I’m still working on my "Runners Up" post about the (almost) best images of 2006, but in the meantime, feast your eyes on a page containing dozens of incredible cloud images. I have seen a lot of these kinds of clouds myself (lenticular clouds are awesome, and weird). How many have you seen?
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Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He has written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic, and fights misuses of science as well as praising the wonder of real science.
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December 29th, 2006 at 4:13 pm
They’re not clouds. They’re UFOs I tell ya! U! F O! s!
(Surely that’s the more rational answer.
)
December 29th, 2006 at 4:45 pm
Here’ some supplemental and impressive cloud imagery:
http://www.extremeinstability.com/
You may recognize some of the photos which were blatantly ripped off for a hurricane Katrina email hoax a while ago (I am sure we’ll see them again).
December 29th, 2006 at 5:26 pm
I have to say if I saw some of these clouds with my own eyes, in the flesh, I would be pretty convinced I was looking at UFO’s.
Are you absolutely sure they’re all clouds?
December 29th, 2006 at 6:04 pm
I for one welcome our new brain slug overlords.
December 29th, 2006 at 6:12 pm
Phil,
Growing up in Boulder, Colorado, we were treated to lenticulars many times throughout the years. Some of the first photographs I took were of these beautiful, ethereal shapes.
December 29th, 2006 at 6:17 pm
Prsonally, I think these objects are so obviously clouds that it would be impossible for someone to mistake them for UFOs. The Lenticular Clouds explanation for UFO sightings is one that I think is, at best, laughable and, at worst, an insult to the intelligence of the observer.
December 29th, 2006 at 7:49 pm
Sadly, I’ve seen lenticular clouds in UFO magazines. Typically identified as a UFO or as a “hiding place” for the aliens. A lenticular cloud is stationary relative to the ground as the air moves through it, so some UFOlogists make up a story about it being unnatural for the cloud to not move, so it must be the work of aliens.
Mountain wave is also the motive power for sailplanes (gliders) to fly very long distances. The current world record was set in Argentina along the southern Andes and are in the 2,000 – 3,000 km range. See http://records.fai.org/gliding/current.asp?id1=DO&id2=1 for some current distances and speeds. Most of these fligths are made parallel to the mountain range and perpendicular to the prevailing wind which is typically 50-100 mph at the altitudes (15,000′ – 25,000′) the gliders fly.
In the USA, the Sierra Nevada mountains in eastern CA throught NV have made it possible to fly over 2,000 km in a single flight.
December 29th, 2006 at 10:42 pm
Lenticular clouds usually form over mountains, but occasionally they form over thunderstorms. This lenticular cloud formed as the thunderhead was rising through a layer of faster-moving air. Within two minutes, the thunderhead had swallowed the lenticular cloud. The cloud was over 30,000 feet high.
http://xpda.com/junkmail/junk182/P1070427.jpg
http://xpda.com/junkmail/junk182/P1070428.jpg
December 29th, 2006 at 10:45 pm
I’ve never seen these before! But there are no mountains near where I live, so I suppose that’s not really a surprise. Thanks for the link!
December 30th, 2006 at 2:01 am
WOW!
December 30th, 2006 at 5:13 am
Those pictures are stunning! Thank you for the link! Now what I’d really like to see is time lapse video of lenticular clouds forming.
J. D.
December 30th, 2006 at 9:32 am
Nice pictures on that site, but the commentary from the site’s creator is not very critical of “alternative” viewpoints, especially regarding lenticular clouds as “angel cloud ships”. He uses that awful old standard “everyone has a right to their own opinion about how these clouds are formed” (paraphrase). Uh, no they don’t, especially since we know exactly how they’re formed.
December 30th, 2006 at 11:28 am
Bob, your cloud photos are more likely to be pileus not Lenticular as the cloud is formed by being pushed up by the rising thunderhead rather than flowing over it. If it was rising through a layer of faster-moving air, the fast moving air would have a noticeable effect on the thunderhead which does not seem to be the case.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pileus_(meteorology)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Cb-with-Pileus.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Cumulonimbus-With-Pileus.jpg
December 30th, 2006 at 1:39 pm
Strange objects in slowly rotating clouds are a common sight in desert areas especially in the later hours of a hot sunny day. They form as the remains of a dust devil disperse high above the ground with its load of trash bags, newspapers, shrink wrap, and other debries. I have often seen it rain trash from a clear blue sky over El Paso, Texas. That might be what the picture shows but the clouds look a bit too light to be clouds of dust.
