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| - Fact Check: These square clouds were NOT seen in US skies after Chinese 'spy' balloon incident!
A video of a perfectly rectangular cloud allegedly observed in the US after the China "spy" balloon incident has been widely shared.
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India Today Fact Check
This video has no links to the Chinese “spy” balloon and is at least five years old.
After Chinese “spy” balloons, weird clouds have now allegedly been spotted in the US. A video of a perfectly rectangular cloud allegedly observed in the US after the China “spy” balloon incident has been widely shared. Archives of such posts can be found here and here.
AFWA found that the video of the mysterious clouds is not recent but from 2018.
AFWA Probe
A keyword search on Google about rectangular clouds led us to a news report from March 2018 about such sightings, sparking speculations about the US Air Force controlling the weather. The article carried a screengrab from the viral video. This meant that the viral video is not recent.
Around that time, this weather phenomenon sparked speculations about the infamous High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Programme (HAARP) programme. Meteorologists, on the other hand, theorised that these clouds could have been formed by water vapour that came out of the engine of an aeroplane.
Interestingly, this wasn’t the only square cloud spotted by people. We found a report from around the same time carrying several photos of square clouds or “flying carpets”, spotted in different parts of the UK and the US. This report too contained a screenshot from the viral video. The report noted that the cloud in the viral video was spotted above Tucson, a city in Arizona.
In 2014, NASA astronaut G Reid Wiseman tweeted a photo he reportedly took from the International Space Station, of square clouds running into volcanoes in Kamchatka, eastern Russia.
AFWA showed the viral video to Dr. Abhilash S, an associate professor at Cochin University of Science and Technology, said that while such cloud formations are not very common, they occasionally occur because of reasons that could be natural or man-made, or sometimes even both.
“One possible reason can be air fronts, where two distinct air masses with contrasting temperature and density can cause lifting of air parcels and subsequent cloud formation. Another possibility would be large-standing atmospheric waves aligning the clouds in a straight line”, he stated.
He added that Cloud Seeding experiments can also cause such weather phenomena. Cloud seeding is a type of weather modification that aims to change the amount or type of precipitation that falls from clouds by dispersing substances like silver iodide, potassium iodide, and dry ice (solid carbon dioxide) into the air using aircraft.
So, while we could not independently verify the location of this video, it is evident that it is at least five years older than the Chinese “spy” balloon incident.
(Written by Sanjana Saxena)
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