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Thirteen A Sure Cure for Alligator Bites Slag fell out of the sky over Darmstadt, Germany, on June 7, 1846, according to Charles Fort. Slag! Preposterous, of course. Why, slag could no more fall out of the sky in Germany than it could over Puget Sound a century later. Fort detailed more than a dozen other slag-fall cases from the nineteenth century, always carefully listing his sources. I have taken the trouble to check out several items from the works of Fort, and I found that he was painstakingly accurate. His books, all written in the first three decades of this century, recount case after case of strange aerial phenom- ena that are identical to our modern UFO sightings. So when the late Mr. Fort informed us that 1846 was a most unusual year, we are obliged to take him seriously. Indeed, 1846 was a most extraordinary year! It not only rained blood and frogs and slag. There were strange glowing objects circling those garbage-filled skies, and our naughty poltergeists were having a field day, particularly in France. Furniture was floating around a house in La Perriere, France; rocks were being tossed in the home of M. Larible in Paris; dishes were dancing across the tables of Rambouillet, France, and in a field outside of the little town of La Salette a “miracle” was taking place. Two children, Melanie Calvet, fifteen, and Maximin Guiraud, twelve, convinced skeptical adults that they had seen a religious vision—a great globe of light hovering above the fields. It opened up, they avowed, and a smaller, brighter light moved out. It was some kind of glowing entity who spoke to them in French. The two youngsters, having been schooled in Catholicism, assumed that this entity was Our Lady. She gave them a series of prophecies, accurately predicting the terrible potato famine that struck far-off Ireland in the winter of 1846-47 and the failure