IT looks like any other city skyline with skyscrapers, a few mountains and trees - except it isn't real.
The giant mirage appeared across the skyline near in East China earlier this month after heavy rainfall and humid conditions along the Xin'an River.
As mist settled over the river at dusk, tall buildings appeared to rise from nowhere, leading residents in nearby Huanshan City to speculate that the vision may be a "vortex" to a lost civilisation. Scroll down to see amazing footage of the ghost city
"It's really amazing, it looks like a scene in a movie, in a fairlyland," one resident told UK news channel ITN.
The mysterious city had vanished just as quickly as it had come.
Scientists have quashed the vortex theory and, as per usual, have a simple explanation for the incredible sight.
They believe it may have been a mirage, caused when moisture in the air becomes warmer than the temperature of the water below.
When rays of sunlight cross from the colder air into the warmer air they are refracted or bent creating a reflection in the air that looks similar to a reflection in water.
It's a common sight for many travellers on Australian roads. But we Australians tend to see puddles of water that disappear when you get close, not entire cities floating on rivers. Don't get it? Here's a scientist to explain
Loose translation:
Ant-seething city, city full of dreams,
Where ghosts by daylight tug the passer's sleeve.
From Fleurs du mal, Les Septs vieillards by Charles Baudelaire
"It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted...."
"Proverbs for Paranoids 4: You hide, They seek."
"They are in Love. Fuck the War." Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
"Ccollanan Pachacamac ricuy auccacunac yahuarniy hichascancuta." The last words of the last Inka, Tupac Amaru, led to the gallows by men of god & dogs of war
Then there is the "ghost regiment" that rode above the 7th Cavalry as it departed Fort Abraham Lincoln on its march into mystery.
Charles Drago
Co-Founder, Deep Politics Forum
If an individual, through either his own volition or events over which he had no control, found himself taking up residence in a country undefined by flags or physical borders, he could be assured of one immediate and abiding consequence: He was on his own, and solitude and loneliness would probably be his companions unto the grave.
-- James Lee Burke, Rain Gods
You can't blame the innocent, they are always guiltless. All you can do is control them or eliminate them. Innocence is a kind of insanity.
-- Graham Greene
The Garden of Forking Paths is an incomplete, but not false, image of the universe as Ts'ui Pên conceived it. In contrast to Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform, absolute time. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time. We do not exist in the majority of these times; in some you exist, and not I; in others I, and not you; in others, both of us.
Translation of a passage from Jorge Luis Borges' The Garden of Forking Paths
"It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted...."
"Proverbs for Paranoids 4: You hide, They seek."
"They are in Love. Fuck the War." Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
"Ccollanan Pachacamac ricuy auccacunac yahuarniy hichascancuta." The last words of the last Inka, Tupac Amaru, led to the gallows by men of god & dogs of war