This is weather beyond your wildest imagination—yet it’s all true: showers of worms from the sky, watermelon snow, gory storms, and other freakish and fun phenomena! These stories are anything but ordinary, and they will leave you stunned, horrified, amazed, and sometimes even amused at the incredible things nature can do. Gathered from historic records, present-day news reports and research studies, and spanning the globe from the Sahara to the tundra to the USA, they reveal just how volatile and bizarre weather can be.

Find out about supersized hailstones as big as bowling balls; fish raining from the sky; the never-ending lightning that has become a UNESCO National Heritage Site; and fog so thick it killed hundreds of people in a single day. And if that isn’t strange enough for you, there are terrible typhoons and tsunamis, tornadoes that have carried people into the air, temperatures that soared over 49 degrees in two minutes, and even cyclones that have raised ships buried for over a century. Scientists can explain how and why some of these things happen—but other events remain a mystery.