I’m sure many of you remember this campy scifi film from 1956. Roswell on steroids.
But did you know that there is a natural phenomenon on Earth that gives rise to reports of flying saucers on a regular basis? In fact there’s a mountain near me where they congregate. Observe:
That’s Mount Shasta in northern California. It has a long history of flying saucer visitations. Why I’ve seen people channel this with piles of mashed potatoes and inverted dinner plates.
On a more serious and factual note, these are lenticular clouds, created by the standing wave that occurs as air flows over the mountain, cooling it below the dew point. The one above is from a Facebook share by Hope Devenuto Photo from Mt Shasta Ca. 10-5-11, from my freind Yoj
Lenticular clouds (Altocumulus lenticularis) are stationary lens-shaped clouds that form at high altitudes, normally aligned perpendicular to the wind direction. Lenticular clouds can be separated into altocumulus standing lenticularis (ACSL), stratocumulus standing lenticular (SCSL), and cirrocumulus standing lenticular (CCSL). Due to their shape, they are often mistaken for Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs).
Formation: Where stable moist air flows over a mountain or a range of mountains, a series of large-scale standing waves may form on the downwind side. If the temperature at the crest of the wave drops to the dew point, moisture in the air may condense to form lenticular clouds. As the moist air moves back down into the trough of the wave, the cloud may evaporate back into vapor. Under certain conditions, long strings of lenticular clouds can form near the crest of each successive wave, creating a formation known as a ‘wave cloud.’ The wave systems cause large vertical air movements and so enough water vapor may condense to produce precipitation. The clouds have been mistaken for UFOs (or “visual cover” for UFOs) because these clouds have a characteristic lens appearance and smooth saucer-like shape. Bright colors (called Irisation) are sometimes seen along the edge of lenticular clouds.[1] These clouds have also been known to form in cases where a mountain does not exist, but rather as the result of shear winds created by a front.
Here’s one attacking the Keck observatory at Mauna Kea, Hawaii in 2002
I predict it will be only a matter of time before lenticular clouds are labeled “anti-science”.
😉
While the web abounds with multitudes of UFO like lenticular cloud photos, thanks in part to digital cameras becoming almost ubiquitous in cell phones worldwide, we don’t seem to be getting any fresh credible pictures of real UFO’s …or bigfoot.
It seems that technology saturation is gradually disproving those notions.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
>>Lucy Skywalker
>>If you were to research UFO’s properly, objectively, open to
>>discovering and setting aside prejudices, as per Scientific Method,
>>you would be left in no doubt that there is something there.
Yes, indeed – and that something is disinformation and education.
There are certain groups and associations in the West who find it ‘useful’ for people to believe in alien life. And very successful this programme has been too – especially if some in the military and CIA/NSA play along too.
It is merely a continuation of the 17th century Reformation and the Enlightenment, the Twin Pillars of social reform that built the modern technical world we see all around us. And it serves a very useful social purpose, even to this day. Representations of the Twin Pillars can be destroyed, but the Twin Pillars still remain. The West will survive and prosper.
Point Left Right, Point Left Right.
.
Quote RobRoy” There’s lot of USAF stuff going on around Phoenix.
Occam’s Razor is a “UFOlogist’s” undoing.”
Generalisations based on one`s own limited understanding of a subject means Occams Razor cuts both ways.
That some people make mistakes about aerial phenomena means all people are is a logical fallacy..(not that this means ufo=aliens)or..read something like Project Identification: The first Scientific Study of UFO Phenomena by Rutledge former chairman of the physics department at Southeast Missouri State University.
Ignorance of a subject is often a “sceptics” undoing. 🙂
And paradoxically..protects their own delicate cognitive dissonance..
Here in the South Island of New Zealand we have lenticular clouds on a very regular basis, typically when the wind is mild and from the NW flowing over the spine of the Southern Alps. Sometimes we get perfect stacks of pancake clouds.
For those who mentioned gliding, we are also a prime place for gliding.
