Tabloid media love to invoke the cool sounding "fata morgana" to explain images of things floating in the sky. The problem is that a real fata morgana looks like this:

There's distortion, and there's inversion.
It does NOT look like this:
Source: Science Channel
Despite the Science Channel's talking heads saying this is a Fata Morgana, it very obviously is not. The giveaway is the total lack of distortion, duplicated images, or inversion. It's just a boat, relatively close to shore, but beyond a false horizon created by the fog bank behind and around the boat, combined with the shallow angle at that distance, altering the reflection off the surface of the sea. If you boost the levels in the image, as I did with the title image of this post, then you can see where the horizon would be.
The person who shot the video says:
http://www.express.co.uk/news/weird...flying-boat-could-have-emerged-through-portal
This photo is higher resolution than the video of the sailboat, and so we can see the difference between the water surface and the sky. We can even see the ripple of the wake from the small boat that's "in" the illusionary sky area.
Another:
Source: thriol on Flickr
Fata Morgana sounds cool, and it does make some really cool images sometimes. But it's not a panacea explanation for everything that looks like it's floating in the sky.
See also: Floating Cities are Generally not Fata Morgana Mirages
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