Plane in 'Strangest' Position in the Sky Baffles Internet

A video of a plane appearing to remain frozen in the air has gone viral on TikTok.

The clip, which contains some profanities, was posted by @.kadeshia and has had 32.2 million views. A message overlaid on the clip says: "This plane never even moved. Strangest thing I've ever seen."

The footage shows a viewpoint from inside a car, as it's being driven along a road, with a plane apparently hovering in the sky in the distance.

The plane appears bigger as the vehicle approaches it but seems to remain in stationary as the car drives past just below the aircraft.

A caption shared with the post says: "Please tell me this isn't real."

As odd as it may look, the plane in the latest viral clip is not actually motionless in the sky. It may appear that way because of an optical illusion known as the parallax effect, as several TikTokers were quick to point out in comments on the post.

A November 2013 study in RadioGraphics notes that iIlusions of perception, such as ambiguous figures and distortion, take place in the "higher-order" brain structures, which are responsible for combining sensory input into "a mental image interpreted by the mind."

Illusions of image formation, such as the parallax effect, result from "the way images are generated," the study explained.

The parallax effect causes the plane to appear to be remaining still because of the position and motion of the viewer.

A plane in the sky may appear like it's moving extremely slowly, or even not at all, because of a lack of reference points, according to Sarah Nelson, an aerospace educator and the director of the NASA Iowa Space Grant Consortium at Iowa State University.

In a September 2023 article for Discover magazine, Nelson explained: "If you watch a plane accelerating toward take-off, it appears to be moving very quickly. It's not until the plane is in the air and has reached cruising altitude that it appears to be moving very slowly. That's because there is often no independent reference point when the plane is in the sky.

"This can make it very hard to perceive just how fast a plane is moving. And because the plane is far away, it takes longer for it to move across your field of vision compared to an object that is close to you. This further creates the illusion that it is moving more slowly than it actually is."

'Super Freaky'

The latest video has sparked debate among TikTokers.

User mystiquemcnair said: "Me and my brother saw something like this years ago, no one believed us!"

Sho_Nuff wrote: "I saw this a couple times. I don't understand it.!"

Several were not surprised by the footage, such as user Toad, who noted: "We live by an airport and we see this all the time when driving. If you stop your vehicle you'll see it is moving."

Dennis Chanay noted: "I've seen this before too. It is super freaky but it's just an optical illusion."

Newsweek has contacted the original poster for comment via TikTok. This video has not been independently verified.

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