Mysterious smoke ring in Kazakh sky

The black ring hovered above the village of Shortandy.

Eerie footage has emerged from Kazakhstan that shows a mysterious black circle move above a village in the north of the country.

The footage taken on Saturday baffled the residents of the village of Shortandy as it hovered in the sky making a near perfect circle above their heads for over 15 minutes.

Experts said it was almost 100m in diameter and approximately 1.6km above the ground 70km north of the Kazakh capital Astana.

Oleg Menshikov, a village resident, told Kazakhstan media: "It was like a black cloud. We saw it at around 4pm on April 3.

"It dissipated like smoke, but it was completely odourless."

The video was uploaded onto YouTube over the weekend and had internet users quickly suggesting that the ring could have been created by an "extra-terrestrial force".

However, Andrey Solodovnik, associate physics professor at the Northern Kazakhstan State University, tried to put these rumours to bed by saying that the giant hoop was most likely a large smoke ring caused by combustion from a nearby factory.

This isn't the first black smoke ring of its kind to have been filmed and uploaded onto the internet in recent years.

Last April, a British schoolgirl filmed a similar black smoke ring as it moved above Leamington Spa.