On Sunday July 9, the residents of Yorkshire, England saw something strange when they looked up into the sky. Hovering roughly 300 feet off the ground was an ominous black ring of smoke. The shape just hovered above the quiet community for hours before dissipating. As you can probably guess, the hovering ring caused a stir among the county’s residents! Stranger still, this isn’t the first time a black smoke ring has been spotted! So, what are these black smoke rings? UFOs? Something worse? And what could they mean? Check out these images of UFOs all over the world!
These “smoke vortexes,” as they’ve been called, have also been spotted on this side of the pond! In April 2016, a similar black smoke ring was recorded floating over Disneyland in Anaheim, CA! “Walking up main Street at Disneyland, following the parade. Everyone around me starts looking up and pointing at this daunting black ring floating methodically above us,” Kyle Hawkins captioned his footage of the disturbing event on YouTube. “It was a windy night, couldn’t have been a smoke ring. Everyone watched it in fear/confusion. I half expected an alien portal to open up through this ring as we were gazing up in disbelief… The strangest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Are the rings a form of communication from extraterrestrials or can they be explained? In 2015, ABC News investigated the phenomenon and determined that, despite their terrifying appearance, these black smoke rings are merely the byproduct of a blast through a circular structure, oftentimes pyrotechnics or from a nearby smokestack. This is how the Yorkshire ring was explained. It was the result of cannon fire from the Yorkshire Wartime Event, which featured military vehicles. Although this explanation is plausible, it does little to alleviate the terror of seeing a black ring of smoke floating high above!
HollywoodLifers, what do YOU think the eerie smoke rings are? Let us know below!