The Truth About 'Fata Morgana,' Oceanic Mirages

In 2015, video footage from Jiangxi and Foshan, China, emerged of what appeared to be a floating city in the cloud. Out of all the wacky explanations outlined on Indian Express – aliens, conspiracies, NASA experiments, hoaxes, and the like — CCTV got it right in 2019 with their headline regarding a similar sighting in Yantai (viewable on YouTube): "Breathtaking Mirage Appears in East China." To the naked eye, it really does look like the boxy outlines of apartment buildings studding a clouded sky. So what exactly is going on? For that matter, why does a road shimmer on the horizon on a hot summer day?  

As Jill Coleman, atmospheric scientist at Ball State University, offhandedly says at National Geographic, "It's called a superior mirage, which just means it's an upward projecting mirage." As Wired explains, a superior mirage — what we've dubbed fata morgana — appears when colder temperatures hover under warmer temperatures, known as a "thermal inversion." Light from a distant object, even one beyond the visible cut-off of Earth's curvature, passes through the colder, denser air, and is refracted down. To the eye, the light is processed at a higher height — hence floating, distant objects like city apartments and Flying Dutchmen. In the opposite case — an "inferior mirage" — hot air trapped under cold air projects the mirage down. Hence the whole "oasis in a desert" thing, or "shimmering road horizon" thing, which is actually just the sky.

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