Daily Times

While alleged UFO sightings are common across the United States, this time it wasn’t the aliens who came knocking but a fancy cloud. On Wednesday, a cloud the shape of a flying saucer ir a stack of pancakes appeared in the skies of Weed, California.

This particular type of cloud is called a “lenticular cloud” or a “lenny”. Lenticular clouds, or “lennies,” as many meteorologists refer to them, often resemble flying saucers, hockey pucks or heaping stacks of pancakes. They form by the drove in mountainous environments with chaotic wind patterns.

Lenticular clouds form when comparatively moist air rides up a mountaintop, forced into a cooler layer of air above. If the cool-down is significantly large, the air parcel can become chilled to saturation, forming a cloud. Downwind of the mountain, the air eventually sinks lower in the atmosphere, drying out and eroding any visible cloud. As such, wind-sculpted lenticular clouds are usually local.

They are most readily visible when the atmosphere as a whole is stable and layered. In other words, there’s no organic upward motion to create clouds elsewhere. Just the localized forcing of air upward by a mountain peak — in this case, Mount Shasta.