The Skull of Hurricane Matthew

It's Thursday, and we're trucking right along with Skeleton Week here on Theresa's Halloween Wonderland! The topic of today's blog was actually rather unplanned, but those who study the creepy and unexplained know that sometimes a little synchronicity shows up in the least expected places!

Yesterday, my Facebook feed was flooded with an interesting news story. Meteorologists and scientists all over North America are closely watching Hurricane Matthew, which is expected to hit the United States. But what the weather map showed was a storm much scarier than anyone could have imagined. As the eye of the storm passed over Haiti, it took on a sinister appearance of a grinning skull in profile!

Obviously, this is the result of pareidolia. Our minds are hardwired to seek out patterns in random stimuli, and we're especially prone to trying to identify faces. With Halloween being so close, and the deadly destructive force of these types of storms, a skeleton face showing up so plainly is still quite an eerie phenomenon.

Stu Ostro, the senior director of weather communications and senior meteorologist at The Weather Channel posted the image above to his Twitter account, and according to Snopes.com, meteorologist Matt Devitt of southern Florida's WINK-TV posted and confirmed that a similar image from his broadcast was completely unaltered in any way. Please continue to keep those affected by Hurricane Matthew in your thoughts and prayers...and keep an eye out on those satellite images for any further anomalies!

Matt Devitt and Hurricane Matthew satellite image