Folklore | Science
Skyfish and Flying Rods: The Strangest Animals that Never Existed
How an Optical Effect Spawned a Modern-Day Legend…
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It’s easy to forget that ancient people were, individually, just as intelligent and rational as anyone today. The “superstitious peasants” weren’t just coming up with crazy stories for the sake of livening things up: they were making sense of the world around them using the best evidence available to their senses. People couldn’t see fly eggs, and maggots seemed to appear by magic as food rotted, so spontaneous generation was suggested to explain them. We didn’t learn otherwise until Louis Pasteur’s sterilization experiments in 1859. Barnacle geese never seemed to lay eggs, and goose barnacles resembled them, so it made sense that the geese hatched from the barnacles. Even mermaids aren’t entirely fantasy: sailors did, in fact, see strange humanoid figures with fishlike tails frolicking in the distance or swimming beneath the waves. They were seeing manatees.
Modern science hasn’t come close to discovering everything, but the scientific method is usually very good at marking the limits of our knowledge so that we don’t find ourselves wandering down such blind alleys again. In the 1990s, however, reports of an incredible new animal made the headlines, an invisible, airborne creature unlike anything most of us had ever imagined. While the truth behind “flying rods” turned out to be less exciting, they offer a modern example of how a sincere but mistaken effort to explain what we see can lead to the wildest folk tales.
Life Among the Clouds
Ever since the dawn of history, people have connected the fathomless depths of the ocean with the equally fathomless sky and wondered if they aren’t just two forms of the same thing. The book of Genesis describes the heavens as the waters of the firmament, and Tiamat is the Sumerian goddess of both the ocean and the cosmos. Cornish folklore also describes the sky as an ocean, and some of its fairy beings, particularly the shapeless Yuletide entity known only as “It,” are thought to be aquatic creatures that accidentally drifted too far below the clouds and fell to Earth.
Victor Hugo set some of these mythological speculations down in his 1866 maritime novel Toilers of the Sea and gave them a more rational treatment as the protagonist Gilliatt speculates about sky-based life:
He used to say, “Since the water is filled with life, why not the atmosphere?” Creatures colourless and transparent like the air would escape from our observation. What proof have we that there are no such creatures? Analogy indicates that the liquid fields of air must have their swimming habitants, even as the waters of the deep. These aerial fish would, of course, be diaphanous; a provision of their wise Creator for our sakes as well as their own. Allowing the light to pass through their forms, casting no shadow, having no defined outline, they would necessarily remain unknown to us, and beyond the grasp of human sense. Gilliatt indulged the wild fancy that if it were possible to exhaust the earth of its atmosphere, or if we could fish the air as we fish the depths of the sea, we should discover the existence of a multitude of strange animals. And then, he would add in his reverie, many things would be made clear.
More than forty years later, Arthur Conan Doyle took the same idea to a terrifying extreme in his 1913 horror tale “The Horror of the Heights,” which speculates that the upper atmosphere hosts a bizarre ecosystem filled with floating jellyfish and monstrous carnivores. While commercial jets and space travel have shown that there’s nothing quite so dramatic up there, there is a sliver of truth in that some microscopic fungi and bacteria do live in the stratosphere, and they’ve remained aloft for so long that they’ve genetically drifted from their earthbound relatives.
That’s the cultural backdrop against which the cryptozoological idea of “atmospheric beasts” arose, a theory that explained such bizarrely organic UFO sightings as the 1891 Crawfordsville Monster as giant airborne creatures that either migrated into our atmosphere from space or have always been a part of Earth’s biome without our realizing it. The idea of such otherworldly predators has left a lasting mark on monster movies, from the 1964 kaiju film Dogora to a much more recent sci-fi horror movie that I won’t spoil here, since it’s something of a plot twist.
In 1994, a particularly strange new kind of animal joined the ranks of atmospheric beasts. They were called “rods,” and, for a few brief years, their appearances in photographs all over the world became one of the most fascinating and fiercely debated topics in cryptozoology.
Look, Up in the Sky!
