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You may have seen the pictures - a dark, funnel-shaped wind roars across a flat plain, tearing up houses and lifting objects into the air. It’s a tornado. Early American pioneers traveling across the Great Plains reported seeing tornadoes suck up bison, carry them a while, and then spit them out. In April 1986, a family tried to outrun a tornado in a pickup truck. The twister swept over the vehicle, sucking their four-year-old girl into its funnel. She was never seen again. Tornadoes running over barnyards have torn the feathers right off chickens. Winds have snatched blankets off beds, leaving sleepers unharmed. Another tornado once picked up a train from its track and set the engine down facing the other way but on an opposite track. A 1944 tornado in West Virginia sucked the whole West Fork River dry. One woman tried to hide from a tornado in a closet beneath a stairway in her house. When she came out after the storm, she found that the closet and stairway were all that was left of the building! Yet another twister destroyed a house, carried its refrigerator a quarter of a mile, and then dropped it on the roof of a bank.

Tornadoes can be very dangerous and destructive, but amazingly gentle as well. One tornado once transported a crate of eggs 500 yards without breaking a single shell. Mirrors have been carried far distances and then set down, unbroken. A jar of pickles traveled 25 miles intact within a tornado.

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