This strange cloud anomaly over Moscow was captured on video last week. Predictably enough, the loonies are out in force attempting to ‘explain’ it and we’ve had everything from a ‘HAARP mothership’ ((If you don’t know what HAARP is, do a Search™, but be warned, your brain may rot due to a deluge of stupidity)) to a Sign of the End Times. More than a few have obsessed over the black dots that fly across frame at about the 5 second mark (birds, you idiots) and the most perplexing thing about the whole phenomenon is that there doesn’t seem to be – anywhere that I could find – a single rational attempt to explain it. I also note that there doesn’t seem to be any other footage of this odd event – in this era of ubiquitous image-capturing devices that does seem to me to be slightly unusual. Unless of course everybody who was actually there found it unremarkable, which is another fairly hefty indicator that it’s not a spaceship from Zeta Reticuli.

For the record, my hypothesis is that underneath it somewhere there is a source of thermal disturbance, perhaps a power station, which has caused some kind of convection activity in the low clouds above.

UPDATE: A single user comment on one of the many propagations of the video led me to a possible expanation: a hole-punch or fallstreak cloud. You can see lots of examples by doing a Search™. Hole-punch clouds are caused by aircraft disturbing thin cloud layers. If this is a hole-punch cloud, it is particularly unusual for its symmetry.