Conscious Choice: It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s a Pink Flying Saucer!

January 2008 | Art & Soul

It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s a Pink Flying Saucer!

In the field with the Cloud Appreciation Society

“O! it is pleasant, with a heart at ease
Just after sunset, or by moonlight skies,
To make the shifting clouds be what you please”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Fancy in Nubibus (or The Poet in the Clouds),” 1819

We’ve all done it… glanced up, and suddenly, almost unconsciously, seen a shape materializing out of the clouds. The experience usually leads to a sense of giddy excitement and awe, followed by an intense desire to share your observation with a friend before it floats out of recognition. It’s just not as fun to cloud- watch all by your lonesome.

Enter the Cloud Appreciation Society. Formed in the summer of 2004 “to fight the banality of ‘blue sky’ thinking” (and give solo spotters a place to share their discoveries), the CAS, which currently boasts more than 8,000 members spread across 43 countries, wants to remind people that clouds are “one of nature’s most beautiful and life-giving phenomena.”

Over the years, CAS members have sent thousands of cloud photographs to society headquarters to display in the online Cloud Gallery. Some of the most impressive have recently been compiled in the sweet little book Hot Pink Flying Saucers and Other Clouds (Perigee, 2007).

Says Gavin Pretor-Pinney, founder of the Cloud Appreciation Society and editor of the compilation, “We hope that Hot Pink Flying Saucers will encourage even more people, be they children or adults, to find a few moments in the day to gaze up, let their imaginations wander among the shifting shapes of the sky, and enter a world where monkeys go skiing, the mermaids are multicolored and the Michelin Man decides to rob a bank.”

We agree. Here’s to many more happy discoveries in 2008.
—EDS.

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