‘Space loogie’ or Harry Potter villain? Video shows odd formation in Australia sky
A dark mass with wispy tendrils shocked viewers in Sydney, Australia, as it floated across the sky.
TikTok videos showing the weird formation, posted on Feb. 18 and Feb. 20, have received over 14 million combined views, and people are scrambling for answers.
“That’s obviously an Obscurus,” one comment said, referencing a dangerous force from the “Harry Potter” series.
“[Doesn’t] that mean Voldemort is back or something like that,” another comment said.
Others commented that they thought it was part of the Blue Beam project, a debunked conspiracy theory that says NASA and the United Nations are working together with the Antichrist to simulate the Second Coming and unite the world under a single religion to establish a “New World Order,” according to Myth Detector.
“Best picture I’ve ever seen of something in the sky … congrats,” one comment said. “That is a space loogie.”
So, what is it?
Among the outlandish possibilities scattered in the TikTok comment section, many suggested that the weird tendrils in the sky were actually a scud cloud.
Scud clouds are “small, ragged, low cloud fragments that are unattached to a larger cloud base and often seen with and behind cold fronts and thunderstorm gust fronts,” according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Sydney has experienced record rainfall in February, accompanied by large thunderstorms, according to 9News, including in the days leading up to sightings of the mysterious sky formation.
Martin Singh, a senior lecturer from the School of Earth, Atmosphere, and Environment at Monash University, told Yahoo News that, while a strange formation, he also believed it was a scud cloud or something similar.
“Sometimes these clouds are formed when rain evaporates below a parent storm, moistening the air and eventually leading to a secondary cloud formation,” Singh told Yahoo News Australia. “Under these conditions, they are not part of an organised updraft, and so they can take on a ragged appearance.”
Still, TikTok users were baffled by the formation.
“I guess I just learned what a scud cloud was,” one comment said.
“How does every one [know] what a scud cloud is all of a sudden?” another asked.
Singh told Yahoo News that scud clouds are common but that the one filmed was “fairly extreme.”
“My guess would be that it is partly the position of the sun which makes the cloud look so dark, and partly that the cloud is quite close to the observer, so you can see the details of the cloud edge better than usual,” Singh told Yahoo News Australia.
This story was originally published February 24, 2023 at 10:45 AM with the headline "‘Space loogie’ or Harry Potter villain? Video shows odd formation in Australia sky."
