Last week, people the world across were in a state of absolute shock after a video of what appeared to be a floating city above the clouds surfaced online. Turns out, the “floating city” was something that residents of Jiangxi and Foshan – two towns in China – actually witnessed. The city apparently came to a standstill, with people standing in the street and looking at the mirage, which gave the impression of towering skyscrapers emerging from the clouds. The eerie mirage appeared first in Foshan and, a couple of days later, in Jiangxi. The illusion persisted only for a few minutes in both cases, disappearing as abruptly as it had emerged. Many attribute the floating city to have supernatural origins, while others claim that the mirage was a portal into a parallel universe.

The number of theories discussed also attribute the “floating city” to be part of NASA’s secret project – “Project Blue Beam” –  aimed at faking the second coming of Christ using holograms in order to start a New World Order. And while many did take this conspiracy theory too far, meteorologists point at a natural phenomenon that has nothing to do with either NASA or parallel universes, and it is called “Fata Morgana” – a phenomenon that projects distorted images of a real object onto land or air.

The Fata Morgana occurs as the result of something called thermal inversion, when warm air sits above a column of cool air, unlike in normal weather conditions. The different temperatures of the columns of air mean that they also have different densities, and this leads to bending of the rays of light that may – and inevitably will – pass through them, and this refraction leads one to think that an object is somewhere, whereas, in reality, it might be elsewhere. This is perhaps the same reason that a whole city seemed to have been suspended mid-air in two cities in China.

Assuming that the video is not doctored in one way or another, Fata Morgana sounds like a plausible theory, and one much less terrifying that possible NASA conspiracies. However, there is another contradiction to the possibility of the mirage being a case of Fata Morgana, which says that it was not physically possible because it requires stable air conditions and, on the day of the illusion taking place, Foshan had experienced thunderstorms. Additionally, most of the images projected due to the Fata Morgana are inverted or twisted in some manner, and usually appear above the horizon, while neither was true in this case. People also claim that given the fact that apparently thousands of people saw it, it seems highly impossible that there is only one available footage. A number of images have surfaced since, but then again, there is always the possibility of digital manipulation.

If it is, in fact, the result of the Fata Morgana, this won’t be the first time that the phenomenon has wreaked havoc in people’s minds: the Fata Morgana has been previously responsible for casting reflections of everything from castles to boats and mountains up in the air.

In any case, there is no denying the fact that this is as creepy as it could get, and once you watch the footage, I’m sure you will agree.
[source: dailymail.co.uk]

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