Alien and conspiracy theorists showed up in full force last week after a weather modeling software “error” showed an anomaly the size of Texas moving up the African coastline while generating waves bigger than 80 feet high.
Ventusky is an application that presents weather and meteorological data to allow people to monitor developments anywhere in the world.
According to the company’s website, the app is available to anyone in the world and has the ability to illustrate movement of particles to show wind data, and more.
Last week, the application showed a cluster of waves reaching over 80 feet in height and spanning a distance wider than the state of Texas, moving up from Antarctica and toward the coast of Africa for about 24 hours before disappearing.
Video of the weather pattern got the rumor mill going, with people claiming it was anything from a massive underwater sea creature to a spaceship under the sea.
With a length of about 801 miles and a width of 773 miles from its widest two points, Texas, according to WorldAtlas.com, has an area of about 268,600 square miles.
The video was also shared on YouTube by MrMBB333.
“As bizarre as some of the footage you are about to see in this video is, it’s all real,” he posted. “These are real-life encounters of ‘something’ the viewer saw, recorded and was unable to identify.”
By Sunday afternoon, the video had been seen 80,000 times, with followers debating what the massive black spot on the map was.
“Everyone knows Godzilla comes from the sea,” one user wrote.
Another said, “Ok, who released the Kraken?”
Other followers said the mysterious matter could be H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu, or even linked the blob to a giant sea creature awoken by April 8th’s solar eclipse.
But others suggested there may have been some sort of glitch with the software, as the mass on the map moved over a major shipping channel and there were no reports of large waves in the area by the seafarers.
Ventusky saw the buzz the map created and quickly addressed the situation, debunking the conspiracy floating in the ether.
“Despite numerous reports of UFOs or Atlanteans launching from the ocean, yesterday’s image of giant waves near Africa was due to a model error,” the company wrote. “Fortunately, our provider, the German Meteorological Institute @DWD_Presse, has already resolved it, and the forecast is fine.”
The company added that the model takes in copious amounts of data from ships and buoys throughout the ocean, and problems can occur with such large databases.
Still, it could take time to find out what caused the error last week, the company wrote.
But despite the company’s attempts to defuse the situation, sleuths continued, forcing Ventusky to try to prove their point once more.
“A significant number of people still do not believe that the giant waves off Africa were just an error and prefer UFO theories,” Ventusky wrote. “What can we do as a visualization platform? Add more sources! Therefore, we are incorporating another wave model from respected source, Météo-France.”
Ventusky CEO and founder David Prantl did not immediately respond to inquiries from Fox News Digital on the matter.
