The perfect circle of black smoke remained in the sky for several minutes on Saturday before gradually dissipating.
“It was like a black cloud,” said village resident Oleg Menshikov. “We saw it at around 4 pm on April 3. It dissipated like smoke, but it was completely odorless.”
Since appearing online the footage has been viewed over 200,000 times with Internet users speculating over what it could have been.
As it turns out however smoke rings like this are neither a unique nor unexplained phenomenon.
Last year a British schoolgirl caught something very similar, which was later dubbed “the Black Ring of Leamington Spa”, on her phone. It was later revealed that the ring had been the result of a nearby fireworks test, as was another similar ring sighted over Florida in 2013.
Pyrotechnics aren’t the only possible cause of these phenomena either – back in 2012 a ring spotted in Chicago turned out to be the result of an electrical transformer exploding.
While the exact cause of this week’s smoke ring in Kazakhstan has yet to be conclusively determined, the chances are good that the explanation will turn out to be similarly mundane.
