Straight out of a scene from the movie Independence Day it appears that Moscow has had some strange visitors, or at least strange weather. The video (below) appears to to show a very unnatural halo shaped formation in the skies over Moscow last Wednesday.
Millions of people witnessed the strange formation and wondered what the heck was going on.

Of course, the most obvious explanation is alien visitors. Clearly our alien over-lords are trying to communicate with us through cloud messages. Think of these as crop-circles in the sky. Or, perhaps that is the equivalent to an alien carbon footprint. Any Moscovites experience anal probes in the last couple of weeks? Never mind, don’t answer that question.

Actually, it appears that it’s not visitors from another planet, or even an advertisement for the new ABC series remake “V”. Instead, it is an optical weather effect. According to “weather officials” in Russia,

“Several air fronts have passed Moscow recently, including an inflow of cold air from the Arctic, and they combined to produce such a phenomenon.”

While normally I don’t subscribe to the conspiracy theories (I find myself saying that a lot lately) I’m always suspicious of a couple of things: a) Random “weather officials” quotes b) any official in Russia c) Strange patterns that defy all logic. While I don’t discount the possibility that nature could never produce a pattern like that, it seems very coincidental that it did here. I don’t pretend to know what else this could be, but random light refractions off the clouds strikes me as the Russian equivalent to swamp gas reflecting off the atmosphere or “it was just a weather balloon”. Yeah, just a weather balloon, we believe you. But what the heck do I know?