“Not all inversions give a Fata Morgana,” explains Les Cowley, who runs the website Atmospheric Optics, “but when they do, we are confronted with a wondrous prospect of otherwise ordinary distant hills transformed into impossibly tall multilayered cliffs, towers, and buildings ever shrinking then climbing in the shimmering air. Even a distant frozen sea can rear up into a Fata Morgana, and early polar explorers eager to sight undiscovered lands were known to mistake this apparition for mountainous land.”
On December 2013, I had the fortune of spying le Fay’s handiwork from a hillside outside Fairbanks, Alaska. At first, I saw a series of inverted castles in the air above a distant peak. Two minutes later, the airborne castles had melted into a single fortress with two spires. Two minutes after that, the castle had deformed into a massive flat-topped plateau.
Historical wonder
In written records, whispers of the Fata Morgana can be traced to at least 1531, when German magician and occult writer Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa recorded the phenomenon in his Of Occult Philosophy, Book III. An even earlier observation came from Italian scholar Antonio de Ferrariis in 1508, but it was not published until 1558. In his book about the region of Italy now known as Apulia, de Ferrariis wrote that the formations do not last long but change “as the vapors in which they appear, from one place to another, from one form to another.” Sometimes, he wrote, “you will see cities and castles and towers, and sheep and different colored cattle and images or specters of other things.”
By the way, the plot of Sergei Prokofiev’s 1921 opera, The Love for Three Oranges (based on an Italian fairy tale), included a curse from the witch Fata Morgana and the casting of a magic circle by the sorcerer Agrippa.
Get out there and try to detect this illusion. As always, let me know what you see and don’t see at
sjomeara31@gmail.com.