‘What is that?’ Video of object shrouded in clouds above California is not a UFO

A video purportedly shot from a commercial airliner at 38,000 feet shows a strange object topped with antennas poking out of the cloud cover below, a Twitter post shows.

“Does anyone knows any building with 38000 ft height and has three steel bars pointing towards sky ?? Because i dont ...,” reads the March 14 post by IHuntUFOs.

The viral post has been viewed more than 17 million times.

But the video, shot in 2021 much closer to the ground, actually shows the top of Sutro Tower in San Francisco, California, poking through the fog, SF Gate and other Twitter users reported.

“People will believe anything,” reads one comment, pointing out that mountains can be seen in the supposedly high-altitude video.

“It’s definitely not the mother ship,” another comment reads.

Twitter has added an explanation to the post clearing up the misidentification.

Sutro Tower, a 977-foot-tall television transmission tower atop a hill in downtown San Francisco, was built in 1971 at the site of an earlier, shorter tower, according to SutroTower.com.

In 2009, the tower was adapted to all-digital transmissions. It’s named after the hill, which takes its name from Adolph Sutro, “a Prussia-born Gold Rush engineer and real estate investor who was elected mayor of San Francisco in 1894,” according to the site.

This story was originally published March 21, 2023 at 7:16 AM with the headline "‘What is that?’ Video of object shrouded in clouds above California is not a UFO."