Fata Morgana: Oregon Coast Weather Illusion Bends Reality, Caught Near Seaside

Published 7/17/24 at 9:32 p.m.
By Andre' GW Hagestedt, Oregon Coast Beach Connection

(Seaside, Oregon) – What's fairly rare here on Oregon's coast turned into a stunning and strange find for one north coast resident. (Photos Mike Bernard). There's a cool science explanation behind it.

On July 5, Mike Barnard caught Seaside's Tillamook Head and the Tillamook Rock Lighthouse in a very unusual state: it was bent, squished and spread out in a repeated manner – like something out of a sci-fi movie. The thin piece that resembles some digital reiterative anomaly is Terribly Tilly and part of the headland. There's also that thin line above it stretching almost horizon to horizon. The visage makes no sense.

Barnard caught the elusive Fata Morgana, the surreal optical illusion that happens at sea or on land and turns ordinary objects into freaky things that cause plenty of head scratching. Reality gets bent here.

Barnard said he was at the wreck of the Peter Iredale for awhile and spotted it.

“I immediately saw what I thought was smoke,” he told Oregon Coast Beach Connection. “As I drove towards Seaside from the wreck of the Peter Iredale, where one of the beach approaches are, it became clear it wasn't smoke because it was stationary.”

Mike Bernard

He had to snap pics of it and then zoom in on his camera viewer to be sure. Yup, it turned out what he thought it was: the optical illusion you really don't often see on this coastline. Having been a commercial fisherman for awhile, Bernard said he'd seen it before in Alaska numerous times, but not here.

“We usually don't see it here,” Barnard said. “We usually get the fog, not what I'd call a layering of different atmospheric conditions.”

Photo Seaside Aquarium: you can just barely make out the lighthouse from this angle - as it normally looks. Note the lighthouse rock is in only one place: in the optical illusion phots it's repeated a strange way.

It turns out, it had been around awhile on this particularly warm north coast day. The park ranger at Fort Stevens that Barnard spoke to said he'd been seeing it out there for a good hour and wondered what the hell it was.

Barnard left after a half hour of watching it himself and said it was still around when he left.

The north coast resident said he isn't sure it's much of a big deal, but it is considered at least a little rare on this coastline. In the 30 or so years staff from Oregon Coast Beach Connection have been documenting the coast – and literally tens of thousands of photos – we've never seen it.

Brian Nieuwenhuis, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service (NWS) in Medford, said he has seen it before in other areas but not around here.

Mike Bernard

So what is the Fata Morgana? The science is as trippy as the sight itself, and it's thought it's behind some strange mythology in our past.

“It's simply a type of mirage, formed when there is a cold layer of air trapped below a very warm one,” Nieuwenhuis said. “I imagine this is pretty common at our coast in the summer, with the marine layer in place at the ocean surface and hot air flowing over the marine layer as it blows off the land. Maybe conditions were just right on this day?”

Indeed, conditions were right.

“I noticed you can actually see the line where the dense air meets the warmer air,” Barnard said. “When I cropped it to blow it up, then I could see that the lighthouse actually had an inverted image above it. Same with the pinnacles at the end of Tillamook Head, inverted above the normal image.”

The distant horizon on Earth can cause all sorts of interesting sights, especially on the sea (like the Green Flash at Sunset or its freaky cousin the Novaya Zemlya. See Oregon Coast's Green Flash at Sunset and Its Wacky Cousin Novaya Zemlya).

“The differences in temperature cause light to bend through what is called an 'atmospheric duct,' and this can cause objects on the horizon to look reflected, vertically stretched, and stacked on top of itself,” Nieuwenhuis said. “This same kind of 'ducting' can happen at any layer of the atmosphere, and it can mess with our radar data sometimes. In this case, the layer is right at the surface.”

Nieuwenhuis said the cool thing about Bernard's shots is you can see exactly where the “duct” is.

“Or in other words, exactly how shallow the marine layer is,” Nieuwenhuis said. “The rocks offshore are being vertically stretched and reflected, and also stacked so they look like hour glasses.”

Mike Bernard

Fata Morgana can result in strange sights like seeing a ship out at sea that appears to be floating. The Fata Morgana probably had its hand in a lot of paranormal things people have reported throughout history.

“It is thought that in the past this phenomenon is responsible for reports of castles in the sky, phantom mountains and islands, and even the legend of the Flying Dutchman!,” Nieuwenhuis said.

Fata Morgana is also known as Morgan le Fay, a sorceress from Arthurian legends who was the sister of Merlin. Fans of Stargate SG1 and Stargate Atlantis will also recognize that name.

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