I have also seen lenticular clouds in southern England, in similar conditions (mild wind from the SW coming over the North Downs).
First thought: “Wow! That’s lovely.” Second thought, “hmmm, I wonder what the lift potential is, where the gliderport is at, do they have aero tow,” et cetera. And “ooooh, yeah, that’s why I don’t fly over the Rockies and Sierras in winter.” What makes for gleeful glider pilots sometimes causes great unhappiness for power-plane pilots and passengers.
From the trailer, Our Hero on the radio: “To the best of our knowledge, my wife and I are the only ones left alive.”
Didn’t James Lovelock write an equally fantastic science fiction story? Something about the last “breeding pairs” of human refugees in the Arctic or Antarctic, the only places still habitable after Thermageddon? Checking the Intergore…here it is:
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/james-lovelock-the-earth-is-about-to-catch-a-morbid-fever-that-may-last-as-long-as-100000-years-523161.html
Well, ZERO ‘radio traffic’* (terrestrial or othereise) has been detected, and attributed to, “UFOs” … kinda strange don’t ya think? How do they communicate?
* ALL bands and ALL wavelengths.
.
Ah, the flying saucer trick.
It’s actually just the climate communist hippie’s way, in the private that is the climate commune, of saying: No, no I’m not gay, I was just probed in the a** by out-of-towners flying big sausage sassy t’ings.
This link leads to a vulnerability in Internet Exploder for a nasty “redirect”. Please remove. Also please let the owners of this link (legitimate I believe) know that they have been compromised!
http://xxxwww.ufoevidence.xxxorg/
But but but …. Bigfoot is REAL! And he’s very sensitive too.
I actually think most UFO sightings are conventional (or at least man-made) aircraft people are misidentifying, some of it’s weather phenomena (e.g. St. Elmo’s Fire). It’s no coincidence that a lot of the UFO’s were sighted out where Skunkworks does business; then about 10 years later we get the public release of info about a stealth plane or new surveillance craft. Which does, technically, make them UFO’s to the public when it was being seen during its trials. I’ve had this experience myself with the Boeing wing drone. I saw wing UFO’s one time when driving back from school, near Wright Patterson. Well, they had the same lead aspect and trailing edge as the Boeing drone, and a friend in the know has since said they were testing them out of WPAFB around that time. I had kinda assumed that anyway, since they were just flying level and they were near the base.
Mom also ran into the same thing a lot when she was with the Navy’s ATC in the 60’s and 70’s. She was also one of the points of contact for Project Blue Book. She said most of it was people seeing the fighters out of the test range on their base at night, but they had a few incidents where ‘something’ was flying rings around the prototypes; and one time they had ‘something’ doing high-speed fly overs with random stops to hover over the nuclear weapons bunkers. So, who knows.
>Well, ZERO ‘radio traffic’* (terrestrial or othereise) has been detected, and attributed to,
>“UFOs” … kinda strange don’t ya think? How do they communicate?
A friend who’s in the quantum computing field says there’s, in theory, some sort of paired set of molecule that has the same electrical state no matter the distance between them due to some quantum mechanics wonkery I don’t really understand. They want to use them in quantum computing so you can get rid of the copper cables and buses making a speed bottleneck. You could also theoretically use it to make a ‘faster than light’ communications device that has an signal that can’t be intercepted or jammed. They haven’t made any stable examples yet, so not sure how feasible it is, or if it’s one of those works in theory but not in practice things.
If aliens actually do contact us one day, a lot of people are going to be seriously disappointed to discover they are God fearing conservative capitalists, who have grown past post-normal science.
Otherwise, they’d never have gotten off their own planet.
That doesn’t mean they’re all not. Pretty clouds, but some things your pretty little cynics can’t explain.
Dave Springer;
It seemed like a reasonable question given the lengths you went to fool people in your community into thinking they’d seen a flying saucer.>>>
It wasn’t reasonable at all, anymore than suggesting me and the boys drugged homeless people and gave them anal probes.
