IT has been known to locals for more than a 100 years: a strange ‘UFO cloud’ that appears in the exact same spot over a mountain on New Zealand’s South Island.
Once it appears, it doesn’t move. It simply hangs stationary in the sky before eventually fading away.
Aerial view of Strath Taieri, near Middlemarch, showing the cloud formation known as the Taieri Pet, taken May 1951[/caption]
A glorious birds-eye view of the cloud was captured by a Nasa satellite in September[/caption]
The bizarre phenomenon is sometimes confused with a UFO – bearing similarity with Jordan Peele’s thriller ‘Nope’.
But residents of towns sandwiching the Taieri Plane, over which the cloud looms, aren’t afraid of it at all.
They have instead affectionately named it “Taieri pet” – suggesting the freaky formation is nothing more than a strange companion.
The sky-bound oblong frequently appears between towns Middlemarch and Hyde, in the Otago region of the South Island.
A glorious birds-eye view of the cloud was captured by a Nasa satellite in September.
The phenomenon was last captured back in 2020 by Air New Zealand First Officer Geoff Beckett, who was on the flight deck of an aircraft flying to Dunedin, a city on the South Island.
“I’ve been flying for 20 years now and I’ve never seen anything like that. It’s the best example I’ve ever seen,” Beckett told local outlet the Otago Daily Times.
“The scale of it was huge. It just kept going up and up and up.
“The image makes me think of a massive alien mothership.”
However, the cloud has no alien origins.
It is a unique condition of the area, with the earliest record of its “Taieri pet” title dating back to the 1890s.
A weather article published on 29 October, 1896, in the now defunct Otago Witness, a newspaper which ran 1851 to 1932, said: “On the Sunday night our faithful prognosticator, “The Taieri Pet,” put in an appearance, so we knew we were in for a good blow.
“And we were not cheated of it, as it commenced on Tuesday and kept constantly at it till the end of the week, parching everything up and blowing hundreds of acres of newly-sewn grass seed away.”
The local “pet” is what’s known as an elongated altocumulus standing lenticular cloud (ASLC).
These saucer-shaped clouds, which are often referred to as ‘stacks of pancakes’, can vary in size.
Satellite imagery measures it at roughly 7 miles (11.5 kilometers) long.
Why does it reoccur?
Its reoccurrence is owed to the nearby Rock and Pillar Range of mountains.
ASLCs form when waves of air pass over a topographic barrier, like a mountain range, forcing water vapor to condense into vertical layers, according to the National Weather Service.
The cloud is then held in place and further shaped by perpendicular winds blowing from the north, Nasa’s Earth Observatory explained.
These types of clouds are notoriously dangerous to fly near, even for commercial aircraft, as they are associated with high wind.
