16-year-old Georgina Heap was playing tennis with her mother on Friday evening, April 11, 2014 when she looked up at the sky and noticed a strange black ring floating high in the air. She grabbed her iPhone and quickly snapped a picture. The huge black ring was spotted in the skies above Leamington Spa, a spa town in central Warwickshire, England, and remained in sky for about three minutes before disappearing completely (or “burning off”).
The giant black ring resembles an extremely well-defined smoke ring, but police said there were no reports of fires in the area at the time of the sighting. Weather experts are baffled and say the clearly defined black ring looks like no known weather phenomena they are aware of. Some speculate that the giant, black ring could be bizarre circle-shaped swarm of insects that either coincidentally formed in an odd, circle-shaped pattern or possibly were blown into a circle shape by wind currents. Strangely, there also appears to be faint evidence of airplane contrails throughout the sky around the strange ring.
Similar black rings, distinct in their large size and differing from a normal smoke-ring by the extreme definition of the ring’s edges, have been seen in Newport, Virginia (2009) and Fort Belvoir, Virginia (1954). In 2009, a mysterious spiral-shaped blue ring appeared in the skies over Norway that was believed to be a Russian military missile that had spun out of control. A potential natural explanation could be an extremely rare and unusual phenomena, “vortex rings” or “ring-shaped vortexes”, that can be formed by air and smoke (or steam) and are usually produced by large explosions (although no fires or explosions were reported in the area of the Leamington black ring).