If aliens ever wanted to announce their arrival, Florida would be a good place. And this would be a pretty convincing (and creative) way to do it.
A bizarre video filmed by fisherman Josh Jorgensen of BlacktipH off Key West shows a thin blanket of clouds hanging over the Gulf of Mexico — except several enormous, nearly circular holes appear to have been punched straight through it.
“Bro, look at these clouds,” someone says in the clip. “What is going on with these clouds?” Jorgensen later posted: “Has anyone seen clouds like these before? We were fishing off Key West.” Check out the video linked here, and below.
So, what are they? The answer is less extraterrestrial, but almost as strange.
They’re called hole-punch clouds, or more formally cavum or fallstreak holes. According to NASA, they form inside mid-level clouds containing supercooled water droplets — liquid water that remains unfrozen even below 32 degrees Fahrenheit. When an aircraft passes through the layer, changes in pressure around its wings or propellers can trigger droplets to freeze into ice crystals.
Then the process snowballs.
The Cloud Appreciation Society explains that once freezing begins, ice crystals grow, splinter and encourage neighboring droplets to freeze. Eventually the crystals become heavy enough to fall, leaving behind an expanding circular gap. The society compares the effect to someone taking “an enormous cookie cutter” to the cloud layer.
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And yes, they really can look like UFOs.
NASA notes the formations are so odd they’re sometimes interpreted as evidence of “flying saucers” or unidentified phenomena. Its Terra satellite even captured a cluster over the Gulf of Mexico west of Florida in January 2024, around the time Jorgensen’s footage was recorded.
And how rare are they?
The Cloud Appreciation Society says cavum are “not actually that rare,” although the National Weather Service describes occurrences as relatively infrequent. NOAA meteorologists have also noted that Florida sightings are unusual because the necessary conditions are more common at higher latitudes.
So, no aliens.
Just airplanes, supercooled water, and atmospheric physics conspiring to make the sky look deeply suspicious.
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