December 30th, 2006 at 6:24 pm
[...] Peter links to Bad Astronomy for the top 10 astronomy images of 2006, where I also found this page on natural cloud formations that look totally sci-fi. [...]
December 30th, 2006 at 6:25 pm
I’m with Jamas. ALIENS!
Sadly, I’ve only seen them in photos.
December 31st, 2006 at 1:06 am
Very good. I never saw a lenticular clouds, maybe they are uncommon in my Region. The site has a photo from Rio de Janeiro, where I live, that show a very typical group of clouds that can form very interesting shapes.
January 2nd, 2007 at 3:05 pm
[...] Posted: Tuesday, January 02, 2007 4:55 PM by Alan Boyle More than 3,000 reports of unidentified flying objects were sent to the National UFO Resource Center over the past year - but not one has generated as much buzz as November’s sighting at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. Was it a metallic-shaped object, rising through the clouds, or nothing more than a meteorological oddity? It’s hard to figure out whether the truth is really out there, but one thing is for sure: Clouds can do some positively alien-looking things. Peter Davenport, the UFO center’s director, says the buzz over the O’Hare sighting is fully justified. “In my opinion, because I know the quality of the witnesses, and because I know the nature of the documents that were generated, it is one of the most dramatic cases of the year 2006 that this center has handled,” Davenport told me today from the center’s headquarters in Washington state. On the other side, NBC News space analyst James Oberg – a longtime UFO skeptic - says the evidence that’s come to light so far isn’t all that compelling. “It’s just sad that we keep getting these reports which are of zero evidential value,” he told me. “It’s sad because there’s a lot of strange stuff in the air that we do need to know.” Davenport’s center put out the first reports on the O’Hare sighting weeks ago, but the report really picked up traction over the holiday weekend, when The Associated Press picked up a Chicago Tribune story about the case (free registration required). Here are the basics: Employees at O’Hare reported seeing a dark gray, seemingly spinning disc hovering above Concourse C – at an estimated altitude of hundreds of feet, close to the cloud cover. The disc appeared to fly up at a rapid rate, leaving behind a hole in the clouds. The Federal Aviation Administration acknowledged that it received a sighting report, but agency spokeswoman Elizabeth Isham Cory said no further follow-up was planned. “Our theory on this is that it was a weather phenomenon,” she told the Tribune. ”That night was a perfect atmospheric condition in terms of low ceiling and a lot of airport lights. When the lights shine up into the clouds, sometimes you can see funny things.” Case closed? Not so fast, Davenport said. “I am certain that the airline and the FAA are now attempting to conceal the true nature of the incident,” Davenport said. So far, about a dozen witnesses – all affiliated with the airport or airlines – have surfaced, according to the Tribune. Davenport said he’s not yet aware of any reports from outsiders. “Trying to find the actual eyewitnesses is very difficult,” he said. “My suspicion is that there are a great many more. … You ask, are there other witnesses? My response is, almost certainly. How do we find them, and how do we get them to come forward?” One of the airport witnesses did take a photo of the phenomenon, but is reluctant to make it public out of concern for his job, Davenport said. “So far, over almost two months, we’ve been unable to get that,” he said. I have a feeling that even photographic evidence wouldn’t settle the case. There are so many weird atmospheric phenomena out there that even crystal-clear pictures could be interpreted either as UFOs or as cloud patterns. For example, check out this roundup of lenticular clouds (offered with a big tip o’ the Log to Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy Blog). Even knowing what they are, you’d be hard-pressed not to see them as flying saucers worthy of a Steven Spielberg blockbuster. The idea that the disk left a hole in the clouds might sound like an atmospheric vortex phenomenon – perhaps like the vortices created when airplanes zoom through clouds. This Web page includes a video of an airplane leaving a dark, indistinct vortex in its wake. Other weird phenomena are reminiscent of smoke rings. When I suggested that the O’Hare incident might have been a vortex created by an airplane rising through the clouds, Davenport shot me right down. “You can conjecture all day long on that point if you wish to do so, but it’s futile in this case,” he said. “First of all, airplanes don’t fly over [terminal] gates, they fly over runways. So your surmise, I think, is not appropriate in this case. … This object was seen by many people to accelerate so fast and go straight up in the clouds that their eyes were unable to follow it.” To be fair, Davenport’s center has been taking such cases seriously for 32 years – longer than I’ve been a