A chain of bizarre clouds just northwest of the Florida Keys looks like a giant floating jellyfish, or maybe the UFO from the sci-fi horror film ‘Nope.’
One fishing influencer posted a video of the clouds from below on TikTok, set to the theme music from Netflix‘s horror hit ‘Stranger Things.’ But, in reality, a well-known flying object was the cause: airplanes.
Captured from above late this January, by NASA‘s Terra satellite, the ‘Cavum clouds’ are ‘so odd that people sometimes argue they are signatures of flying saucers,’ according to the US Space Agency, which released the overhead image this week.
The true source of Cavum clouds, sometimes called ‘hole-punch clouds‘ and ‘fallstreak holes,’ had eluded scientists for nearly 70 years, until meteorologists finally cracked the case in 2010.
The strange shapes, they found, are produced when aircraft fly through ‘altocumulus clouds’ — patchy banks of small clouds that form between 7,000 and 23,000 feet up.
Hellbound and Down 