China's Floating City

The history of mankind is riddled with the weird and the wonderful; bizarre people, strange places and odd events. For centuries, we’ve told each other fantastic stories around campfires and in darkened rooms. Tales of ghosts, UFOs, and conspiracies, but are these stories exactly that: Stories? There’s only one way to find out! Join me as I dive down the rabbit hole and into… the Unexplained Files.

This week: China's Floating City

WTF?
 
Jiangxi, China. 7 October 2015. In the streets of Jiangxi hundreds of baffled citizens have their necks craned skyward as, in the clouds above the city is… wait for it… another city?
 
That can’t be right… *checks notes* Nope, that’s right. There was another city. In the clouds.
 
And we’re not talking some grainy, wavering, mirage-like city. It’s a full on cityscape, all straight lines and angles, with high-rise buildings and skyscrapers.
 
“Great!” I hear you cry. “Another one of those stories where people say they saw something, but nobody had a camera handy.” Only they did. Lots of them.
 
Here comes the crazy part: the folks in Jiangxi weren’t the only ones pointing their faces skyward. Y’see, two days earlier, over 500 miles away in the city of Foshan, they saw the exact same image.
 
You’re Kidding, Right?
 
The towering skyline appeared in the clouds over both cities, witnessed and photographed by thousands of baffled citizens. So what was going on?
 
A glitch in the matrix? Maybe so, but as you can imagine, the interwebs went into overdrive coming up with possible explanations. One of the most popular ideas floated (see what I did there?!) was Project Blue Beam. Hold on to your tin foil hats for this one…
 
According to the theory, BlueBeam is a NASA project that will use holographic images (amongst other things) to convince the public of one of two possible scenarios: firstly, in a series of steps that the ideas that have been built around religion are wrong, BlueBeam will be used to convince people of a second coming; and secondly, if that idea isn’t batshit crazy enough for you, BlueBeam will be used to convince folks that aliens are attacking.
 
As nuts as that sounds, the origin of such an idea comes from a real live scientist, albeit a Nazi one. But one clever enough that Uncle Sam thought was keeping around. Dr Wernher von Braun was shipped over to the US after WWII as part of Operation Paperclip, and in 1977, he made a startling deathbed confession.
 
Von Braun said the military industrial complex’s perpetual war machine would always need an enemy. At that time, it was the Russians and Communism, after that he said there would be something harder to tie down: not a single area or state, but individuals - namely terrorists. After the terrorists it would be “rogue nations”. Nations of concern like Iran, Libya, or North Korea. Then there would be the big one: the weaponisation of space, all in the name of protecting us from asteroids and cheesy Michael Bay movies. And after the asteroids, there would be E.T.  
 
Suddenly, the populace would need their government to protect them from such a threat, because how can we protect ourselves? After that, the huddled masses would gladly go along with whatever they proposed including an insidious sounding ‘One World Government’.
 
Hold Your Horses!
 
Hang on there a minute! Surely there’s a more mundane explanation?
 
Of course there is! Fata Morgana. Fata Morgana is the Italian name for Morgan le Fay, the Arthurian sorceress, and is a weather phenomenon which can be seen on land or at sea; so basically a natural mirage.
 
Fata Morgana mirages usually distort the images of boats or skylines on which they’re based, often to the extent that the original object is unrecognisable. The image also has the appearance of changing rapidly, flipping between right-way-up to upside-down that can be stacked upon one another.
 
How does it work? Light rays are bent when they pass through layers of air, which are at different temperatures, through something known as a “steep thermal inversion”. This creates an atmospheric duct. In essence, a layer of warmer air sitting atop a layer of much cooler air. This is the opposite of the usual situation with cooler air on top. So, in calm weather, the warm layer rests on top of the cool one, which acts like a refracting lens. For a Fata Morgana to exist, this warm air on top of cool air duct must be present.
 
Make Your Mind Up Time.
 
I have a problem with that official explanation because of course I fucking do. See, if you check out any images of real Fata Morgana, they look nothing like what appeared in the skies over China. Fata Morgana images are shimmering, hanging just over the horizon, all on cloudless days. Do you see how easily I shat all over the theory with not one but three different ways of debunking? That shit was too easy. Not to mention the fact that the identical images would have to come from the same place at the same angle.
 
Don’t get me wrong: I fucking love science. But trying to shoehorn a phenomena into a pre-made scientific theory isn’t very… well, scientific. When we do this, we’re missing an opportunity to actually discover something new, and science should be about exploring frontiers, not about dismissing something just because we don’t understand it. The science should fit the story, not the other way around.
 
It’s like saying someone saw a ghost because they’d had a couple of Sherries, even though they’d never ever seen anything before, with or without Sherry. But low-level sonic frequencies causing a disturbance in the witness’s perception? BOOM! Science! But I digress…
 
Were China’s floating cities Fata Morgana? Fuck no! Were they a result of NASA’s project Blue Beam…
 
RATING: 1=Bollocks 2=Not convinced 3=Possibly… 4=Compelling stuff 5=Holyshittheskyisfalling
 
Further Reading: Countless newspaper articles can be found online, most of which are accompanied by video.

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