professional journalist. So who am I to question the reports, particularly when they seem so authoritative? The O’Hare incident is being taken more seriously than most sightings because the reports are coming from aviation professionals rather than untrained onlookers. But Oberg argues that the professionals don’t always make the best eyewitnesses because they tend to favor flight-related explanations for what they see. “NTSB investigators say that the worst observers of an aviation accident are aviation personnel,” Oberg said. “It’s because a pilot will usually want to understand what happened, and in his initial perceptions and later retellings will stress the facts that support his initial interpretation.” Oberg pointed to a couple of case studies in pilot misperception, investigated in detail years ago. And just for good measure, he passed along Web links to a Russian UFO report from 2001 that sounds similar to the O’Hare incident, plus the solution to a UFO mystery that came up just last week in Europe. Oberg said the European case was particularly instructive, because the specifics about the mysterious glow in the sky helped investigators quickly figure out that it was most likely a cloud trail left behind by a Russian rocket launch. Without such specifics, the O’Hare incident may turn out to be little more than another “missed opportunity,” Oberg said. In any case, the incident is making for an interesting tale, and that has led Cosmic Log correspondents to add more UFO tales to a posting I published back in June. Feel free to offer up your own story here in the comments section, even if it’s decades old. If you’ve got a recent sighting, you might want to let Davenport know as well – you can find the contact details at his Web site. [...]
January 3rd, 2007 at 6:47 am
Cool clouds. How do the aliens make them so cool looking?
January 3rd, 2007 at 12:06 pm
There was a lenticular cloud sitting over the summit of Mt. McKinley when we were at Denali National Park for our honeymoon. That was the first time I ever heard the term.
January 3rd, 2007 at 12:44 pm
Clouds vs. UFO’s??? You’re joking right? Clouds don’t travel at high rates of speed. Nor, appear outside the stratosphere making right angle turns and leaving
‘orbit’ at 45 degree trajectories.
January 3rd, 2007 at 6:27 pm
Why do so many people come out so fast shoot down every UFO sighting with outlandish explanations? What are they afraid of? Aviation experts are well versed in atmospheric and manmade aerial phenomenon. Who said they were aliens? UFO stands for unidentified flying object. I just don’t get why throngs of skeptics always come out and claim that there is an absolutely certain explanation for every UFO. They think we are so high and mighty that no other beings or country could ever make a more sophisticated vehicle than our own. The most likely explanation is that our airspace is being violated by another country on this planet that has developed a unique, groundbreaking aircraft. Quit insulting our intelligence. Those are some beautiful clouds, but they bear no resemblance to UFO’s.
January 4th, 2007 at 3:21 am
It’s the mothership!!
Take me to your dealer!! ,.|…
January 4th, 2007 at 11:43 am
It is funny how these same people that come up with outlandish explanations to classify all UFOs discredit the witnesses and people with alternative viewpoints when they cannot discredit the facts. I am sure multiple pilots with photographs who have built entire careers that hinge on the ability to identify weather patterns and aircraft must be on drugs as well. People place their lives in their hands every day and they placed their careers on the line to report what they saw. Science cannot begin to identify a phenomenon until people admit that there is something unidentified. When every single solid sighting with multiple sane professionals and photos is wrongly blown off as a known object, science is hampered. Science is being hurt in this society by ignorance on a range of topics. Science is debated through data, evidence, and theory not personal attacks. I am amazed at the credentials of some of the people who do not understand this.
January 8th, 2007 at 10:11 am
[...] Tengo la sensación de que incluso la evidencia fotográfica no resolverá el caso. Hay muchos fenómenos atmosféricos extraños haya fuera que incluso las fotos claras como el cristal se podrÃan interpretar como ovnis o como patrones de nubes. Por ejemplo, chequen estas nubes lenticulares (ofrecidas como tip del blog de Phil Plait Bad Astronomy). Aún sabiendo lo que son, tú estarÃas apremiado en no verlas como verdaderos platillos voladores. [...]
January 15th, 2008 at 9:36 am
They’re from Nebiru – Planet X – our sister dwarf star on an eliptical plane – arriving between a planet near you in 2012 – They’ve come to harvest the human crops they planted during the Sumarians – but they didn’t know we would have nukes so they are probing for weakneses. Nanu-Nanu Mr. Shazbot…..I mean Greetings David Flynn…!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axRecXZHCeQ&feature=related