A
video purporting to show a mass of skyscrapers towering above clouds in
the Chinese city of Foshan has gone viral, sparking talk of parallel
universes and even secret NASA plans to fake the second coming of Jesus
(really).
Oh, and some boring science junk involving thermal inversions and stuff. Scientists.
There's just one more possibility: The brief video glimpse of buildings hovering in the sky could be a fake.
After
all, despite claims in media reports that hundreds or even thousands of
people witnessed the event, there's just one video of the scene, and
none of the thousands of purported witnesses seems to have come forward
to talk about it.
At
least none of them is quoted in the approximately 40 billion breathless
articles, posts and tweets on the topic since the video popped up on
YouTube in early October.
Freaky, those
posters say. Scary. Chilling, even! Maybe even evidence, some wondered
aloud, of NASA's Project Blue Beam -- apparently an effort by the space
agency to broadcast holograms of the Rapture to all corners of the globe
at once in support of a totalitarian takeover of Earth by the New World
Order (just thinking out loud here, but wouldn't a bunch of guns and
tanks and stuff be easier?).
If it is
that, China is obviously in on it. State-run CCTV reported last week
that the "authenticity of the footage was under doubt," saying it could
not trace the video to its original source (we can't, either).
"After
analyzing, meteorologists claimed that the video was actually a fake,
saying that the natural environment in the location makes it impossible
to form such atmospheric phenomenon," the broadcaster reported.
Mythbusting site Snopes.com also weighs in on the side of fakery.
Now, it's also possible that this was a real, uh, mirage.
Something
called a fata morgana has been behind some weird sightings throughout
the ages and is often called on to explain ships that seem to float
above the water or distorted shapes above the horizon.
Such
phenomena are caused by light rays being bent by extremely dense air
trapped by alternating layers of warm and cold, CNN meteorologist
Brandon Miller said.
The mirage causes
observers to mistake the true location and sometimes shape of a distant
object, which can be distorted and repeated by the phenomenon in strange
ways, Miller said.
Of the China video,
if authentic, he said, "it could just be an island that's stacked many
times on top of itself, or it could be buildings."
Then again, it could be fake.
Or NASA holograms of heaven.
(CNN)
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