A Devonshire couple were on cloud nine this week after capturing an image so bizarre that the man who photographed it thought people would doubt his sanity.

“I’m glad my wife was with me, because otherwise nobody would believe it,” Keith Purvey told The Royal Gazette on Monday.

“It looks exactly like a cruise ship off North Shore. But that’s actually a cloud formation. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Mr Purvey and his wife Lorraine were driving up Brighton Hill shortly after 1pm when they were astonished what appeared to be a cruise ship headed on the water.

“But you can’t see the ocean from the top of Brighton Hill,” he said.

“It’s definitely a fluke. We were at the right place at the right time. It probably only lasted for 15 minutes, if that.

“I couldn’t believe it. I pulled over and took as many pictures as I could.”

There were two cruise ships in Dockyard that day: the Enchantment of the Seas and the DisneyMagic.

Mr Purvey said: “What’s amazing is the cloud even looks like it has two funnels, and the Disney Magic has two funnels. It looks unbelievably real.

“But you can definitely take that to the bank – it’s clouds.”

The pictures were taken not long after rain swept over the island.

Michelle Pitcher, deputy director at the Bermuda Weather Service, said: “Clouds can be so interesting to look at. Looking back at our observations, it was most likely a cumulus cloud (the round one) building up from a shower.”

She added: “Most likely cumulus congestus. The horizontal clouds in front of it could be low or mid-level clouds of ragged stratocumulus or stratus. It’s hard to tell the level from the picture.

“They are typical cloud formations that we see in and round showers.”

Mr Purvey’s message for anyone convinced there was a ship in the sky was: “You’re not crazy.”

He added: “I’m hoping the Gazette can get royalties for me.”