Images from weather radars that resembled crop circles in Texas on Saturday had residents in the Lone Star State thinking aliens might be on their way, or maybe perhaps the apocalypse was upon them.
WFAA, the ABC affiliate in Dallas-Fort Worth, aired a brief segment Sunday that showed perfect circles and semicircles along the Interstate-35 corridor while a meteorologist tried to explain the phenomenon.
First, here's what happened. The TV station received lots of social media messages regarding the radar that showed a series of perfect circles of green radar above Fort Worth, then south over Central Texas towns like Waco and then another over San Antonio.
Here are a couple of the questions they saw Saturday night on WFAA:
"Are we being invaded?"
"Crop rain circles? WHY AREN'T YOU TALKING ABOUT THIS!!???"
On the segment Sunday morning, WFAA meteorologist Kyle Roberts said, "There were people convinced last night that an alien invasion was happening in North Texas."
When asked why in North Texas by the show's news anchor, he said "because of the way the radar looked last night." He said people asked if there was an alien invasion.
"We're all here today, so I don't think Independence Day happened yesterday evening," he said. He said viewers kept chiming in, asking about "rain circles" and other radar weirdness.
Aliens? The apocalypse? Strange rain circles?
— Kyle Roberts (@KyleWeather) November 3, 2019
NOPE!
This is why the radar looked the way it did last night -> https://t.co/YTuZKhIw2Z
"I'm so impressed so many people were checking out our radar, even though we had no rain and we had clear skies last night," Roberts said.
Roberts went and pulled the radar from Saturday night that appeared to show perfect circles over the DFW Metroplex, in between Waco and Austin, and then just to the north of San Antonio.
He said, "No, there wasn't an alien invasion," but he went on to explain what probably caused the radar.
Roberts said the radar travels from the radar site and typically hits things like hail, rain and other objects falling from the sky. The normal refraction from the radar increases in height the farther it travels away from the radar site.
"But last night we had a circumstance that allowed things to call superrefraction to happen," he said. "Now when that happens, the radar travels a little closer to the ground."
The meteorologist said when the radar travels closer to the ground, it hits things like "birds, bees and dust" caused by cool, calm conditions. He said people in his profession call it "ground clutter."
"I guarantee you it will happen more times as we head through the fall," he said.
As of Sunday evening, nothing extraterrestrial had been reported.
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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