An enormous freight ship called the Achilleas was seen ‘floating’ off the coast of Greece as the result of a strange optical illusion, while it traveled on the shipping line between the country’s mainland at Kimi and Skiros, one of Greece’s many islands.
High seas: Mind-bending pictures show giant ship ‘floating in the sky’ off Greek coast in bizarre optical illusion https://t.co/qgpGve37v3 pic.twitter.com/3YuFxaopqz
— Daily Mail Online (@MailOnline) May 9, 2024
The bizarre photo was captured by Greek photographer Nontas Kalogiannis, and is a great example of a strange optical illusion called Fata Morgana. Named after Morgan Le Fey, or the legends of King Arthur, the complicated illusion occurs as a result of light bending as it passes through layers of air with different temperatures.
The bending of light brings about images of objects which have seemingly been distorted and changed to both the human eye and cameras.
Quite often Fata Morgana illusions result in images being inverted, but on some more rare occasions, if the conditions are set right, images can appear to be the right side up, displaying a strange apparition while at sea.
Are ships floating or flying? Either way, summer is here! #Greece #summertime #vacations #ships #crystalbluewaters pic.twitter.com/IdOutWPdFe
— Angeland.eu (@angeland_eu) June 14, 2017
A History of Floating Ships
The mirage is thought to be the raw material for the legend of the Flying Dutchman, according to Jonathan Eyers’ 2011 book Don’t Shoot the Albatross!: Nautical Myths and Superstitions. The spectre is not limited to the sea, and can be responsible for many strange sightings, including mountains that appear to be hovering.
Fata Morgana is the Italian name for Morgan le Fay, the Arthurian sorceress believed to use witchcraft to conjure up fairy castles used to lure sailors to their doom. Multiple ‘floating ships’ have been photographed and videoed over the years, with boats appearing to hover off the coast of Britain in Cornwall, Devon, and Aberdeenshire on one occasion.
In another sighting, four ships appeared to hover above the sea off the coast of Cyprus, forming a line just east of the southern city of Limassol.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Fata Morgana mirages may have played a role in a number of unrelated “discoveries” of arctic and Antarctic land masses which were later shown not to exist. Icebergs frozen into the pack ice, or the uneven surface of the ice itself, may have contributed to the illusion of distant land features.
Yakov Sannikov and Matvei Gedenschtrom claimed to have seen a land mass north of Kotelny Island during their 1809–1810 cartographic expedition to the New Siberian Islands. Sannikov reported this sighting of a “new land” in 1811, and the supposed island was named after him.
Three-quarters of a century later, in 1886, Baron Eduard Toll, a Baltic German explorer in Russian service, reported observing Sannikov Land during another expedition to the New Siberian Islands.
Many other expeditions set off to try and find the land mass, but all failed. Some historians and geographers have theorized that the land mass that Sannikov and Toll saw was actually Fata Morganas of Bennett Island.