Alien hovercraft or possibly an Altocumulus lenticular cloud excites Catalina residents

I first noticed the craft as I was driving up Golder Ranch Drive. At first I thought it was just an Altocumulus lenticularis…  Really didn’t think that much about it.  We seem them over there all the time.

But it was unusually smooth, I thought, and had a slightly humped up portion on the top I could see after I zoomed in on it.   Could it be a cloaked alien space vehicle? Time would tell.

A lenticular expands and contracts while hovering over the same spot. This can go on for hours!  But, as you will see, over the next 20 minutes, this cloud, or “craft” did not change in any way, clearly evidence of a cloaked space vehicle!  Way too smooth to be a real cloud!

Since it didn’t seem to be doing anything, maybe just spying on me and us as do virtually all institutional entities these days,  I lost interest in it and continued doing yard work….

12:47 PM.
12:48 PM. Zoomed in….
1:00 PM. Seems to be taking an interest in Charlotte’s house next door, kind of floating over it. Hmmmm.
1:01 PM. After I looked away, it seemed to have leapt back over Charouleau Gap!
1:01 PM. As I zoomed out my camera, the object seemed to be getting smaller, perhaps moving away finally! I felt relieved and went back to raking the fall  leaves.  But, we don’t have leaves here, so what was that about?  Had I been infected?  Taken over?

Later, completely different looking clouds came over, Altocumulus tending toward castellanus variety…making the early afternoon smooth-looking cloud more anomalous.

2:42 PM. Bands of Altocumulus clouds worked their way over Catalina and environs, the craft or lenticular cloud long gone.  Or, wait a minute!  Is that it there on the horizon???
2:42 PM, looking farther to the SW. You can see how different these clouds look compared to the “lenticular.”

PS:  It been said that the UFO craze began with an Altocumulus lenticular cloud in the lee of Mt Rainier in the late 1940s.  Why not see if we can start a new craze right here in Catalina?  Been abducted lately?

 

The End, for now

By Art Rangno

Retiree from a group specializing in airborne measurements of clouds and aerosols at the University of Washington (Cloud and Aerosol Research Group). The projects in which I participated were in many countries; from the Arctic to Brazil, from the Marshall Islands to South Africa.

2 comments

  1. Pretty good looking “UFO”, Art. But in a lot of the books I used to read on the subject, those unidentified craft were often described more as “cigar shaped”. That cloud doesn’t quite look like a cigar to me. 🙂

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