Posts by Mike McPhate

An illustration of how California would have looked around 1850. Tulare Lake is the large body of water to the lower right. It vanished with the rise of irrigation farming. Mark Clark 1. California’s Central Valley used to be so watery that you could take a boat between San Francisco and Bakersfield. Long since vanished,…

When Adam Tenenbaum hung a few chandeliers from a tree in the front yard of his Los Angeles home, he worried about how people would react. Eleven years and 31 additional chandeliers later, the so-called Chandelier Tree is a full-fledged Los Angeles landmark, cherished by his neighbors in the Silver Lake area as well as…

Legend has it that if you behold an elusive flicker of green light above the setting sun, you will acquire telepathic powers. While evidence is scant for the supernatural properties of the so-called green flash, the celestial phenomenon is very real. Green flashes occur regularly on the Pacific horizon when the atmosphere, acting as a…

Some people have wondered if the strange sky formations around California’s Mount Shasta were UFOs, or perhaps some kind of cloaking device used by aliens to visit undetected. But as human scientists tell us, they’re just clouds — albeit of a strange variety. They’re called lenticular clouds, and Mount Shasta is one of the best places in…