As for your time in the marine corps, thank you for your service. As for Mr Smith and Mr. Wesson, hand guns are illegal where I am for the express reason that some people think they should be able to defend themselves with a gun from a punch in the face in return for a remarkably rude insult.
I wasn’t threatening you, I was making a point that your accusation was disgusting and rude. Further, if you stopped to ponder for a moment the point of my comment, it was that very simple things when observed without context get reported back as being as big as football stadiums and travelling three times the speed of sound. I knew some guys that would fly their crop dusters at night over town, in formation, and cut the engines and glide so that they were silent and only the wing markers showing that produced equally astonishing results. I even knew some lads who made crop circles with hockey sticks and when they came clean, they were excoriated for lying about what they had done by “experts” who could “prove” that the crop circles could not have been produced with a hockey stick. (Remarkable what hockey sticks got accused of back in the 70’s!)
Your apology is accepted.
davidmhoffer says:
October 9, 2011 at 1:15 pm
I saw one of those in Pittsburgh while walking back to the dorm. I was trying to gauge the scale of the thing, and not doing too well, until one of the “lights” descended and went out. I quickly deduced a candle reached the bottom and fell off the holder. The speed of the fall, the color, and brightness all suddenly made sense and I deduced it was a dry cleaner bag UFO.
Our two stage rocket motor assembly with balsa wood fins and a cherry bomb on top fired slightly toward Schenley Park made a very nice Whoosh/whoosh/flash/pop sequence. I never have understood why people put Estes motors inside models of famous rockets. A little balsa wood and Elmers glue works great and you don’t worry about things getting stuck in a tree or on a roof. 🙂
Well, you do need the cherry bomb to know how high it got.
Ric Werme;
Our two stage rocket motor assembly with balsa wood fins and a cherry bomb on top fired slightly toward Schenley Park made a very nice Whoosh/whoosh/flash/pop sequence.>>>
Yeah, wish I’d discovered balsa wood sooner. I might have actually got one of the rockets I built in high school to get off the ground. I was trying to build a solid fuel rocket with my own home made solid fuel. I first one I got to “leave the ground” did so in many pieces scattered over a wide area. After that, blowing stuff up just seemed so much easier and more exciting than building a rocket 😉
Godzilla probably arrived in this UFO. Or maybe Mothra.
Recently a USAF officer reported seeing lights. I always remembered his quote: The lights “…were not of this world.”
Turns out they were flares used in a training exercise.
And you could probably cause a stir with these.
Finally, we had better hope there are no advanced civilizations nearby. They’d think half the population was retards. Oh, wait…
They detect the radio signals from the phones and stay away. Obviously.
@Layne Blanchard
“But but but …. Bigfoot is REAL! And he’s very sensitive too.”
He, or she, might have been, once, but as you might have noticed, the Chines don’t eat big feet no more only poor little cute dogs.
>>
Why I’ve seen people channel this with piles of mashed potatoes and inverted dinner plates.
<<
Wasn’t that Devils Tower, Wyoming?
>>
John Doyle says:
October 9, 2011 at 10:45 am
That is Mt. Ranier in Central Western Washington.
<<
It sure looks like Mt. Rainier to me, too.
My daughter took this picture from her neighborhood on December 5, 2008, of similar clouds over Mt. Rainier. You can just see the mountain peak over the houses. The cloud formation has moved slightly to the east.
>>
These clouds have also been known to form in cases where a mountain does not exist, but rather as the result of shear winds created by a front.
<<
Dr. David Legates once gave a talk about GCMs where bands of clouds form across the Pacific. These are probably standing wave phenomena too. Dr. Legates said that to simulate the effect, the modelers added mountain ranges in the middle of the pacific ocean. Ever hear of the mid-ocean Pacific mountain ranges?
