simple result of icing processes at high altitudes.” He said the very name of these massive ice blocks was coined to identify “large atmospheric ice conglomerations, which, despite sharing many textural, hydrochemical and isotopic features detected in large hailstones, are formed under clear sky conditions.”