Last weekend, the locals of a town located near northern Kazakhstan were convinced of a UFO sighting after they captured a video of strange black ring of about three hundred feet in diameter floating for about fifteen minutes and then it vanished without a trace.
Andrey Solodovnik, Northern Kazakhstan State University's associate physics professor, estimated that during the observation, the black smoke ring stayed at the same altitude, approximately from 600 to 3,000 feet in the sky.
Oleg Menshikov, a villager from Shortandy, about forty five miles north of Kazakhtan's capital Astana, saw the phenomenon and stated to a reporter from Today.kz, "It was like a black cloud. We saw it at around 4 pm on April 3. It dissipated like smoke, but it had no detectable odor."
As to how the incident originated, Prof. Solodnovik theorized that the black smoke ring can be scientifically explained as a result of combustion in the area, a theory which most experts believed and are familiar with black smoke ring like the one from the Burning Man festival last 2008.
According to Mirror, one observer of the video clip, which has been watched close to 50,000 times, explained on the YouTube page that it was probably just a smoke ring.
"A vortex ring or smoke ring can be formed in the atmosphere by a rising (falling) mass of warm (cold) air, which is also called a thermal (microbust). It could have been artificially created as well," the viewer said.
Last year, a same black smoke ring became a sensation when Georgina Heap captured a video from her smartphone. It was later found out that a fireworks test, near Warwick Castle, caused the "Black Ring of Leamington Spa." Another pyrotechnic test shaped the same type of black smoke ring over Florida last 2013, and a nearly similar smoke ring, witnessed over Chicago back in 2012, was credited to a blown electrical transformer.
"Creating smoke vortices generally requires a blast through a circular structure - perhaps from a factory smokestack, or a homemade trash-can smoke ring launcher, or a hippie-dippie apparatus specially designed for the job," said an NBC News report.
It is very natural for people to construct conspiracy theories after capturing a few minute video of phenomenon as mysterious as black smoke ring, like portal opening to a different reality, bizarre insect formation, UFO or even apocalyptic moments but similar occurrences in the past will prove them to be wrong, thankfully.
Photo: Shannon Kringen | Flickr