Jim
@ur momisugly Hoser says:
October 9, 2011 at 1:05 pm
Who says we have to have a predefined destination? Perhaps it’s the journey that matters. Besides we are not standing still “right here”. Our entire galaxy is moving at a pretty good clip and accelerating along with the rest as the universe expands. Within our galaxy our star system is also on the move, and last I heard has been doing so for the past several billion years, Earth time.
Expand your mind. 😉
davidmhoffer says:
October 9, 2011 at 4:13 pm
“It wasn’t reasonable at all, anymore than suggesting me and the boys drugged homeless people and gave them anal probes.”
Butchering dead livestock and leaving it somewhere with no obvious way that it got there isn’t illegal or even immoral near as I can tell, at least no more illegal or immoral than faking a UFO. The thing you describe with a homeless person is assault and battery, possibly kidnapping, and very likely a number of other federal offenses a DA would conjure up.
“As for your time in the marine corps, thank you for your service.”
You’re welcome. I’d do it again in a heartbeat.
“As for Mr Smith and Mr. Wesson, hand guns are illegal where I am for the express reason that some people think they should be able to defend themselves with a gun from a punch in the face in return for a remarkably rude insult.”
Where I’m from people don’t resort to physical violence for the express reason they could get themselves shot dead for doing it because you just never know who’s packing and they have a right to defend themselves. I’ve lived in places where concealed handguns are legal and where they are illegal. I prefer the former. It’s much more civilized and bullies with fast fists have no advantage over weaker people. We have a saying “God didn’t make all men equal. Samuel Colt did.”
“I wasn’t threatening you, I was making a point that your accusation was disgusting and rude.”
Get over it.
“Further, if you stopped to ponder for a moment the point of my comment, it was that very simple things when observed without context get reported back as being as big as football stadiums and travelling three times the speed of sound. I knew some guys that would fly their crop dusters at night over town, in formation, and cut the engines and glide so that they were silent and only the wing markers showing that produced equally astonishing results. I even knew some lads who made crop circles with hockey sticks and when they came clean, they were excoriated for lying about what they had done by “experts” who could “prove” that the crop circles could not have been produced with a hockey stick. (Remarkable what hockey sticks got accused of back in the 70′s!)”
This is what mature adults do for entertainment?
“Your apology is accepted.”
I didn’t offer you an apology. I didn’t mean to offend you but I don’t really care if I did.
[End of issue. It doesn’t need to be discussed further here. Robt]
Smokey says:
. . .Recently a USAF officer reported seeing lights. I always remembered his quote: The lights “…were not of this world.”
You do mean a former USAF officer, Smokey.
And those former airline pilots who reported UFO’s do not exist, either.
Nope.
Anthony,
That’s three new acronyms you’ve got there.
The Wikipedia source needs strengthening.
NOAA has definitions for ACSL & CCSL but not for SCSL.
There is a wealth of images for Altocumulus Standing Lenticular , as this thread shows
Can anyone identify clear examples of pictures of Stratocumulus Standing Lenticular?
For discussion APOD 21 January 2009
I have this example from NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day for 26 March 2003 as a possible Cirrocumulus Standing Lenticular.
The photographer Mark Meyer tells me that he took this picture at dusk one evening towards the end of January in Southern Wyoming, just off interstate 80 near Cheyenne. The long wisp to the left of the cloud mass looks like a mare’s tail, this suggests to me that the cloud was producing ice crystals which remained caught up in the downstream flow.
If you are going to believe what the government says about UFO’s then maybe you should also believe in government sponsored man made climate disruption, that inflation is only 3+%, unemployment only ~9%, that Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter (Cheney under Bush) or that they do (Repub. congress under Obama), that the CPI is accurate (changed ~20 times since 1980), that the Glass-Steagall Act was an unnecessary hindrance to banking, that only about 1 trillion was spent on the 2008 bailout (try 16), that the Iraq invasion was necessary, that most Wall Street trading is NOT being done by preprogrammed corporate owned machines in millisecond trades, that that there are in fact no government conspiracies because they would never ever lie to you.
And wasn’t it also done using shaving cream?