Unexplained Mysteries – Mysterious Clouds

For many years, people have often passed the time by observing clouds in the sky to try to identify the different shapes that might represent some known familiar object to them. However, not all clouds can be explained away by referring to the normal atmospheric conditions at the time. Over the last hundred years or so, there have been numerous unexplained sightings of mysterious clouds and includes a sighting in 1814 at Agen in France, after an unusual white cloud was observed floating through the sky when it suddenly began to spin before exploding in a shower of rocks and stones. In 1870, the crew on the Bark, Lady of the Lake, sighted a strange circular cloud drift over their heads with a strange semicircle divided into four parts, and entered the occurrence in the ship’s log. In another case, in 1913, a weekly weather review from Fort Worth, Texas, reported a mysterious unseen body within a cloud formation.

In the last twenty five years, there has been an increasing number of strange-looking clouds appearing in the skies, and in 2007, a NASA satellite observed mysteriously shaped clouds floating over America that usually appear over the Polar Regions. In July 2009, there was an increase in the sightings of these eerie shaped clouds across Europe and America. There are some, who suggest the phenomenon is due to global warming, forcing changes in the global weather conditions. While there are others, who say the clouds are signs of pending changes to the Earth and the fulfilment of unexplained ancient prophecies. The clouds are unusually bright in the night sky with a number of scientists referring to them as Noctilucent or night-shinning clouds. They have theorised that the clouds are formed by ice, a build-up of carbon dioxide and a sharp drop in temperature at the boundary of the earth’s atmosphere, some fifty miles above Earth. They suggest that the unusual brightness of the clouds is due to them being up so high and are still being illuminated by the Sun, long after it is below the Earth’s horizon.

However, in 2009, there were sightings of strange bolts of lighting accompanying the clouds. The phenomenon, seen by hundreds of people, was quite different to the usual lighting strikes because the bolts shot upwards from the cloud, like gigantic jets of light, and appeared to continue going up until they hit something. There have been suggestions that the bolts eventually hit the Ionosphere or the top layer of the Earth’s atmosphere that is made up of electrically charged atoms. Another atmospheric scientist, James Russell from Hampton University, and principal investigator for the NASA cloud study mission, has suggested that the questions of, why so many and why so bright, remains unanswered. After the first sightings of these mysterious clouds were recorded in the 1800s, there have been many theories and explanations proposing that temperature changes were the cause of the strange clouds, but Russell believes that it’s not that simple and the evidence remains inconclusive.