Dense radar ‘cloud' turns out to be butterflies

DENVER — Looking at weather radar with an uneducated eye, it looked like a huge, 70-mile-wide storm was going to hit the Denver area, but what it turned out to be wasn’t a storm but a massive amount of butterflies.

At first, Paul Schlatter at the National Weather Service thought it could be a flock of birds being picked up by the weather system, but they were flying the wrong way, The Associated Press reported.

Normally, migrating birds would be flying south this time of the year.

So he did what anyone nowadays would do: reached out on social media to find out what was flying northwest across Denver.

People said they saw painted lady butterflies floating in the sky, the AP reported.

Experts say that they’ve seen an unusually large number of the butterflies in Colorado this year and that they’re herding together in what looks like clouds.

Cox Media Group