Rods were purportedly discovered by Jose Escamilla in 1994 while filming a UFO in Roswell, New Mexico, who went on to become the most outspoken proponent of their existence. Since their appearance in videos and photographs is a genuine phenomenon, they must have been appearing long before Escamilla first noticed them. But he did give them a name, popularized the concept, and transformed “rods” from an obscure film smudge into an intriguing new breed of mystery animal.
They appear in photographs and videos as blurry snakelike shapes moving through the air, seemingly supported by long rows of wings or fins that run along the lengths of their bodies. They seem to be anywhere from a few inches to a few feet long, though some footage that’s focused on the sky appears to show much larger ones that are much further up. Here’s one infrared video that gives a good example of the phenomenon:
Despite the early connection to Roswell and UFOs, the idea that aliens might be involved never really took hold: there were simply too many reports of flying rods coming in from all over the world. They do bear a striking resemblance to a predatory giant shrimp, Anomalocaris, that lived 500 million years ago, and Escamilla speculated that perhaps rods were some sort of evolutionary offshoot of Anomalocaris that’d left the ocean and survived to the present day as an elusive flying species.
The reason we only see them on cameras, he and others suggested, is that, even though they’re all around us, they dart too quickly through the air to be caught by the naked eye. Only the advent of high-speed footage reduced them from a subliminal blur to the unearthly shapes we now see on film. As for those bigger forms moving through the sky, they must be larger rods that remain higher in the air, a divergent species of shark-like predators, or perhaps even giant filter feeders akin to baleen whales.
It’s a dizzying concept to consider, and for several years the idea of skyfish swimming through the air all around us grabbed the public’s imagination. Unfortunately, the logic doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. No matter how fast rods move, they shouldn’t remain invisible if they’re flying parallel to our line of sight, which they appear to do quite often. Besides, estimates of their speed based on their apparent size and distance from the camera lens only amounted to ten or twenty miles per hour, hardly faster than a bicycle. And bicycles, of course, don’t turn invisible when we ride them.
A more likely explanation, according to the skeptics, was that the rods are just insects flying close to the lens and moving so quickly that the camera’s low frame rate smears out their flight path, creating copies of wings along an elongated body. Attempts to set traps and catch the rods resulted in nets full of moths and bees, and the larger rods in the sky, on closer inspection, appeared to be birds whose forms were similarly stretched out.
By 2005, the mystery had been solved for all but a few diehard enthusiasts. As digital shutter speeds and frame rates continued to improve, rods began to gradually disappear from photos — or, rather, they now began to show up as the moths, bees, and birds that the skeptics had insisted they were from the beginning. The rod phenomenon had been the byproduct of a very particular phase of camera technology when recording speeds were just good enough to pick up flying insects in mid-flight but too slow to give a clear image of them. The idea behind rods wasn’t even completely wrong: there were, in fact, elusive animals flying through the air so fast that they seemed to be invisible. It’s just that they were ordinary animals we already knew about, and they were only invisible to older cameras.
Swim On, You Crazy Skyfish
Just like the “mermaid” sightings that inspired the manatee’s scientific name Sirenia, and the barnacle geese and goose barnacles who still share each other’s names, rods were an example of people using the best evidence available to their senses (or, in this case, the senses of cameras with limited shutter speeds) and honestly coming up with a new kind of animal that, upon closer inspection, turned out to be fiction.
But, just as the speculative animals of the past live on today as creatures of fantasy and folklore, skyfish continue to inspire artists and have since appeared in everything from the anime series Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure to the Castlevania franchise (where, fittingly enough, the player has to freeze time to be able to see them). Real or not, rods are just too interesting to be discarded entirely: they’re already beginning to join the stable of fantasy beasts that include mermaids, unicorns, and the Kraken, stories that were once just misunderstandings but now have a life of their own.
And, while the number of skyfish living here on Earth seems to be zero, scientists have long speculated that such creatures could inhabit other planets like Jupiter, Saturn, and perhaps even Venus, worlds that might have a habitable cloud layer above an inhospitable interior. Such an airborne environment could host an ecosystem held aloft by wind and buoyant gases, a living sky-ocean like our ancestors imagined.
For now, rods are just an entertaining myth. But European scholars spent centuries thinking gorillas were a myth. Who knows? Maybe something like a skyfish really is out there, just waiting to be discovered.
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