A mysterious black ring appeared in the sky in Virginia on Tuesday, and some people flipped out. Some thought it could be aliens, some thought it could be some kind of ominous S.O.S. signal, and some thought it could be a portal to another dimension.
Maybe it was aliens sending us an S.O.S. that they were trapped in another dimension, and would rather be in . . . Virginia. (???)
A bunch of people caught photos of it, and a local news outlet tried to “investigate”, but as far as we know they haven’t figured out what caused it.
But it’s almost certainly a SMOKE RING.
If you Google “mysterious black ring,” there are dozens of instances of them popping up in various cities over the years, basically ever since everyone had a cell phone on them at all times.
Experts say that in those cases they were caused by an explosion through something round, like a smoke stack. Or when power transformers explode.
They can also be inadvertently caused by some diesel engines, and intentionally caused by certain pyrotechnics.
There are also some videos demonstrating the science of it, which is not unlike how you could blow smoke rings from a pipe, just on a much bigger scale.
(History.com did a feature on it a few years ago.)
(WAVY.com has footage from the “mysterious black rings” in Virginia.)
