This is something I experienced exactly once about a year ago. (Whenever I heard the phrase, I thought they meant ordinary light shining off the moon.)
However, one evening in the summer I looked outside my window in response to an owl hooting and found the ground covered in a blanket of snow. Since it was about 70 degrees outside, I needed to investigate. To my amazement, the snow did not disappear when I got closer—it wasn’t that kind of mirage. Even when I stood on the ground, it looked like I was standing in snow. The moon light had some kind of strange polarization (?) and it was so bright and direct everything it touched was bleached.
Have you ever seen ‘moonshine’?
This is something I experienced exactly once about a year ago. (Whenever I heard the phrase, I thought they meant ordinary light shining off the moon.)
However, one evening in the summer I looked outside my window in response to an owl hooting and found the ground covered in a blanket of snow. Since it was about 70 degrees outside, I needed to investigate. To my amazement, the snow did not disappear when I got closer—it wasn’t that kind of mirage. Even when I stood on the ground, it looked like I was standing in snow. The moon light had some kind of strange polarization (?) and it was so bright and direct everything it touched was bleached.
I was interested and did a search. It happens on the ‘Harvest Moon’: http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2006/28sep_strangemoonlight/
How it looks varies a bit from person to person.