UFO News: Cloud-Shaped UFO Drifts Over Texas Desert, Experts Baffled [Video]

The UFO News community is abuzz after an Arizona UFO hunter captured what he claims is a shape-shifting UFO fluttering about behind the clouds over the Texas desert, the Mirror is reporting.

UFO hunter Anthony Sakowski posted the video below on January 6, but it’s not clear, as of this writing, when he captured the footage.

In fact, Sakowski doesn’t say much at all about his UFO video, beyond answering one commenter’s question about where he filmed it (in or near Van Horn, Texas, in case you were wondering).

For those who can’t watch the video posted above, not much happens beyond the videographer driving down a desert road, filming the alleged UFO. The driver/videographer — presumably Sakowski — doesn’t say anything in the way of narration.

Based on the title of the video, it seems that Sakowski is convinced he’s seen a UFO based on the shape of the cloud, and the fact that it appears to be lit from behind (the Sun, by way of comparison, is above and to the left of the cloud).

Not everyone is convinced that Sakowski captured a UFO. Some commenters are more convinced that what he’s captured is what’s known as a lenticular cloud. Lens-shaped lenticular clouds are often mistaken for UFOs.

However, UFO expert Scott C. Waring isn’t convinced that what was captured that day is a lenticular cloud. He says the way the cloud reflects light discounts it being a natural phenomenon.

“The UFO was noticed when the sun lit it up and caused a disk reflection above it on the clouds. Only a metal reflective surface could do this, and, as you see, the dark area of the cloud is the actual UFO.”

In fact, the sun, moon, stars, planets, and sky all conspire to create phenomena that, to the human eye, defies explanation and are often mistaken for UFOs. Another common atmospheric event often mistaken for UFOs is the sun dog (or sundog).

As Sky and Telescope explains, a sundog occurs when the Sun is in just the right place in the sky, and atmospheric conditions are just right, to cast the sunlight in a way that the observer on the ground observes to or even three “suns” in the sky. In some cases, the mock sun is mistaken for a UFO. Reading Richard Tresch Fienberg’s description, you can see why:

“Sundogs form, often in pairs on either side of our daytime star, when sunlight refracts through icy clouds containing hexagonal platecrystals aligned with their large, flat faces parallel to the ground. Technically known as parhelia, singular parhelion, they are often white but sometimes quite colorful, looking like detached pieces of rainbow, with red on the inside, toward the Sun, and blue on the outside.”

And of course, there’s always the good, old-fashioned psychological phenomenon known as “pareidolia.” It’s the tendency of the human brain to assign meaning to random stimulus when there is no meaning to be found. It’s the same phenomenon that convinces people that they’re seeing the Virgin Mary in a tortilla shell or Jesus Christ in a piece of toast.

So you’ve got a more-or-less oval-shaped cloud, lit in a weird way by the way the Earth’s atmosphere scatters light, the phenomenon of pareidolia, and a UFO hunter who really wants to see a UFO, and you’ve got a perfect storm of conditions that will lead a guy to believe he’s captured a UFO hiding behind a cloud.

Or he actually captured a UFO hiding behind a cloud.

[Featured Image by Mumemories/Shutterstock]