This has been a most interesting thread to me and I would welcome a continuation on a Part Two thread.

As the person who mistakenly- serendipitously?- turned this thread into a, as Escamillo said, serious rather than humorous subject (Hey! I happen to be a very literal person!), I would like to hear more first-person accounts of the unexplained (and not necessarily unexplainable). We all have had them.

The other day I asked my friend with whom I saw the 'cloud name' whether it's possible that she somehow created an image which I then absorbed- a hallucination, as it were. She does NOT think so; she says that she had no such possibility in her mind, that she, no more than I, was not thinking of the sky at all, that she was greatly relieved that I could see it too.

When I came home that day, I used a piece of chalk to draw the letters as I saw them: a huge E, an a, a tucked-in, slightly-tilted r and an l with a flourish back under the name. My friend, when she saw my drawing, said that the 'a' in the name the she saw was more upright than I showed it to be- the a I saw had a slightly long tail, as though it had drifted. So what we saw evidently was not identical.

I don't mind at all if a mudcatter tries to explain away what I saw- in fact, I would welcome it- I would like to have it explained. If you cannot explain it or maybe postulate some atmospheric phenomenon that could have caused it, I am free to agree with Sinsull and others that Earl made a quick detour!

Ebbie