Originally published at: Man 'stunned' to see a ship floating in the air while on a stroll | Boing Boing
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I’m glad he took a picture because, you know, Cornwall.
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One potential clue that the sight is a mirage is the lack of any detail below the vessel’s waterline – for example a mirage of a “hovering” yacht lacked the lower hull and keel.
Well thanks for that. Without that really obvious tip I would apparently have thought I was seeing an actual floating ship if this ever happened to me?
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“Release the Sarlacc!”
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I was expecting there would not be a photo but rather just a first person account. Seeing the photo I too am now “stunned” but no one is writing any stories about me.
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Having evolved to keep things simple, the human brain is easily fooled. It assumes the light rays from the ship have travelled in a straight line
I just realized while looking at my coffee cup that I’m been making grave assumptions about the path the light took to reach my eye. I’ve been drinking from a Klein bottle all along!
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I see the Chemtrail shipment has arrived.
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I thought this was called a Fata Morgana?
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We were just discussing thermal inversions over the last few days as the air was noticeably smoky while out for our walks and the air quality index was 50 on my phone rather than 20 where I would kind of expect it to be. Smog in other words.
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Breaking News: Blog viewer stunned to see a picture taken by a man stunned to see a floating ship while on a stroll!
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“Having evolved to keep things simple, the human brain is easily fooled. It assumes the light rays from the ship have travelled in a straight line, and so pictures the ship in a higher position than it really is – in this instance, above the sea surface.”
That strikes me as a pretty unhelpful and inaccurate way to describe what’s going on. I suppose the camera that took the image was just as confused as the simple, easily-fooled human brain.
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Nice to see Hovercrafts are making a comeback.
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There was no ship. Swamp gas from a weather balloon was trapped in a thermal pocket and reflected the light from Venus.
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Alternate explanation: it’s a floating ship!!
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I think a Fata Morgana is a superior mirage that also distorts and/or duplicates the image in a way that leads observers to mistake it for something else (fairy castles and whatnot being the classical example).
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A flying ship? Was it perhaps delivering our Brexit unicorns?
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Oi! [waves pasty]
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If you see a “huge full moon” and take a photo, it doesn’t as huge as your brain made it seem. If the floating ship was a brain trick, a photo would show it on the water. The author of this article needs to go back to her source on the brain trick explanation and rewrite this.
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same. and the wikipedia article i just looked up sounds like it was also the reporter’s source – so it’s no better…
it’s strange to me that if the ship is visible, the water that the ship is touching is not visible. not to be too dumb: but what does light care? it’s all just surface, no?
( or is it something about a vertical surface vs the horizontal one? hmmm… i guess maybe that makes sense. the light rays of the boat’s vertical surface are reflected and wind up perfectly paralleling the water back to the viewer’s eye, but the light rays hitting the water are reflecting upward, not towards the viewer’s eye. something like that maybe? )
one other thing im curious about: does this mean the ship is beyond the horizon?
and if so, how does flat earth theory account for this? 
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